The cruel romance by Ivan Bunin: “A Beauty”

The paper aims at contextualizing one of the most concise stories of “Dark Avenues” - “A Beauty.” This miniature is written with such extreme brevity as to cause difficulties in reconstructing its motif and intertextual poetics as well as understanding its genre nature by using traditional scientific approaches. In order to analyze and interpret this short story, it is necessary to clarify its relation to Bunin’s earlier works and to find the exact localization of the plot in the historical-poetic tradition. When solving the first problem, the author considered the story “Liraplayer Rodion,” reflecting the conflict between a stepmother and an orphan child, which later became the basis of the plot “A Beauty.” However, this pretext was one of the typical examples of Bunin’s poetics in the 1910s - the entire folklorization of plot and style. Further elaboration of comparative pair short story / folk ballad led the author of this paper to a number of observations on the narrative structure of “A Beauty,” revealing Bunin’s artistic response to the composition rules of ballads about an orphan and cruel romances of the 20th century. Thus, the first step of Bunin as a narrator towards the ballad-poetics was the motif of an orphan’s longing to his/her died mother, his/her plea for his mother to rise from her grave. This motif can be found in the folksong performed by Rodion, and also it appears in a number of folksongs collected by Peter Kireevsky. The latest publication of this collection was quite familiar to Bunin, who has made lots of notes out of texts published by Kireevsky. The second feature that connects Bunin’s story with the folklore tradition of songs about the orphan is the reinforcement of the stepmother’s role in the plot. In cruel romances of the 20th century, this role is directly represented as the stepmother’s wish to commit infanticide.

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