“A strange mystical village” in Bunin’s short novel Dry Valley: To the problem of sources

Abstract

The subject of research in the article is the image of the Dry Valley in Bunin’s short novel and its possible sources. The author believes that the main precedent texts for Bunin’s short novel and the concept of national life and national character embodied in it, are the novels by Fyodor Dostoevsky The Brothers Karamazov (as the researchers have already noted) and The Silver Dove by Andrey Bely. Bunin both argues with the writers and develops their ideas about the essence of the Russian character and the Russian life. The signs pointing at the ‘presence’ of Dostoevsky’s novel, as well as the facts of the writer’s biography, are the main plot collisions, special features of the psychology of the Dry Valley dwellers (their strangeness, warm-heartedness, posing etc.) and place-names. The novel by A. Bely is referred to by key antinomies in understanding the fate of the Russian person (West – East, civilization – primitive world, sacred – demonic, heaven – hell), loci (manor and village), material details and the names of the heroes. At the same time, in the Dry Valley life one can also see the manifestation of universal laws, the idea of which Bunin develops under the influence of the artistic discoveries of Edgar Alan Poe, the author of the short story The Fall of the House of Usher. This is evidenced by the idea, fundamental for the poetics of the two works, about the connection of the external world, including the inorganic one, with the soul and the fate of a person, and the form of its representation (common reference motifs and color dominants in the description of the estate, the nature, the appearance of the characters and their inner worlds, etc.), as well as the system of images.