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Abstract:

Ivan Bunin entered the history of Russian literature not only as a poet, novelist, and translator, but also as a bright critic, publicist, and memoirist. One of the main themes of his critical, journalistic, and memoir-autobiographical works was Russian literature of the late 19th – 20th centuries, which the writer evaluated not only from the general aesthetic and general literary but also from the ethical, psychological, and socio-political points of view. Bunin considered many things that the Silver Age brought to Russian culture to be harmful and destructive both for Russian culture and public consciousness. According to the writer, literary and artistic innovations of the turn of the century played a significant role in the socio-political catastrophe that befell Russia in 1917, and Russian revolutionary intelligentsia and Russian Bohemians — also, as a rule, very revolutionary, and not only in purely aesthetic but also in political terms — were equally responsible for this catastrophe. As a result, the characteristics Bunin gave in his ego-documentary works to contemporaries — Bohemians, were mostly ruthlessly caricatured. The article reveals the reasons for Bunin’s dislike of the aesthetics and ideology of Russian modernism as a whole and personally to a number of its creators; one of the most revealing memoirs and autobiographical works of Bunin dedicated to the era of the Silver Age, the essay “Autobiographical Notes,” published in 1948 in the newspaper “Novoe Russkoe Slovo” (New York). The article also presents the text of this essay, which has not yet been republished in the writer’s homeland.

Keywords: Ivan Bunin, “Autobiographical Notes” (1948), autobiography, memoirs, Silver Age, Bohemians, Russian literature of the late 19^th – 20^th centuries, Russian modernism.