The poetics of the Gospel titles and their variation in Ivan Bunin poetry

The article examines the poems of I. A. Bunin, whose title contains evangelical motifs and images. Special attention is paid to the title as a strong textual position. The fact that at least two versions of the title are relevant for most of the selected works was the reason for this study. The variability of titles is explained by various textual principles that underlie the publication of collected works and collections of poems by the author. I. A. Bunin attached great importance to titles: when republishing, he could change them several times for the same text, then make changes to the text itself, he could completely remove the title or, conversely, title a poem that had no title before. The author’s work on the text became known in detail thanks to the two-volume collection of poems published in 2014 at the Institute of Russian Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Pushkin House), edited by T. M. Dvinyatina (the series “The Poet’s New Library”), which contained the texts selected according to the main lifetime publication principle. At the same time, most of the post-mortem editions were published according to the last will of the author. As a result of a comparative analysis of different publications, the peculiarities of the interaction of the text and the title were studied. In some cases, it is the title that allows us to see the theological component of the text. The key semantic dichotomies of the poems are revealed, indicating the poet’s Christian worldview.