Ivan Bunin’s book of travel sketches the Temple of the Sun: a history of the text

Abstract

The starting point for the authors is the notion of flexibility and dynamism of Bunin’s text, which was treated by this writer as a narrative that almost never could reach its conclusion, be verified and, since that moment, given an unchangeable version. The travel poems The Temple of the Sun provide one of the instances of that kind of treatment. The uniqueness of the material derives from the following factor – efforts initiated in the 1910s to edit the travelogue were the first experience, unprecedented for Bunin, in dealing with a large form, a prevenient step towards his later and latest works, such as Cursed Days, The Life of Arseniev, The Liberation of Tolstoy, Dark Avenues and Memoirs. For the first time in science, the authors undertake a fullscale reconstruction of the travel poems’ textual history, which became a significant step on the way to complete an academic collection of Bunin’s works that is currently prepared by a team of scholars at the A.M. Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The conceptual center of all observations in the article is an emphasis onto the primarily “semantic” character of Bunin’s amendments – loaded with sense and paving the way towards the new poetics. The authors have found four versions of The Temple of the Sun: (1) initial publications of 1907–1911, which for the first time became an entity of “travel poems” within Bunin’s collected works of 1915; (2) the 1917 edition in which travel sketches were intertwined with oriental verses; (3) the thoroughly revised Paris 1931 edition entitled The Shadow of a Bird; (4) the “Nobel prize” version within collected works issued by Petropolis, a publishing house in Berlin, again under the title The Temple of the Sun. The authors analyze the texts that belong to this outlined circle of sources in the perspective of several topographic locations that concentrate around themselves the main motifs of the travelogue. They also single out a number of essential types of correction Bunin made in his opus. Motifs representing the cosmopolitism of world capitals (remarkably, not Western ones but Eastern, such as Constantinople and Alexandria) alongside with the specific sentiment in the narrator’s voice, marked with the feeling of the all-world unity, serve as indicators of the primal, most archaic layer of the text. Its history reveals how gradually (vigorously in émigré years) Bunin tended to reject both the world capitals’ narrative and hopes for a cosmopolitan future of humanity. These shifts encouraged an alteration of Bunin’s oriental poetics as a whole. Now traces of modernity are excluded from East’s images whereas the feeling of antiquity as a kind of a channel that could bring the reader back into the humanity’s past was, on the contrary, reinforced as years went by. A less conspicuous but not less important type of correction was based on erasing from the text the traces of the narrator who sometimes presented himself as a historically authentic figure: his “literary” citations as well as a “bookish” instrumentation of the telling subject in general were radically reduced and sometimes eliminated. All of this finally contributed to a virtual, fictional relocation of this subject out of factual realities of the 1907 travel into timelessness, from history into metahistory. All these strategies of revising the text that the authors singled out are considered in close connection with the real topography of Bunin’s journeys across Turkey, Greece, Egypt, Palestine, and Judaea. In the course of the comparison of the texts that refer to different stages in the travelogue’s history, the dynamics of initial aesthetic and ideological concepts that Bunin applied towards such centres of ancient religions and cultures as Constantinople, Athens, Alexandria, Cairo, Jerusalem becomes more noticeable.