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Abstract:

In Russian classical literature, Nikolay Gogol often resorted to the depiction of different types of smells for different descriptions and characteristics. In many of his works, Ivan Bunin made such techniques almost the main element of poetics. In “Antonovka Apples” one can find those generic, main features of Bunin’s perception of the world, Bunin’s style, which would develop later, in the writer’s subsequent work. Everything earthly, all living things in their multitude of manifestations, fragmented into separate smells, sounds, and colours, is an independent subject of Bunin’s depiction. The idea of the story is not limited to the task of depicting the native and familiar multicolored, sounding, breathing world; it’s wider. In “Antonovka Apples” the theme of the passage of time, the change of epochs and ways of life is poetically expressed: the present is shown in an inseparable connection with the past, as its continuation; in a reminder of that gone and departing, without which there would be no present. A direct inheritance of Bunin’s techniques can be seen in the works of writers of the twentieth century — Mikhail Sholokhov, Valentin Rasputin.