Article

Name: Bunin’s Lyrics: The Evolution of the Relationship between Objective and Subjective

Authors: O. N. Vladimirov

Novokusnetsk Branch Institute of Kemerovo State University, Novokusnetsk, Russian Federation

In the section The Plot in the System of Cultural Universals: Bunin, East and West of the Russian Emigration

Abstract:

The article deals with the cross-cutting plot of Bunin’s lyrics – about the harmonization of objective and subjective, reality and words. From an accurate “topographical survey” of the area in early poems, the poet made a way to endow nature with the deepest possible subjective content within the framework of his poetics. As the lyrical subject deepens into the life of nature, the landscape is complicated by reflection. The growing hero is also aware of the mutual alienation of nature and man. The poet comes to the idea of the need to overcome convention. This struggle with the word was expressed in the logic of changing the leading poetic genres: landscape poems (symbol), sonnets, ballads, and just poems. The desire to overcome the distance between the word and reality is also noticeable in the unassembled cycle of poems that develop the motives of the window and the book: “Night and day” (“Ночь и день”), “Cell” (“Келья”), “Melilot” (“Донник”), “Run, run sheets of the open book...” (“Бегут, бегут листы раскрытой книги...”), “Evening” (“Вечер”), “Night” (“Ночь”) (1952), etc. A special place in this series is occupied by the sonnet “Evening”. In this sonnet, though temporarily, the objectivism of perception and the conventionality of art are brought into balance, and an agreement is reached between the world and the self.

In later lyrics, the poet's attitude to creativity is twofold: the statement in its antientropic essence does not cancel out the lack of understanding of its meaning, and then – doubts and disappointments in its possibilities. To the problem of correlation of truth of life and the conventions of art writer turns in a story “Book” (“Книга”) with the same common places of the lyrical plot as in “Evening”. Here, in order to resolve the sharpened contradictions in relation to creativity, the tasks of both the content (“to speak about what is truly yours and the only present”) and the formal plan (“requiring the most legitimate expression”) are set. In an effort to overcome the distance between literature and life, to “wake up from the bookish obsession”, the poet seeks to bring words and reality closer together in the lyrics at the level of content. The verse form, which is inevitably associated with literature, resists this convergence.

Keywords: Bunin, lyrics, conventions, objective and subjective, lyric plot, lyric cycle

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