I.A. Bunin i russkaia literatura XX veka: Po materialam mezhdunarodnoi nauchnoi konferencii, posviashchennoi 125-letiiu so dnia rozhdeniia I.A. Bunina 23-24 oktiabria 1995 g.

Terras, Victor

Ivan Bunin (1870-1953) has had remarkable staying power, as is evidenced by the interest in him by scholars of the young generation, many of whom are represented in I. A. Bunin i russkaia literatura XX veka (I. A. Bunin and Russian Literature of the 20th Century). A perusal of the volume's thirty-three contributions suggests the reasons for the survival of a writer whose views were hardly original, who stood against everything that the Silver Age stood for, and whose poetics rested entirely with the traditions of the nineteenth century, as T. V. Marchenko convincingly shows in her article "Traditions of Classical Russian Literature in I. A. Bunin's Prose."

Bunin's meticulous and conscious craftsmanship, in particular his attention to the iconic function of the word, is the subject of several articles: T. M. Bonami deals with Bunin's musical and sound imagery, A. P. Ter-Abramiants with images of the starry sky in Bunin's poetry and prose, N. A. Kozhevnikova with his similes and metaphors, and V. V. Krasniansky with his epithets. With "Russianness" again a topical issue, Bunin's attempts to define the concept have caught the attention of Yu. V. Maltsev ("The Actuality of Bunin's Prophecies on the Russian Soul"), T. G. Dmitrieva ("The Problem of National Character in I. A. Bunin's Prose"), V. K. Sigov ("National Character and Russia's Destiny in the Works of I. A. Bunin"), and D. D. Nikolaev ("I. Bunin's Prose of the First Half of the 1920s").

However, the most substantial (and the longest) contribution is M.D. Shraer's "Bunin and Nabokov: The Poetics of Rivalry," in which subtle observations are made regarding the relationship between the two leading writers of the Russian diaspora, from early influence of the established writer on the budding talent, to rivalry and "anxiety of influence" and eventual fading away of the older writer into resentment of his rival's success.

Several of the contributions present newly discovered archival material, correspondence, notes on the writer's biography, discoveries of prototypes of his characters, and other useful information.

Victor Terras Brown University