Thematic model of the love prose of I. A. Bunin: the poetics of feeling and the tragedy of death

The subject of the research is the thematic model of the love prose of I. A. Bunin, in which love and death form an inseparable semantic unity that permeates the entire late novellistic work of the writer. The material for analysis includes the stories and novellas "Mit's Love," "The Case of Cornet Yelagin," "Solar Plexus," "Dark Alleys," "The Raven," "Three Rubles," "In Paris," and "Cold Autumn." The focus is on the mechanisms of functioning of this narrative model, where death is not an incidental detail but a necessary structural component that organizes the plot and defines its philosophical weight. In the article, love is viewed as an absolute expression of life force, stripped of social markers, and it is argued that the tragic ending serves a constructive function: it interrupts the temporal duration, prevents the degradation of feeling into mundane existence, and preserves the experience of love in its peak state. The methodological basis of the research comprises structural-thematic, motif-based, and comparative-typological methods of analyzing the artistic text. The scientific novelty of the article lies in the systematic description of the three-level structure of tragedy, which includes: social determinism (the incompatibility of pure feeling with banal reality), the function of interruption (death as a barrier against the degradation of feeling), and philosophical reflection (death as a symbol of purification and eternity). The article highlights two key elements of Bunin's model, namely: the poetics of love as a “happy flash” and the tragedy of death as a structural mechanism, with their internal unity being recognized as defining the uniqueness of Bunin's novellas. In conclusion, it is stated that death in Bunin's work not only destroys the possibility of earthly love happiness but also serves as a necessary condition for preserving the aesthetic value of the experience of love, transforming the love novella into a philosophical parable about human existence.