Historical and literary context of Bunin’s travelogue The Temple of the Sun. Whose background let Bunin “come out as a genius”?

The article proposes a new approach to the history of the text of Bunin’s travelogue The Temple of the Sun, which is analyzed in the perspective of third-party influences on the writer, who found himself between the “force fields” of social and genre contexts relevant to him. At the same time, both kinds of ties, either reliably verifiable (Pierre Loti, Stepan Kondurushkin) or hypothetical (Sergey Elpatyevsky, Konstantin Balmont), are not considered by the authors of the article as deliberately broken by Bunin - on the basis of intertexts that might have been initially actualized and then deactualized. In all cases, the authors speak about travelogue cliches associated rather with literary schools than with individual authors’ versions of the genre. The authors’ aim is to “return” Bunin’s travelogue from the literary environment of the 1930s, when Bunin as an emigre was giving his work the final cut, to the original “habitat” of the 1900s-1910s - the time when “travel poems” were created in a lively dialogue with contemporary travel literature. In a purely practical sense, this means that what Bunin excluded from his text finds multiple parallels in travelogues of the 1890s-1910s, whereas all that remained after edits obtains the highest degree of originality. The authors of the article show a number of examples selected from the thematic repertoire to which Bunin was particularly sensitive: images of local population, narrator’s attitude towards Eastern religious practices, his appraisals of Russia. Images of fellahs become the first instance. Readers of typical Egyptian travelogues created by Russian authors had to recognize in the fellah a specific kind of a human, albeit distant in terms of geography and ethnicity, but very close in social and cultural perspective. In works by Evgeny Kartavtsev, Sergey Elpatyesky, Konstantin Balmont, fellahs are compared with Russian peasants and described precisely within this paradigm, whereas Bunin’s fellahs are presented firstly as exotic bearers of ancient culture. From the mystical-esoteric side, Balmont turned out to be closest to the early Bunin. Both are interested in sects and ecstatic cults. Balmont was seeking in Egypt the same themes and motifs that Russian Symbolists valued so much in sectarians’ life. On the contrary, Bunin in his early description of dervishes focuses yet on what is valuable for Balmont (personal attitude and historical and cultural retrospection), but later on he eliminates all this, leaving the picture of dervishes’ ritual without evaluation and explanation. Another aspect of the travelogue is social. Here Bunin should be compared with Stepan Kondurushkin, who spoke from the position of secularism widely accepted in his milieu. The object of criticism in his essays was Russian pilgrims who were heading en masse to the biblical East. Kondurushkin’s narrator is naively biased and in descriptions of life in Mount Athos monasteries he reproduces the same ideologemes that are contained in characters’ monologues. Bunin in the initial edition of “travel poems” was no stranger to similar devices and characteristics. And again, like in other cases discussed above, all these evaluations were removed in the 1930s edition. Bunin’s revision of the text of his work touched upon the key nodes of the narrative and ideological organization of the travelogue: its verbal matter was fluid, dynamic and incomplete for a long time. As an aesthetic entity, the work experienced its formation during the most dramatic years of Bunin’s life since the early 1910s till the mid-1930s, while the history of the text was inseparably united with the genre context surrounding the The Temple of the Sun. The authors declare no conflicts of interests.

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