Журнал «Филоlogos»

FOLK-COLLOQUIAL BASIS" OF THE I. BUNIN’S TALE "ABOUT THE EMELYA-FOOL...": TO THE IDEA OF THE WORK

Author: Kurnosova I.M.

The tale "About the Emelya-fool, who came out smarter than everyone" was written by Bunin in Paris in 1921. These were the first years of Bunin's emigration and the realization that he had lost everything - "people, homeland, loved ones". During these years, he became a passionate denouncer of everything connected with Soviet Russia. The tale "About the Emelya-fool" is a peculiar form of his sharp response to the events in the country. Sasha Cherny in 1924, in a review pointed to its "not quite clear plan," noting its language, which "convincingly shows how wide and varied are the author's visual powers”. The judgment about the language, of course, is correct, but it is difficult to agree with the opinion about its “not quite clear plan”. The language of the fairy tale differs significantly from the language of all the works of Bunin, in that devoted to the Russian village. This concerns the total number of "common words" in it, their semantics, their emotional and expressive coloring, the peculiarities of their functioning in the general context of the work. The article analyzes the "common" language of the fairy tale "About the Emelya-fool" in relation to its ideological concept, shows what lexical and phraseological means created the image of Emelya, notes the lexical and semantic roll call of Bunin's fairy tale "About the Emelya-fool" and his speech "Mission of the Russian emigration" (1924). The plot borrowed from the folklore is complicatedly processed by Bunin in the context of a new socio-political situation. The creation of a fairy tale oversaturated with the means of "common" speech, we believe, was due to Bunin's desire to express his attitude to the arrival of a new, red power in Russia in a sharp, semantically negative, stylistically reduced form.