The "Indian Paradox" in theWorks of I.A. Bunin

Researchers of I.A. Bunin's life and work are faced with an obvious paradox: the writer, who is in love with Indian culture, has never been to India, but colorful images, religious and philosophical sentiments, anthropological and historiosophical ideas associated with the ancient civilization are reflected in his works. The article examines the peculiarities of the formation of the "Indian code" in Bunin's work, the artistic axiology that determined the conceptualization of literary material.Bunin's first impressions of contemplation of the Indian Ocean and Ceylon are biblically, religiously colored: they are combined with impressions of "sacred texts", where the world is value- and hierarchically centered by God in the space of Paradise. It was in this space – in the place of Creation – that Bunin psychomentally found himself, and the "Indian code" is formed in the combination of natural and sacred, personal and sacred, as a special measure that determined the writer's dominant attitude to the world in the categories of "vital kinship" and "universal responsiveness", in the images of "uterine brotherhood", "the cradle of humanity" and spiritual and cultural kinship with the ancestral homeland.Bunin's "Indian Paradox" reveals the spiritual and cultural potential of the Russian national identity, which makes it possible to significantly correct the Eurocentric model of worldview and world-building and can naturally be in demand with respect to solving anthropological and civilizational problems of modern society.