‘The Temple of the Sun’, a Book of Travel Sketches by Ivan Bunin: The Problems of the Title and the Main Text

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

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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. 20-012-41004 “Ivan Bunin and Palestine”.

Abstract:

The article analyzes the history of the book “The Temple of the Sun”, also titled “The Shadow of the Bird” by Ivan Bunin. The author points out the difference between dating and text history of certain sketches of the book, that have been published separately a number of times, and the whole book. The first conclusion is that the book should be titled “The Temple of the Sun” and be dated 1915 (it was the first publication of the whole book). Having analyzed 4 text variants of the book (1915, 1917, 1931, 1936), the author makes the second conclusion that there are two basic versions of the book, 1915 and 1936. These texts have different poetics; the early modernist for the first one; the late modernism for the second one. They have different main ideas, that’s why both of them should be suggested as “main texts” for the academic publication. Such decision is new and non-traditional, but the traditional approaches do not fit well into Ivan Bunin’s works.