Ivan Bunin's poetry in Russian vocal lyrics

The aim of the article is to determine the nature and influence of the music of Russian composers of the 20th and 21st centuries on the comprehension of the artistic originality of Ivan Bunin’s poetry. This will make it possible to come closer to the formulation of the creative method that unites such prominent persons as Ivan Bunin, Sergey Rachmaninoff and Georgy Dmitriyev. The materials of the research were the poetic works of Bunin, the music of Russian composers, information from music and bibliographic reference books, the results of studies by Soviet and Russian philologists and musicologists. The research methodology combines musicological and literary analysis with methods of comparative study of various types of art and a systemic cultural approach to the national worldview. The authors point out that the first romances to Bunin’s poems were written almost 120 years ago, and since then the panorama of musical incarnations of his poetry has been expanding, every year growing due to academic genres, works of contemporary authorial and Orthodox songs. At the first stage of the research, when summarizing the music and bibliographic reference books published in the 1960s-2010s, the authors found that only the early (1900s-1910s) transcriptions of Bunin’s poetry to music were taken into account with sufficient completeness. Lists of works of the academic genre, written in the 1970s-2010s, are extremely incomplete. The second stage of the research was to eliminate the existing gaps, starting with the most significant works. The authors carried out a musicological analysis of the vocal cycles of Georgy Dmitriyev, who created more than 30 compositions based on Bunin’s poems. With a detailed analysis of Dmitriyev’s vocal-instrumental cycles, the authors of the article supplement the musicological analysis of the choral cycle Old Russian Legends (1987) and the polyptych Pictures from an Old Book (2008), which Yury Paisov, a well-known Russian musicologist, performed in 2007-2018. The authors of the article also included romances by Sergey Rachmaninoff, Reinhold Gliere, and Sergei Vasilenko in the musicological analysis and comparison. The research resulted in the study of the “Bunin layer” of Russian vocal music created by Russian composers. The range of creative incentives of the rather wide collective creative process was correlated with Bunin’s poetics proper. The works related to Bunin’s poetry by the artistic method were determined. The authors of the article came to the conclusion that the method they were analyzing was generated by the Orthodox worldview and reflects features that are fundamentally important for the Russian genius as such.