About one of the peripheral plots in Ivan Bunin's short story "A tavern on the river"

The paper analyzes one of the peripheral plots in Ivan Bunin's short story «A Tavern on the River» (from the «Dark Alleys» collection). The plot is linked to a real-life person, the poet Valery Bryusov, and includes a subtext which can be traced back to V. Khodasevich's essay «Bryusov». The «Bryusov episode» illuminates symbolist tones in the main plot of the story which adds complexity to its literary semantics.