I.A. Bunin and his era in the cycle of memoir essays by V.N. Muromtseva-Bunina

The article analyzes V.N. Bunina’s essays of the 1920-1930. In total, V.N. Bunina published 15 essays (1927-1936), and then did not publish for a long time. The article outlines the history of the publication of the texts, as well as their relationship with the essays of the 1950-1960 and with two books by the memoirist “Bunin’s Life” and “Conversations with Memory”. The essays of the 1920-1930, in our opinion, can be divided into two cycles: 1) about herself and her family 2) about the writers around Bunin. The first cycle of texts is based on the voluminous unpublished autobiographical manuscript of V.N. Bunina, where the memoirist described her childhood, adolescence, youth and paid attention to the gymnasium environment. The second cycle of texts is devoted to the literary environment of the mid-1900-1910, and to I.A. Bunin’s entourage. We suggest to regard this unpublished material and the essays about the writers of Bunin’s entourage as a kind of unwritten autobiographical text under the title “The Life of Muromtseva-Bunina”, where the texts about the memoirist’s own life can be called “Muromtseva’s Life” and the texts describing the literary environment into which V.N. Bunina finds herself from the moment she begins her life with Bunin - “Bunina’s Life”. In this article we mainly focus on the essays about Bunin’s environment: “L.N. Andreev”, “S.A. Naidenov”, “Iushkevich”, “Moscow ‘Sreda’”, “Piccola Marina”. In our opinion, all these essays form a common cycle, united by a single idea, common heroes: I.A. Bunin, L.N. Andreev, common social and literary space - the Moscow literary and artistic circle “Sreda”. The essays also contain a number of cross-cutting plots, that appear fragmentally in different texts. Special attention is paid to the essay about D.N. Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky as a “middle” text between “Life of Muromtseva” and ‘Life of Bunina”.