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Abstract:

Due to its moral and aesthetic foundations, love, and attachment to the homeland, the Russian estate literature has become a truly original phenomenon in the history of culture. Having found himself in new historical conditions marked by the fading and destruction of the once harmonious traditional world, I.A. Bunin continued the traditions of the 19th century “estate text”. Bunin’s story “Mitya’s Love” (1924) preserved the “city — estate” opposition characteristic of the “estate text” of the 19th – early 20th century; however, the writer introduced some changes to the estate plot and image system to reflect his view on historical events of the 20th century in Russia and the world and his reassessment of spiritual and moral values during emigration. These changes reveal a two-fold attitude of the emigrant writer to the phenomenon of manor: on the one hand, it is his nostalgia for the lost traditional “estate culture”; on the other hand, it is his understanding of the spiritual insufficiency and even extinction of the “estate culture” occurred in historical storms of the 20th century. Employing the perspective of a researcher guided by the values of Chinese culture, the article studies the dialectic of “estate” and “city” characters in Bunin’s “Mitya’s Love” — one of his first novels written during emigration.