“The Life of Bunin” and “The Life of Arseniev”: novel projections of biography and the mistakes they cause

The paper offers a parallel reading of the book “Zhizn’ Bunina” (“The Life of Bunin”) by Vera Muromtseva-Bunina and the novel “Zhizn’ Arsenieva” (“The Life of Arseniev”) by Ivan Bunin. Numerous correspondences allow us to show the crucial role of the novel quotations in the biography composition. Detailed analysis of the text of the first chapter of “Zhizn’ Bunina” reveals all the sources of the biography: the autobiographical synopsis written by Bunin, sketches preserved in the archive after the writer’s death, oral stories by Bunin and his relatives, preserved in the memory of Muromtseva-Bunina, letters of the young writer published in the USSR, extremely rare extended autobiographical notes, the writer’s diaries, and, finally, the novel “The Life of Arseniev”. The autobiographical outline and the novel are recognized as major sources. Referring to the text of the novel, the biography “recodes” the novel narrative into a biographical one. The compilation structure of “Zhizn’ Bunina” is examined: the insertions of Muromtseva-Bunina’s “own text” are found to have an exclusively connecting character for different types of “other texts.” However, using the novel as a source for Bunin’s biography has resulted in a number of mistakes concerning the writer’s adolescent years. This paper provides a typology of mistakes and corrects the most important of them, as some of them continue to affect the scholarly narrative and biographical publications.