Ivan Bunin and Palestine. Towards the formulation of the problem

The issue of “Bunin and Palestine” has not yet been formulated in Bunin studies. The poems and the essays (later collected into a book of essays), that Bunin wrote about Palestine, used to be considered as peripheral within the wide context of “Bunin and the East”. The author proves that, firstly, Palestine played an important role in Bunin’s works and, secondly, that the “Palestinian texts” (in their widest meaning as the poems and prose inspired by the impressions of the 1907 trip to Palestine, as well as Turkey, Greece, and Egypt) are different from the so-called “Ceylon” texts, inspired by the journey across the Indian Ocean. The “Palestinian texts” should be analyzed via modern methods of travel literature studies as a whole travelogue. This “metagenre” combines a real trip (documented by Bunin’s journals, as well as those by his co-traveller David Shor, together with the memoirs by Bunin’s wife Vera Muromtesva-Bunina), the poems and essays (intended as “travel reports”). The article outlines the range of questions that should be answered first: how was the route of the trip planned? which poems are to be included in the “Palestinian cycle”? which of the two titles suggested by Bunin should be considered the main one? how could we characterize that specific genre that Bunin invented in his book of travel essays? what dominant traits shall we name in the poetics of the book Hram Solnca [“The Temple of the Sun”]? Thus, Bunin created the central travelogue of the Silver Age, bringing together all the East Mediterranean countries. The unity of the Mediterranean civilizations can be traced in the terms of the Russian symbolist “myphopoetics”.