Visual Aspect of the Poetics of the I. A. Bunin’s Novel “Arseniev’s Life”

The article examines the visual aspect of the poetics of I. A. Bunin’s novel “Arsenyev’s Life.” The leading visual form in the book is literary pictorialism, i.e., a way of modeling the artistic world in which the phenomena and events of reality are presented based on the pictorial principles of image creation. The pictorial text has a number of features resembling a painting: static nature, stipulated by the predominant use of the present tense, accentuated forms, colorful descriptions, and a special composition. Bunin’s gift of painting is realized in generous description of textures and colors, in the accuracy of details, in the ability to capture memories in vivid landscape, subject, and portrait images. Along with literary pictorialism, Bunin resorts to ecphrasis, focusing mainly on photographs and family portraits. Thus, the past, including with the support of ecphrasis, manifests not only through paintings, but also through faces. The verbal icon is designed to visually enhance and accentuate the plot of the hero’s entry into the world of Orthodox religiosity. At the same time, the paintings on which the narrator’s gaze rests are combined with cinematic writing — a dynamic stream of frames perceived by consciousness and vision and recreated with the help of editing. This is how the course of life is modeled in the “incongruity and inseparability” of dynamics and stopped moments. Thus, the visual forms of the artistic world’s unfolding in the novel are presented systematically and in a branched manner. They can be attributed to those factors that form Bunin’s distinct organic writing style, when questions of ontology are posed and resolved at the stylistic level, at the level of the images of the surrounding world that manifest themselves here and now.