Poetics of I.A. Bunin's "Happy House": proper noun - art detail - narrative

The article examines the features of the proper noun in its interaction with the narrative organization and motif structure of a literary text on the material of I.A. Bunin's "Happy House". The analysis considers the mythopoetic aspect of the proper noun problem that it received in the second third of the 20th century. In her research of 1936, O.M. Freydenberg was first to identify the connection between the name, the motif and the character in a literary text. Later the features of the proper noun as a specific type of a sign, allocated in the ancient period of the poetic word, were shown in the structural and semiotic research of Yu.M. Lotman and B.A. Uspen-sky, and then in the historical poetics of S.N. Broytman. Despite the fact that the narratological approach was not used very often to analyze Bunin's prose, such works are fundamental in all studies of Bunin's oeuvre. L.S. Vygotsky first paid attention to the narrative organization of the writer's texts. O.V. Slivitskaya used more narrative techniques in her works. She made a fundamental observation about the overabundance of things in Bunin's texts. Detailed descriptions of objects in his fictional world often dominate over the plot and dynamic elements. To construct such a dense, tactile art world, the writer should select word signs whose structure implies identity between the word and its referent. The most suitable type of such a sign is a proper name. It can make the text much more objectified and also denotes an event. In Bunin's novel "Happy House", the nickname, a type of the proper noun, is in the focus of attention. Two focal characters of the story were analyzed: Anisya and Egor Minaev, and, respectively, two lines of equivalent motifs that are connected with them. One source for all these motifs is the semantics of Anisya's nickname: Ukhvat [Oven Fork]. Anisya's motifs are parallel with the motifs that create her son's image. On the one hand, relations between characters are shown on the plot level and in the perspective that Russian formalists called "fabula". On the other hand, they are detailed in the numerous tangles of motifs that arise from the meaning of Anisya's nickname. Consequently, when the narratological approach is used, the similarity of the characters' fates is identified. Therefore, relationships between them become much more ambiguous and tangled, which shows how Bunin deepens the problems of this short story. If to attract the narratological analysis for solving the proper noun problem, it shows not only the socio-historical side of the novel, but deeper questions and ontological focuses of Bunin's prose.

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