Ivan Bunin's "The Archive Case": The remake of the literary "archive" of Russian classics

The article examines a case of Ivan Bunin's reflexive review of the plot with the main character of a copyist that was developed in Russian literature in the 19th century. The material for this study is provided by Bunin's story "The Archive Case". In the article, the hero of this novel - Fisun - is analyzed in the retrospective of the plot on copyist characters. The pattern of this plot was found by M.N. Epstein. The thesis of the researcher is that a copyist was the center of the metastory of Russian literature in the 19th century, and a copyist was the initial form of the social-psychological type of the so-called "little person". For comparison with Fisun, the author studies characters of Bashmachkin in N.V. Gogol's "The Overcoat", Makar Devushkin in F.M. Dostoevsky's Poor Folk and Belikov in A.P. Chekhov's "The Man in the Case" as the most representative examples of copyists in the Russian literature of the 19th century. In the study, the author found out that in his story Bunin keeps to the pattern of the plot about copyists identified by M.N. Epstein in compositions of the 19th century. There are constant coinciding motifs in this pattern: features of appearance (small and hunchback), inevitable devotion to service or profession related to writing, the death of a copyist as a result of facing with esub-ject of power. However, these details obtain a completely opposite meaning in "The Archive Case". Bunin argues with his predecessors when he removes the focus of the story from social problems to the copyist's ontological question about the word's relevance. The analysis of the narratological and onomatopoeic organization of the story is the key to the comprehension of this inversion. The main character in "The Archive Case" is not a copying hero in the plot, but the narrator, the substitution of the author: a librarian who tells the story of Fisun's death in his collision with Stankevich. Bunin offers a new metaposition of the writer through the contrast of antagonists: both Fisun and Stankevich represent an ambivalent comprehension of word and literature. The true point is revealed in the difference between oral speech (Stankevich) as a sign of a temporality and written text (Fisun) as a sign of the eternity and immortality. At the end of the story (which is also the final of the narration), the librarian becomes the successor of Fisun's way of thinking, his beliefs and destiny. Therefore, the main character of Bunin's story is the suggestive figure of the librarian. Оп the one hand, he includes the pretext of Fisun's life, and, on the other hand, his goal is to produce his own original narrative as a kind of a certificate that confirms his immortal existence.

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