Журнал «Филоlogos»

I. BUNIN'S "LIGHT BREATHING": THE NOTES OF A "SHORTSIGHTED" PHILOLOGIST

Author: Ivanyuk B.P.

A version of an interpretation of Ivan Bunin's story "Light Breathing" is presented, based on a structural-semantic analysis of artistic details, conceptualized, mainly, by one of the text's meaning-forming oppositions, namely, "alive - dead". Formed in the introductory epilogue, this opposition then varies in three modifications: "correct - incorrect", "natural - artificial", "symmetrical - nonsymmetrical", and is realized in the plot's episodes and system of characters. Space (interior, landscape), time, and the characters' characteristics (name, portrait and clothes, manners, gestures, and speech) are detailed. The details are distributed between two subjects: the main character, Olya Meshcherskaya and the narrator, at first in the role of the reproducer of other persons' opinions, and then as an implicit witness of the events. There are no subjective comments on the details, the burden of their understanding entrusted completely to the "astute reader". However, their semantic similarity speaks of the affinity of those two subjects' world perceptions, and thus, of the narrator's axiological sympathy with the "alive" Olya Meshcherskaya, which accounts, on the one hand, for the compassionate justification of her behavior, and, on the other, for the putting of the blame for her sad plight on those characters who - to a certain measure, willingly or unwillingly - brought about her tragic end and are, in a wider sense, the carriers of "death" in general. On the whole, the details contribute to the transformation of a rather trivial story dealing with "a chain seduction" into the world literature's time-honored plot about the eternal rotation of life ("light breathing") and death.