Ivan Bunin’s Middle East and Nikolay Gumilyov’s Africa: Travels Through the “Map” of Literary Techniques

Abstract

The article traces a number of links between two relatively different individual poetics. The poetics demonstrate an unexpected proximity in their authors’ lyrical musings and travelogue representations of journeys in the Middle East and in the neighboring North-Eastern Africa. In this spatial perspective the researcher may see how events and realities, very similar at first sight (starting with almost literally coincidental, “ritual”, scenes of sailing off from the Odessa port to Istanbul), can remarkably match or, on the contrary, completely disagree regarding the techniques of their representations, whereas the very set of these techniques turns the journeys not into simple movement on a geographical map but rather into journeys through the figurative “map” of literary techniques and artistic worldviews. From a source study perspective, the researcher must pay attention to the large massifs of Bunin’s and Gumilyov’s lyrical verses that create a context for both eastern travelogues - The Temple of the Sun (1907-1911) by Bunin and The African Diary (1913) by Gumilyov. Landscape-describing narratives written in the first person of the observing I are deeply rooted in the fruitful soil of the lyrical I self-presenting confessional reflections. Two theoretical problems are in the focus of the present paper. The first is the problem of subjectivity, i.e. the attitude of the first person instance, which plays a crucial role in both travelogue and lyrical verses, to the represented or thinkable object. These relations, specifically emphasized in the post-classical epoch, affect the motif-semantic level of the text structure as well as the genre poetics of this text. The second problem is the genre poetics. They are traced using the distinctive examples of verses by Bunin and Gumilyov and fragments of their travelogues. Thus, against the background of the western travelogue, which, since Karamzin’s times, signified for the Russian author a penetration into a space of high canon, Bunin’s trips to Palestine seem to be an inversion since in the Middle East Culture has crumbled under the pressure from the inexorable Nature. However, Gumilyov’s experiment is even more radical. Regarding all the relative advantages of sovereign Abyssinia, which in this respect differed so much from almost all the other African lands controlled by the world empires, the Abyssinian history and current life were anyway extremely distant from the experience of a European - so that they consequently provoked different, as compared to Bunin, principles and techniques of writing. In particular, this refers to shortages in a personal actualization of the cultural trace and hence to the conspicuous deficit of elegiac forms of self- and world-perception. The analysis is based on a number of diagnostically important coincidences in both poets’ representations of their artistic objects - the mental image of life as a unified whole, the nature-describing image of a leopard (a panther), situations of sailing off from Russia, reflections of the ethnographic exotic Other. The crucial observation of this work lies in Bunin’s reinforcement of an elegiac mode of his text organization. This elegiac accent echoes two emotions tightly bound with each other - the feeling of an irretrievable loss and a sharply, here and now, experienced complicity. Both of them preordain motifs of trace and personal link with the represented objects. Moreover, the cultural and sometimes religious character of these objects (a tomb, an ancient temple, places of Christ’s earthly life) make personal feeling of this link even stronger. On the contrary, the predominantly natural character of Gumilyov’s Africa turns on a number of different, non-elegiac, techniques of displaying the lyrical (in verses) and ethnographic-describing (in travelogue) I. Hence, on the foreground, one can see a ballad, an experimental replacement of the traditional lyrical I with a substitution completely rooted in local ethnography (“Abyssinian Songs”), and Eurocentric Orientalism. The author declares no conflicts of interests.