SUMMARY:

This article addresses the problem of artistic interpretations of nation and empire in Ivan Bunin’s prose of the period from 1900 to the early 1920s. The author considers Bunin’s large-scale reconstruction of the traditional mores, the repertoire of people’s reading (the novel The Village) and the locus of the noble estate’s library (Antonov apples, Grammar of Love, The Unhurried Spring) that is clearly counterpoised to the two former loci. From this analysis the author derives a historical–philosophical antithesis, the poles of which relate to nation and empire. While scrutinizing the structural elements of the “library plot” (its chronotop, symbolic artifacts, interactions with the hero), the author exposes the connection between the library and the elite culture of the end of the eighteenth to the beginning of the nineteenth century. On an ideological level, Bunin stressed the absence of material and spiritual partitions between noble and peasant estates. In view of this position, the author treats cross-social love affairs (Dry Valley [Sukhodol], Grammar of Love) as artistic representations of the “collective body” – the key concept of a nation. The article reveals the dramatic and tragic quality of Bunin’s prognoses of social integration, which disregarded “high” (in terms of its social status) and imperial (in terms of its origin) classical culture.