A. K. Tolstoy in Bunin’s Experience of Historical Reflection:
B. Genre Aspect of the Theme of Memory
The article deals with I. A. Bunin’s perception of the personality and works by A. K. Tolstoy.
The key components of this reception are the system of philosophy of history views formulated by A. K. Tolstoy and his concept of historical memory. The belonging of the 19 th century
poet to the large Tolstoy family was mythologized by Bunin and became a reason for understanding and determining the young writer’s own position in relation to each of the three writers: L. N. Tolstoy, A. K. Tolstoy and Bunin’s contemporary A. N. Tolstoy. The paper draws
upon fictional and nonfictional documents by I. A. Bunin and A. K. Tolstoy.
Bunin’s reception of the personality and artistic heritage by A. K. Tolstoy was determined by
the history of his origin. The Tolstoy family attracted Bunin’s attention because it was an illustration of his own concept of the literary gift as a “family affair”. Leo Tolstoy enjoyed an
undisputed genius and generally recognized family reputation. Aleksey N. Tolstoy’s biography, on the contrary, was ambiguous – the fact that inspired Bunin’s scandalous hints in his
essay “The Third Tolstoy”. Aleksey K. Tolstoy’s biographical path of was also surrounded by
similar rumors – but Bunin in his article “Inonia and Kitezh” prefers to keep silent on them.
In the 1900s, A. K. Tolstoy appeared to Bunin as a rival poet, and in the eyes of Bunin’s contemporaries as the one of his main literary predecessors. Bunin’s poem “Kurgan” was a kind
of poetic response to A. K. Tolstoy’s ballad “Kurgan” dedicated to the problem of historical
oblivion. These works-doublets could serve as an illustration of one of the types of literary
“revision” introduced by H. Bloom. Bunin developed the plot of A. K. Tolstoy’s “Kurgan” in
the elegiac genre and demonstrated the value of the past in the present. Since 1918, Bunin’s
perception of Tolstoy’s legacy has changed. A. K. Tolstoy’s views of the Russian history are
publicly emphasized in the “Cursed Days”, “Mission of the Russian Emigration” and “Inonia
and Kitezh”. According to A. K. Tolstoy, the historical catastrophe for Russia was programmed by “Tatar yoke”, which distorted the European character of the national culture and
personality and later drove the nation to the particularly Asian, as Tolstoy thought, phenomenon of Ivan the Terrible. Borrowing some modern ideas from the natural sciences, Bunin
transferred a number of A. K. Tolstoy’s observations into an anthropological sphere and
pointed out specific signs of the “Mongolian” traces in Bolsheviks’ Russia.
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A. K. Tolstoy in Bunin’s Experience of Historical Reflection:
B. Genre Aspect of the Theme of Memory // Сюжетология и сюжетография. 2020. № 2. Pp. 371–384. DOI: 10.25205/2410-7883-2020-2-371-384.