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ABSTRACT
The article presents a fundamentally new interpretation of Ivan Bunin’s last work of fiction, the book Dark Avenues. The author examines the book in dynamic terms, arguing that the genre-based form of the novella changes significantly from part one to part three and nearly dissolves in the finale (the short story ‘The Chapel’). The most important reason for the structural changes was a powerful and varied intertext that reinterprets virtually the entire Russian classical tradition, including Bunin’s earlier works (even The Life of Arsen’ev). The specific nature of this intertext, which has not been described before, makes clear that Dark Avenues was the beginning of a shift by Bunin from modernism to postmodernism.
Notes
1. According to the principle of the author’s last intention, the canonical text of Dark Avenues should be considered the last edition in the author’s lifetime, in 1946. All changes that Bunin later introduced into the text of individual stories from the book, as well as statements by Bunin about the new composition of the book, have the status of authorial intentions that were unrealized.
2. [Zhiznetvorchestvo: a striving to make one’s biography satisfying in a literary way, practiced in the Silver Age of Russian poetry, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. - Ed.]
3. [The Russian word alleia, which was translated as ‘avenue’ for the English translation of Dark Avenues, can also refer to a path or walkway lined with trees in a park, and has that meaning in Ogarev’s poem. It is thus translated that way in the context of the poem. – Trans.]
4. The author follows the definition of a novella proposed by I.N. Sukhikh: (Sukhikh, Citation2014: 37, 173].
5. [The translation here of story titles in Dark Avenues, and the transliteration of proper names in the stories, does not always conform with the versions in the published English translation of the book. – Ed.]
6. ‘The Lady With the Dog,’ in connection with the beginning of the short story (Marchenko, Citation2015), p. 139]. ‘The Duel,’ in the duel-related motif that is very aptly noted and developed in detail (the heroine’s husband for some reason shoots himself with two revolvers – he had apparently taken them for a duel) in connection with the thunderstorm [ibid.: 162]; the storm, in our view, is tinted exclusively in Lermontovian hues and has no Chekhovian references.
7. [Alektor, derived from Greek, is the Church Slavonic word for ‘rooster.’ – Trans.]
8. [An 1869 novel by Ivan Goncharov. – Trans.]
9. [Part Four of Mikhail Lermontov’s novel A Hero of Our Time. – Trans.]
10. [‘Heinrich’ is the spelling of the name used in the published English translation of Dark Avenues; the original Russian name is ‘Genrikh.’ – Trans.]
11. Semantically it echoes the opening of ‘A Late Hour’: ‘I had once lived in Russia, felt it to be mine, had complete freedom to travel anywhere I wanted, and it was no great trouble to go some three hundred kilometers’ (Bunin, Citation1946, 44).
12. The real-life prototype of this literary comrade was the painter V.P. Kurovskii, an Odessa friend of Ivan Bunin. Bunin went on a lengthy European trip with him in 1900.
13. [An 1859 novel by Ivan Turgenev. – Trans.]
14. [A character in Pushkin’s 1834 poem ‘The Tale of The Golden Cockerel.’ – Trans.]
15. ‘The Steamer Saratov’ is either quoted or condensed to a single sentence in ‘Shrove Monday.’ When the heroine remarks that she may go off to a monastery, the hero responds: ‘I wanted to say that then I would also leave, or stab somebody so that I would be banished to Sakhalin … ’ (Bunin, Citation1946, 317).
16. [An 1865 novella by Nikolai Leskov. – Trans.]
17. Compare, for example, the following text from drafts:
“Big, coarse, with a strong young body, she sits completely naked on the floor, on her heels, shifted toward her hip and head tilted, with her hair undone and covering her face.
‘Prop yourself up against the floor with your right arm, that is your hand, and drop your left arm along your body. Like that. Just don’t sit on your heels, open up your knees, lean on your right thigh … I will paint you this time as an abandoned wood nymph.’
Angrily responds through her hair:
‘You’re forever saying vile things.’
Always angry, caustic – secretly she is passionately in love with him” [Bunin, RAL: 642].
18. [A covered horse-drawn cart used by Roma in Russia. – Trans.]
19. [A reference to Leo Tolstoy’s play The Living Corpse, written in 1900 but not published until after his death. – Trans.]
20. True, the reference is to Gypsy singing: ‘It is that kind of life, energy flows into you’ (Tolstoy, Citation1952, 52).