On the Poetics of Titles in I. A. Bunin’s Poetic Heritage

This article considers I. A. Bunin’s poetic oeuvre from the point of view of title poetics in order to identify the main patterns and author’s strategies in working with the title complex. The methodology is based on the correlation of the title with the text, subtext, and metatext of the poem, taking into account textual refinements. In Bunin’s principle of working with the title complex, there is a noticeable striving for accuracy and at the same time for a metaphorical semantic comprehensiveness that includes existential, natural, and cultural constants. Thus, the main features of Bunin’s poetics of titles are changes in the titles of one text, removal of titles and dedications, repetition of titles in two or more poems, combination of the theme and genre in a number of titles, and the addressing factor. In recurring titles, the researcher finds key images of Bunin’s poetry that include him in the Russian poetic tradition. However, a tendency to modernism is also noticeable in Bunin’s poetry in the titles of poems that contain Bunin’s philosophical and poetical reflection. The titles of such poems refer to the theme of death and often contain the words “grave” / “tomb”, but the text of the poem enters into an antinomic relationship with the title, i.e. a person belonging to the “world of art”, culture, and tradition (myth and religious tradition) has already ascended over the world and is doomed to immortality. The removal of titles as a strong position in texts on political topics shifts the reader’s attention from the temporary to the eternal and metahistorical, which is found in the text itself and clarifies the author’s position.