“Fine Ribbing of Partition Walls”: The Spatial Model of “The Life of Arsenyev”

Abstract

The article examines the artistic space of Ivan Bunin’s novel “The Life of Arsenyev”. Stated that it is constructed according to the laws of lyrical poetics, which therefore determines the lyrical transformations of space, the through volumes of almost all loci, their dynamic intersections, reflections, multiplications, commutual substitutions. Lyrical spatial transformations are traced through specific examples of the novel. Particular attention is paid to toponyms, with reflections on why the text, rich in toponyms, lacks the key names of the nameless provincial town, native to Lika and Arsenyev, and the unnamed Little Russian town where Arsenyev takes Lika. Another theme of Bunin’s lyrical spatial poetics are the veiled changes from one locus description towards another one. Everything significant in the novel, including loci and narrative nodes, not sporadically; it is multiple and varies. For example, Arsenyev travels southwards three times, moving each time in the same direction, visiting the same places, which are described each time in a new way. The versatile space model repeats the laws of a verse with its plenteousness of vocalic alliterations, rhymes, internal rhymes, and multiple structural correlations. In much the same way that in a verse a sound and an intonation theme is recognized in its different variations, the descriptions of the same loci and situations in lyrical prose vary, vaguely repeated. The variations give obscure features to the described landscapes and events, constantly adding to them more and more shades of meaning.