The Bunins reading Gustave Flaubert in 1940s: functions of the receptive experience (based on I.A. Bunin’s and V.N. Muromtseva-Bunina’s diaries circa 1941)

The paper examines the reception of Flaubert (his works and epistolary legacy) by the Bunin spouses - Vera Nikolaevna Muromtseva-Bunina and Ivan Alekseevich Bunin. Vera Nikolaevna and Ivan Alekseevich read Flaubert’s letters in the summer and autumn of 1941, simultaneously learning about the beginning of the war between Germany and the USSR and listening to front-line reports on the radio. Military events are scarcely mentioned in the diary, and the context of combat operations is not present in the source - if only at the level of describing “general upheaval”. The chronology of their simultaneous (June 1941) reading of Flaubert’s letters is reconstructed based on the parallel comparison of the diaries of I.A. Bunin (published in the collection “Literaturnoye Nasledstvo”, “Literary Legacy”) and V.N. Muromtseva-Bunina (Russian Archive in Leeds). Flaubert receives a positive assessment from both spouses. The prehistory of the reception of Flaubert in 1941 is reconstructed. The admiration for Flaubert’s style and the high evaluation of his work by both Vera Nikolaevna and Ivan Alekseevich is considered a “literary fact”, substantiated by references to V.N. Muromtseva-Bunina’s memoirs and I.A. Bunin’s interviews. V.N. Muromtseva-Bunina translated Flaubert in the 1910s, while I.A. Bunin regarded Flaubert as one of the exemplars to emulate in terms of style and artistic image development. Flaubert’s work was discussed within the Bunin family circle, and Bunin’s partiality to Flaubert was expressed to correspondents who interviewed him following his 1933 Nobel Prize award. In 1941, the spouses turned to Flaubert’s letters, and this receptive experience had several functions. Among the dominant functions are escapist, nostalgic, dialogical, recreational, and creative functions of reading Flaubert’s letters. Despite the commonality of the identified functions of reading Flaubert’s texts, the differences in receptive responses are also evident. While Ivan Alekseevich primarily sees in Flaubert a desirable reflection of himself (an artist creating for eternity; an artist suffering involuntarily in the barracks of home and the hospital), Vera Nikolaevna perceives Flaubert as a conversational partner and friend, a person who lived a similar, understandable, and emotionally evocative, but profoundly non-identical experience on various levels - religious and creative.