Selected Works of Puning

Author: Punin
Publisher:
Publishing Date: April 1, 2005
Features: Like the beloved and familiar Turgenev of Chinese readers in the 19th century, Ivan Alekseyevich Bunin (1870–1953), who spanned the 19th and 20th centuries, also created literary brilliance in Russia but ultimately fled to France due to his unwillingness to be constrained by his homeland's political system. He even called himself "a refugee well taken care of by France" (as seen in his acceptance speech). The difference lies in Bunin's longer exile (33 years) compared to Turgenev (21 years), and the greater contrast in political atmospheres he experienced. However, one thing remains the same: both resided in France but remained devoted to Russian literature. Their French exile did not stop them from continuing to contribute to the treasure trove of Russian literature in Russian. Additionally, both traveled as Russian cultural figures in Western Europe, absorbing foreign cultural nourishment while spreading the achievements of Russian literature to the world. When 19th-century Europeans began to take notice of the new peak of Russian literature, Turgenev played a part. And Bunin, through his Nobel Prize in Literature, presented the world with the best showcase of 20th-century Russian national literary achievements. Therefore, it is entirely reasonable to say that, like Turgenev, Bunin was politically exiled and lived in a foreign land, yet culturally, he remained highly effective in continuing to write masterpieces of his nation's literature with a Russian heart and elevating them to the pinnacle of 20th-century literary creation.
Bunin's long exile and often precarious financial situation, yet his monumental achievements, can be attributed to his unwavering creativity despite being far from his homeland. His secret was fully tapping into his rich memory bank, where he had spent years mulling over life, thus gaining an inexhaustible source of new creative inspiration. Therefore, like Turgenev (and even more so), Bunin became a rare literary phenomenon in the world—a writer who thrived despite exile. Ivan Alekseyevich Bunin was born on October 22, 1870 (October 10 by the old calendar), in a declining but literature-loving noble family in Voronezh, Russia. Nearly a decade after the abolition of serfdom, he "grew up in the ruins of a noble family." His father, Alexey Nikolaevich Bunin, was an alcoholic gambler who squandered his wealth, often causing his mother, Ludmila Aleksandrovna, to shed tearful sorrow and pushing the family to the brink of ruin. The entire family had to move from Voronezh to the Butyrki estate of his grandfather in Yelets County, Oryol Province, and later to his grandmother's Ozherel estate. In his memoirs, Bunin wrote: "Our family has contributed many statesmen, generals, and high-ranking officials to Russia. In the field of literature, the famous include Anna Bunina (who was called 'Russia's Sappho' by Karamzin) and Vasili Zhukovsky. The latter was the illegitimate son of Afanasy Ivanovich Bunin, a landlord from Tula, and a captured Turkish woman, Salihah. Because of this, Zhukovsky used his godfather's surname. On my mother's side, I belong to the Chubarov noble family. This is also a very old family, according to our family legend, stripped of its ducal title during Peter the Great's reign. All my ancestors were connected to the common people and the land. On both sides of my family, generations of landowners in central Russia owned estates. This is a fertile semi-steppe, where the Tsars of Moscow, to defend the country from the Tatar invasions from the south, established screening forces from immigrants of various Russian regions. It was precisely for this reason that this area developed the richest Russian language and gave birth to almost all the great Russian writers, including Tolstoy."
Bunin's self-narrative of his family history situates him as a great Russian writer rooted in the national soil and humanistic ecological environment. Although the writer did not become arrogant about his noble lineage, the tragedy of his family's decline left an early imprint on his young mind. He was puzzled by the self-destructive behavior of figures like Usinsky, deeply concerned about the early deaths of Nadson and Garson, and deeply interested in exploring the mysteries of human existence. The brevity, fragility, and vulnerability of life shook Bunin's sensitive soul, while his loneliness (lack of peers) and the boundless vastness of his homeland further intensified these melancholic emotions. The author spent his "childhood filled with sorrow and unique poetic charm" in the "extremely deep field silence, where the fields stretching all the way to the doorstep in summer, and the snowdrifts in winter," as he described it. Life on the estate allowed Bunin to learn the cruelty of serfdom from his neighbors, who were once serfs, and to acquire many folk songs and legends from his mother and maidservants. Through contact with the people, he became familiar with their language. Due to the decline in his family's fortunes, Bunin often fell behind on his school fees during his middle school years, and he grew tired of the dull and rigid teaching, eventually being expelled. At this time, his brother Yuri Alekseyevich Bunin, who had been imprisoned for over a year and then exiled to the countryside, had a profound influence on him. Yuri, a former leader of the Kharkov party, was arrested in 1884 for revolutionary activities and had a high cultural level, having earned a degree. He was much older than Ivan Bunin and treated him like a father, guiding him through self-study to complete his middle school education. Yuri's influence on his brother's thoughts and studies was powerful, unlike the teaching of an elderly, alcoholic, and declining nobleman, whom he had previously employed as a tutor and had little interest in.
In the face of utter family ruin, the 19-year-old Bunin sought a livelihood outside, working as a proofreader, reporter, librarian, and statistical clerk for a local self-governing body, among other jobs, and even selling books from a stall. According to his own letters to his brother Yuri, he endured humiliation and hardship, sometimes forced to kowtow out of poverty, and at other times, toiling hard only to be criticized and treated like a cobbler. While working at the《Ольшанский Вестник》newspaper, he met a young woman named Valya Pasenko, whom he loved and lived with for two years. They separated when Valya's parents believed he could not provide for her daughter. This event caused deep wounds in Bunin's heart.
The above-mentioned aesthetic views made all of Bunin's prose, especially《Жизнь Арсеньева (молодость)》, a perfect fusion of prose and poetry. At the same time, they allowed his poetry to defend and promote the artistic charm of prose and realistic portrayal in the era of musicality and symbolism of the Silver Age. The artistic synergy of prose and poetry enabled Bunin to steadfastly uphold the tradition of novels and poetry coexisting in the turbulent and violent 20th century, marked by waves of poetic and violent upheavals. The experience of their collaboration in poetry and prose provided a direction for Bunin's lifelong pursuit of poeticizing prose and prosifying poetry.
While Bunin's poetry and prose differ in themes, his poetry delves directly into its eternal themes through the beauty of nature, while his prose locates its eternal themes in the contradictions of society and the confrontation between humans and nature. The fundamental conflicts of life and death, beauty and ugliness, and unity and division are common themes in both his poetry and prose, as they all stem from real life and are rich in vitality. For example, the emotional contradictions reflected in the lyric poem《Надгробие》and《Нептушающее свет》and the social atmosphere of the era in the short story《Легкий вдохновение》are strikingly similar.
Bunin's works, whether poetry, novels, or prose, share a common feature: the seamless integration of language, painting, and music. The images or imagery he constructs with language are filled with the beauty of light and color, line, rhythm, and melody. His language may be simple, pure, and even frugal, but it is exceptionally rich in visual imagery and auditory effects. Whether in poetry or prose, though the genres differ, the poetic charm is often a shared characteristic. For example, the protagonist in《Жизнь Арсеньева (молодость)》can "discern the scent of dew-laden burdock from that of damp grass."
Bunin's prose and poetry are interwoven with each other's achievements, a tradition shared with classic writers like Pushkin, Lermontov, and Turgenev. Therefore, Bunin's influence on the Russian literary scene was all-encompassing. Many renowned Soviet and Russian novelists, such as Gladkov, Kатаев, Bondarev, and Rasputin, were influenced by him to varying degrees. As for 20th-century Russian poets, his influence is also indelible. If the mainstream modernist schools of the Silver Age inherited and developed Pushkin's tradition through Fet and Chutchev, then as a prominent non-modernist poet, Bunin also inherited and developed Pushkin's tradition through the same intermediaries, albeit with different emphases. The modernist schools primarily enriched the less diverse lyrical techniques of classical poetry, while Bunin, as a realist, expanded the harmony between humans and nature, sound and light and color, and poetry and prose in classical poetry, elevating Pushkin's poetic simplicity and freshness to a new height consistent with the new era. He made a valuable contribution to preserving and developing the Russian realist poetic tradition.
In terms of quantity, Bunin wrote over 700 lyric poems (none in the form of long poems), and his dedication to poetic creation was extraordinary. While we recognize his achievements primarily in prose, we must by no means overlook his outstanding contributions to poetry. The interplay between poetry and prose was one of Bunin's main methods of artistic innovation. Therefore, he can be said to have poetry within prose and prose within poetry. Examples of poetry within prose are numerous. In addition to the extensive use of prose-like sentence structures in poetic line breaks (though this was also seen in classical poetry, to a lesser extent), one of the most obvious manifestations is the use of extended, highly detailed metaphors, appositives, and other. For instance, in the lyric poem《Дом на родине》(1891), a mere 12-line work, the metaphor of the mother occupies eight lines, demonstrating such fitting comparisons that they would have been nearly impossible with traditional techniques. Another example is the 16-line lyric poem《Сумерки》(1903), which uses an eight-line appositive—"longing" (itself metaphorical)—to modify the image of "shadows," making it particularly appropriate and delicate. This prose-like quality does not weaken but enhances the richness and vividness of the poetic imagery, reviving the artistic charm of the poem.
Bunin's prose with poetic elements is the source of his prose characteristics. Directly shaped by the poet's temperament and poetic craftsmanship, the poetic quality in Bunin's prose manifests in at least the following ways:
1. Poetic Rhythm and Melody: From the shortest ultra-short story《Муравейник》(1930), which begins with a sentence of poetic beauty containing two sets of iambic lines, to his only novel《Жизнь Арсеньева (молодость)》, Bunin's prose is filled with a sense of poetic rhythm. For example, the ultra-short story《Муравейник》, composed of only 64 words, opens with a sentence of poetic beauty and is permeated with rhythmic repetition of words and sounds, evoking a poetic feeling upon reading.
2. , like poetry: Like poetry, his prose often dilutes plot, merely capturing fragments of life. For instance, the "stream of consciousness" (or "stream of recollection") of the protagonist in《Жизнь Арсеньева (молодость)》, which captures disconnected thoughts and emotions in the long river of time, is an example. Similarly,《Муравейник》is merely a fragment of life cut by the author. The purpose of this is not only to make the prose structure concise but also to allow readers to form multidimensional interpretations of the main figures that appear abruptly. For example, the coachman in《Муравейник》can be understood as a repetition of the coachman theme in 19th-century lyric poetry or as a response to the lyrical monologue in Gogol's《Мертвые души》.
3. Absorption of Impressionist and Symbolist Techniques: In observing the objective world, Bunin often emphasizes his subjective perceptions of sound, light, color, and taste, as well as subtle psychological experiences. He also extensively uses symbolic imagery in many works, such as the series of symbolic images—ocean, fire-eyed creature, devil, captain—in the latter part of《Господин из Сан-Франциско》.
4. Use of Poetic Temporal and Spatial Jumps: He elevates the theme from the level of social history to the level of human existence. He does not cut through life vertically but horizontally, focusing not on individuals from specific social strata but on the universal human characteristics that transcend such divisions. He gives his protagonists the ability to fully experience life in moments of crisis and temptation. For Bunin, the most important ability is to remember and skillfully experience the beauty of life, to fully feel its tragic grandeur, and to regard nature as an unchanging value.
From this perspective, Bunin surpassed both Leo Tolstoy and Anton Chekhov. On one hand, he inherited Tolstoy's tradition of writing for life, but on the other hand, he was not limited by Tolstoy's religious and philosophical views on life, delving deeper into the depths of the human psyche. On one hand, he inherited Chekhov's tradition of observing real life with sharp insight, but on the other hand, he stood higher than Chekhov, interpreting social conflicts through the intertwined universal laws of life, death, and love, and moving closer to the eternal truth of human existence.
In summary, Bunin's poetry and prose achieved unity in their lyrical and philosophical style. This stylistic feature remained consistent in his poetry, novels, prose, memoirs, and literary criticism articles, both before and after his exile to France, because "Bunin's philosophical memoirs and literary criticism articles, as well as his diaries and autobiographies, are extensions of his lyrical prose" (as stated by Mikhailovsky).