Thanatological discourse in Ivan Bunin's works

The article analyses the memoir notes of Ivan Bunin and his contemporaries, who knew him closely, which express his attitude to death. Bunin’s notes, drafts and diaries are full of his reflections on the subject of finiteness of human life. In conversations with relatives and friends he confessed that he “is obsessed with the death” and that he “is afraid of it.” The theme of death is the key issue in many of Ivan Bunin’s prosaic and poetic works. In the book “The Life of Arsenyev,” which can be considered the writer’s autobiography, he mentions the fact that the acceptance of death has made him think about the existence of God and the existential dilemma for the first time. Bunin’s fear of death was a kind of a phobia reflected in all his works. The idea of the finiteness of existence is based not only on the perception and feelings of some of Bunin’s characters, but also on the fate of entire social classes. This is why Bunin’s imagery is characterized by a nostalgic, elegiac tone, the “matte silver” colour (according to M. Gorky). The writer rebels against the inevitability of death the way children do (“I will not give in”) and the way writers do by using their works as a line of defense in the struggle over time (“Now you are a thought. You are eternal”). A specific thanatological perception of the world sharpened his attention to Buddhism and to the doctrine of reincarnation. The “law of beauty” for Bunin is based on an eschatological view. That is why he doesn’t write about the future and interprets everything related to the ideal, nature and eternity in a Christian way.