Bunin’s Chests:
The Semantic Perspective of a Mundane Image

A number of observations provided by the given article are dedicated to a single element taken out of Bunin's plethora of mundane and routine things represented in his prose, i.e. chests
and trinket boxes which are traced here in the perspective of symbolic and metaphoric potential of the author’s artistic writing, the ability of the latter to invest intensively the sense into a distinct object – a notion that may serve as a supplement to the mainstream and widespread
concept of “enumerating”, cumulative tendency as a predominant in Bunin’s narrative. The
reached result of the comparison of chests vs. trinket boxes contains the distinction between
the two: whereas the former initiates the anamnesis, the latter – having no correspondence
with natural proportions and size of human body – is located much closer to the memory as
a spiritual phenomenon. “The Gentleman from San Francisco” is the first story to attract the
primary attention. The text contains multiple mentioning of chests and suit-cases. The decisive scene in which both things are involved is the picture of the hero’s preparation for his last
appearance among the high society he belongs to. Here, the anonymous gentleman is presented against the background of cases standing wide open in the middle of his room. A consumer
transforms into a consumed – this is the inversion of traditional image that Bunin tries to convey to his reader, and this inversion is finally emphasized in an episode of hero’s body’s
placement into the box in which English soda water used to be transported. Trinket boxes are
pointed out as the second stage on the way of the author’s rethinking of this class of objects.
The level of their symbolization now seems to be much higher – first of all because a trinket
box yearns away from the “objective” predictability of a chest as an improvised and archetypal coffin compelling a reader to imagine the object of commemorative recreation in a more allegorical and metaphoric way rather than literally and corporally as it was in case with the
chests. The primary source for the analysis now is Bunin’s short story “The Grammar of
Love”. Its relations with “The Gentleman from San-Francisco” are traced along the leitmotif
line of a discovery (“otkrytie” as “discovery”) that contains the sense of a fruitful geographic
journey (it’s justly that both stories are travelogues), opening of the trinket box itself
(“otkrytie” as “opening”) and revelation as a final result of the entire voyage (“otkrovenie” as
“revelation”). What in “The Grammar of Love” becomes a successful embodiment of this mo-
tif chain and supplies the plot with the quality of a cycle that leads the main hero right to the
point of his psychological rediscovery of himself, in the later story “The Gentleman from San-Francisco” seems to be totally impossible. For the anonymous gentleman the prospect of
his revival looks to be closed from the very beginning. In the concluding part of the paper the
author basing on the works by Aleida Assmann, develops the idea of projecting Bunin’s im-
ages of chests and trinket boxes onto the broad European context. The modern science that
deals with the commemorative experience of culture, its practices and representations, has accumulated plenty of data relating to that kind of objects (boxes, chests etc.) as reservoirs of
human memory. Their role in Bunin’s poetics is still underrated. However the true meaning
of these, at first glance, basically external and unnecessary elements of a narrative is really
significant. The author of the article presents a blueprint of possible interpretation of these
images in Russo-European comparative perspective.