How the Historiosophy of Bunin’s Mature Works Was Shaped. Researches by Gaston Maspero in Zodiacal Light and Some Other Oeuvres

Abstract

Purpose. Regarding Bunin’s texts’ principal dynamism and the writer’s resistance to the very idea of almost each of his works’ completeness, the author of the article attributes quotations from Maspero’s Ancient History of the Peoples of Orient revealing their alterations from early redactions of Bunin’s The Temple of the Sun to later ones. It is demonstrated how dramatic was the impact of these citations once used in order to form Bunin’s view on Egypt on «non-Egyptian» prosaic works of the 1910s.

Results. The first result reached in the course of the analysis is the accurate attribution of obscure fragments as in fact borrowed from Maspero. Secondly, it was shown how Bunin treats his precursor’s text – creating his own associations, reducing and tightening initial passages. Thirdly, the paper demonstrates how descriptions and notions derived from the book of French historian have been transformed in their very nature: diverse facts and notions have become an integral poetic imagination inspirated by scenes of decline of the Ancient World. And finally, the article investigates some traces of Bunin’s «Egyptian text» in his mature prose works – exemplifying short stories The Chalise of Life and The Dust as most representative ones.

Conclusion. The author concludes that Bunin’s intertextual poetics was specific in many respects. As it became clear in examples provided in the article, the text borrowed from another writer and «alienated» with inverted commas in fact, in its essence, was completely subordinated by Bunin to his general artistic strategy losing even slight tint of Bakhtinian «someone else’s word».