About the author:
Evgeny R. Ponomarev, DSc in Philology, Leading Research Fellow, A.M. Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Povarskaya 25 a, 121069 Moscow, Russia; Professor, The Herzen State Pedagogical University of Russia, 48624 Moika Emb., 191186 St. Petersburg, Russia.
ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5508-6532
E-mail:
Acknowledgements:
The research was carried out at the A.M. Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences with the financial support of the Russian Foundation for Basic Research in the framework of the scientific project No. 19-012-00290 “I.A. Bunin: New Materials and Research (preparation of the 3rd book of the volume in the series “Literary Heritage”)”.
Abstract:
The paper describes some unknown documents from the Bunin’s archive: the notebooks of the writer, that were prepared for publication in the Bunin’s volume of Literaturnoe nasledstvo [The Literary Heritage]. The author thinks that Bunin’s notebooks are quite different from Chekhov’s notebooks and even Dovlatov’s notebooks as their functions are much wider; this “secondary author’s genre” overcomes its own nature and becomes more like a short story. Also, a Bunin’s notebook is a synthetic genre; we should put them between the sketches and the diaries of the writer, taking in the features of both genres. 10 notebooks which have survived in Bunin’s archive are divided in 3 types, each of them corresponding to a different type of work of the writer with his own notebooks. The problem of the notebooks’ publication is connected with the complexity of cutting them out from the context: there are many documents in the archive that stay very close to the notebooks type of work.