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The Lyrical Autobiography of I. Bunin‘s The Life of Arsenyev in the Context of the Russian and European Modernism (On the Question of Genre Identification) |
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Soňa Pašteková |
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The ambiguousness of the genre structure of Bunin’s Nobel Prize novel The Life of Arsenyev (1927–1933) is determined by the complexity of its intratextual composition which developed against the background of Russian and West-European modernism as a variant of self-reconstruction and self-representation of the autobiographical subject. Up till now it has remained an open and discussed phenomenon in literary science evoking the creativity of methodological approaches and textual interpretations, which enable the work to be designated as a lyrical-autobiographical confession, phenomenological novel, autobiographical metatext, modern existential autobiography, auto-fiction, auto-reflection, self-identification, as well as „poema“ in prose, fictional autobiography, auto-reminiscence and memoir-novel. The problem of the genre identification of Bunin’s text, which is perceived at the boundary between a traditional autobiography and a modern novel, is determined by the central lines of the author’s conception of the work. Their basic feature is the ambivalence of the internal text organisation in the sense of: 1. past – present, 2. domestic – foreign, 3. lyrical – epic, 4. classical – modern, 5. reality (documentarity) – fiction, which can be analysed in the discourse of the Russian emigrant literature of the first half of the 20th century, when the genre of the artistic autobiography reached a dominant status. |
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Keywords: Bunin. Genre Structure. Autobiography. Novel. Russian Emigrant Literature. Modernism. |
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