Ivan Bunin and Georgy Ivanov: A lifetime dispute on poetry

The article discovers the divergence of opinion on modern poetry and its basia artistic principles as seen by Ivan Bunin and Georgy Ivanov, based on new archive materials. The authors mainly focus their attention on the analysis of Bunin's marginalia on Ivanov's collection of poems Rozy ([Roses], 1931) and on his collection of poems as published in the Orion almanac (Paris, 1947). The first document once in Bunin's private library now is preserved in the Russian Archive of Leeds (Great Britain) together with other books and journals containing Bunin's marginalia. The latter document, “Orion”, containing a big collection of Ivanov's works named “Ten Poems”, existed in two copies in Bunin's private library, both contain his marginalia. The analysis of Bunin's marginalia to these poems by Ivanov proved to be very helpful in a more profound understanding of the reasons of disagreements between the two masters that pertain to their mutual appraisal of the other's poetic art and more general views on poetry. Bunin, the first Russian Nobel Prize in Literature laureate, and the main poet of Russian emigration, as Ivanov was frequently called, embodied two different poetics in their art and could never come to an agreement, with all their mutual respect, in their views in the literature of the 20th century. It was in fact a fundamental confrontation in artistic views between one of the last Russian poetry classicists and one of the main modernists, who imbibed and reworked the most refined poetic methods of the beginning of the century (Symbolism and Acmeism in its neoclassic variant). While Bunin recognized in his 1942 diary even if with stipulations that Ivanov is indeed a great poet, the analysis of his marginalia shows that he judged his “Orion” (1947) poems as harshly as his Roses (1931) poems. Bunin constantly underlines the lexemes that represent traditional poetisms: “stars”, “roses”, “tears”. “spring” etc., that were elaborated already in the beginning of the 19th century but deprived of their usual verbal surroundings (characteristic epithets, verbs) in the legacy of the 20th-century poet. He is puzzled by the works that are contrastingly built around the antinomies, claiming at the same time the reader's participation, rereading, filling in the logical gaps. He unmistakably deciphers in the Roses author's poems the reflections of symbolism that evoke his disapproval as well as the repetition of the key motives. The analysis of marginalia leads us to a conclusion that Bunin cannot accept two crucial things in the mature lyrics by Ivanov: the turn to the neoclassicist poetics and the reflections of symbolism. Both in 1931 and 1947, Bunin continued to insist on premodernist poetic principles that were already unacceptable for Ivanov. What he really embraced, the very core of his artistic method, the reworking of the modernist ideas of the beginning of the 20th century thus enriching his own works, was absolutely unacceptable for Bunin.

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