Журнал «Филоlogos»

THE DEBUT OF I.А. BUNIN AS A PROSE WRITER

Author: Morozov S.N.

The present paper studies the very beginning of prose writing by Ivan Bunin, examining the first surviving texts of the early fiction of a novice writer, both those he published and those he didn't. The themes and style of those writings are analyzed. The history of the text of the writer's early prose works is considered, the surviving autographs are described. A certain principle has been revealed regarding the early period of the young author's work: the unpublished texts are known to us from preserved autographs, while the published stories do not have autographs. Bunin's debut as a prose writer in print was the publication of his two stories in the St. Petersburg magazine "Rodina": "Two Wanderers" and "Nefedka". Basically, all the works studied in the paper have only a single preserved text: either an autograph or a publication in a journal. However, as the story "Two Wanderers" ("God's People") was published twice by Bunin, its textology comes under a special scrutiny in the paper, because its text underwent significant changes during re-publication: not only the title of the story was replaced and the names of its characters changed, but the author made a significant stylistic and substantive changes in the text. The paper provides the most illustrative examples of discrepancies and examines the content of the author's edits. The main text of the story is determined - the second publication in the newspaper "Orlovsky Vestnik" under the title "God's people". The paper also emphasizes Bunin's interest in wanderers, beggars, destitute people, and fools, reflected in a number of his works both of the early and late period. Certain characteristic features and creative preferences of Bunin are noted, including the mental state of the hero, his perception of the surrounding world and nature, the theme of death, the happiness of being, the beauty of the world, - they reveal themselves already in the very first prose experiments of a novice prose writer and later developed both in the pre-revolutionary and emigrant works.