Motif analysis of I.A. Bunin's “Caucasus”

In Russian literature I.A. Bunin is a writer who completes the golden age, and at the same time is a modernist who embodies the ideas of Russian cosmism in literature. This requires new approaches to the analysis of his works. The “schematism of modernist art” makes it productive to analyze motifs to identify something constant, stable, passing from story to story. The motif invariant in the short story “Caucasus” can be defined as “falling out of the world order and gaining the world order, due to a change in the relationship of characters with the world”. It is convenient to consider the “invariant - variant” relationship on the two diagrams which show the initial situation as “mirrored” in the second part of the story. In the first diagram, the core of the motif can be designated as “falling out of the world order.” The semantic shell contains options: “secret date”, “love in hotel suits”, “love in a carriage”, “escape”. A.K. Zholkovsky noted that the nuclear motif is constructed basing on the researcher’s intuition. In this case, the relevance of emphasizing the “falling out of the world order” motif is confirmed by the isomorphism of different levels of the text: motif, spatial, actional ones. In the second diagram, the core is the second, inverted, part of the motif: “change in the characters’ relationship with the world order and finding their own place in it”. Its plot and story realization is a trip to the Caucasus. The periphery (semantic shell) is represented by romantic motifs: “escapism”, “view from the window”, “wanderer’s walk”, “the Caucasus”. Bunin’s description of the Caucasus cannot be reduced to a sentimental-idyllic topos. The scenes of the Caucasus contain an allusion to Chapter 1 of the Book of Genesis, thereby actualizing the motif of the world creation, which acts as a variant of the nuclear motif “finding one’s place in the world order”. The researchers explain the constant merging of love and death with the catastrophic nature of life, the absurdity of the world. Another interpretation seems more convincing: death in Bunin’s late prose is associated with special cosmism, with a system of cosmogonic ideas of the East. With this understanding, the motif scheme receives a completely different content: the core of the motif is “the ultimate manifestation of love and death”; the periphery of the motif is “the convergence and divergence of the ‘love - death’ poles”. Obviously, here we have that rare case which confirms the operation of the complementarity principle in literature. Bunin’s story “Caucasus” allows us to assume that even with the use of one descriptive language the result may vary depending on which artistic model of the world the aesthetic analysis turns out to be adequate to.