The Persian “Trace” in Ivan Bunin’s Prose: “The Shadow of a Bird” (the Source Studies Aspect)

The article examines the problem of the Persian “trace” in Ivan Bunin’s prose from the point of view of source studies using the example of the travel essay Shadow of the Bird (1907). The “Persian trace” refers to reminiscences from the works of the Persian poets Saadi and Bahai and the historian of Persian literature Deulet-Shah (the latter dedicated a chapter to Saadi in his treatise Tezkirat oshshoara — The Biography of Poets, 1487). The main conclusions: 1) the direct source of reminiscences from the works of Saadi and Deulet-Shah in The Shadow of the Bird is the monograph by the Russian orientalist Ivan Kholmogorov Sheikh Moslihuddin Saadi of Shiraz and his Significance in the History of Persian Literature (Kazan, 1867); 2) the “Persian distich,” which is given in Bunin’s essay without specifying the author — as a remark by the Turkish Sultan Mehmed II at the sight of the destroyed imperial palace in captured Constantinople (1453) — and which actually belongs to the Bahai, most likely, it was borrowed from the book The Conquest of Constantinople by Mohammed Second (St. Petersburg, 1899), which is an extract from Edward Gibbon’s work The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–1788); 3) the legend associated with this distich and also given in The Shadow of the Bird goes back presumably to Dimitri Cantemir’s The History of the Growth and Decay of the Othman Empire (1716).