“Estate” Narrative as Autocommunicative Discourse: on the Mnemonic Mode of Narration in the Prose of I.A. Bunin

The concept of autocommunication, developed by Yuri Lotman, has been in demand in various fi elds of the humanities for half a century. However, the narratological use of this concept is problematic: the theory of narrative postulates the obligatory addressability of narrative discourse. Even a diary entry generates the fi gure of a potential reader through verbalization, stylistic and compositional design. Nevertheless, we can speak of autocommunicativity in relation to the socalled “memory narrative”. It is characterized by a double reference: to the object of memory on the one hand, and to the mnemonic procedure itself on the other. When remembering something, the speaker/writer inevitably speaks of him/herself – the story is supplemented by meta-narrative elements that “expose” the process of reconstructing the past and at the same time are redundant from the point of view of heterocommunicative interaction. The “mnemonic” mode of narration is realized in Ivan Bunin’s works devoted to the theme of the Russian estate (“The Life of Arseniev”, “Wanderings”, “Untimely Spring”). The article considers a special kind of “memory narrative” – “estate” narrative – on the material of the writer’s works. Its peculiarities (in addition to the specifi c subject of representation) include repetitiveness and automatism, reduction of cause-and-eff ect relations, expansion of autorefl exive components of the narrative, collective (“choral”) identifi cation of the subject of the story with the addressee, and the presence of a diegetic narrator who simultaneously acts as the protagonist of the story.