Breaking "All Ties with the Ground". The Ornithology of Bunin's Travelogue Bird's Shadow: Poetics and Sense

Ivan Bunin's travelogue Bird's Shadow (1907-1911) is the source on which the present study is based. In the article, the role of bird images is analyzed in paradigmatic and syntagmatic perspectives, referring this imagery to Bunin's conceptual world-viewing (symbolic ties with the skies; the vertical, "intensive" dimension of space) as well as to the narrative expansion. This is the primary aim of the article. Among the variety of living creatures depicted on the travelogue's pages, birds are confronted/compared to camels and bulls, on the one hand, and to insects, on the other. The representatives of the first group convey the idea of heaviness, downward motion, bonds with the ground and death-compare it, for example, with spontaneous, yet not accidental in the poet's mind, phonosemantic word play: gruz - gruda - grob - gorb. Simultaneously, the semantic boundaries of these characteristics embrace the architectural edifices: low and squat temples and pyramids half-covered with sand. Here this detail of imagological poetics is in line with the general view of the East as a ruin of civilizations and some common grave. The author places his birds right in this problematic point of his philosophy of history. Freedom and airiness of three-dimensional motions are opposed to everything slow, flat, squat and bulky, directed downwards and inland-to invisibility and non-being. The hero's transformation is intrinsic to every travelogue, the genre in which journeys are described in terms of culture, not geography. In Bunin's text, the hero transforms against the background of aerial and celestial imagery. Birds are part of this imagery or, to put it better, the metonymy of air and sky. As the traveler who has already visited Constantinople, Greece and Egypt, approaches the biblical lands of the eastern Mediterranean, the narrator's mentioning of birds becomes more and more scarce. And it could not be otherwise: the author intensifies the motifs of emptiness, abandonment and absolute perdition reigning here, in these barren lands. Birds are replaced with insects whereas swifts become creatures that mediate these two main worlds of air-dwellers. Swifts remind insects being small-sized, comprising huge flocks, practicing the steep diving style of flying and producing a sound that makes the author associate them with insects rather than with birds. As all this narrative story of the birds, the air, the hero's descending into the dark abysses of historical non-being and facing insects, is finally over and the hero returns to the wind and the sea which he feels differently about now, the reader perceives the whole aerial world in a new way. The hero transforms here in almost the same way as light breathing will later be sublimed: from a trivial though attractive sign of appearance to mighty and eternal aerial streams of paschal spring. This final observation, in the author's opinion, opens up a fruitful prospect of studying Bunin's "air" imagery.

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