The Textology of I. A. Bunin’s Short Story “Silence”: Elegy in Prose

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Abstract

In 1901, after returning from his first trip abroad, I.A. Bunin wrote a short story based on a trip to Switzerland in the company of V.P. Kurovsky, “On Lake Geneva” (later “Silence”). This text is the only prose work of the writer that contains a dedication. The figure of Kurovsky (a romantic character) fascinated the young Bunin, and he later dedicated poetry to him.

The article shows through a textual prism how the writer’s elegiac story was transformed from edition to edition (the text was reprinted 7 times). Bunin retained the original principles of the poetics of romanticism, but diligently retouched the excessive emotionality of the text, got rid of romantic clichés, reduced the amount of intertextual connections, and also carried out the stylistic text editing characteristic of the mature Bunin of the mid-1910s.

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About the authors

M. S. Shchavlinskiy

A.M. Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences

Author for correspondence.
Email: maxim.shavlinsky@gmail.com
ORCID iD: 0000-0001-5156-8999

Graduate Student, Junior Researcher

Russian Federation, Moscow

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