“Chest with cuttings” by Ivan Bunin

The article is devoted to a little-studied corpus of materials - a collection of newspaper and magazine clippings, which I.A. Bunin collected throughout life. The collection includes several tens of thousands of clippings from Russian and foreign periodicals of the 1890s - 1950s. and is the richest material for studying the life and work of I.A. Bunin and his whole era. Printed reviews about himself Bunin not only collected and carefully viewed, but he left his marginalia on many of them. This is a unique set of judgments of the writer about his own work and contemporary criticism and literature. A systematic inventory of these clippings would be the most valuable tool for scientists, and for the researchers who compile the bibliography of publications about Bunin, the “Chest with Clippings” is a fundamental and necessary material. The article provides an overview of the materials of the collection, which after the death of the writer was scattered and ended up in the repositories of different countries, focusing on the meeting of the University of Leeds (Great Britain). The authors of the article believe that the materials of the clippings on which Bunin left his marginalia can be judged on the writer’s artistic principles, his relationship with contemporaries, his views on life and, above all, the writer’s personality and his attitude to his own work. In support of their positions, the authors compare and analyze some marginalia and look for a way how these materials can be introduced into scientific circulation.