Issue 3 (92)

THE TRANSFORMATION OF RHETORIC: THE NORTH-EASTERN TOPOS IN THE DIARIES OF I. A. BUNIN IN EXILE
Year	2026	Number	3 (92)
Pages	93-101	Type	scientific article
UDC	82-94	BBK	83+97.1
Authors	Anisimov Kirill V.	Topic	AT THE TURNINIG POINT OF THE AGES. 20TH CENTURY RUSSIAN LITERATURE
Summary	Using Bunin’s diaries of the revolutionary years as a basis, the article examines the writer’s attitude toward the rhetorical tradition, explaining the reasons for his declarative parting with it in his own literary practice. It demonstrates how and why the diary narrative becomes a challenge to rhetorical discourse, a platform for its decisive transformation. The analytic focus is directed onto device widespread in 18th and 19th centuries Russian poetry, which is known as the “imperial formula” (L. V. Pumpyansky) and the “geo-ethnic panorama” (V. N. Toporov). Bunin makes a breakthrough in the rhetorical setup of the text, transforming this etiquette-based list of localities subject to the imperial center by two means: 1) a radical change in the subject-figurative structure, that is, the subjectification of imaginative geography, incorporating it into the biographical author’s personal experience of traveling across Russia; 2) the subsequent transfer of “fragments” of this rhetorical topos into literary texts, the poetic dominant of which already has little in common with rhetoric. Exemplifying the story “Clean Monday”, characteristic features of the eastern frontier, previously reflected in the excerpted diary passage, are traced. Attention is paid to such key images of the eastern frontier as Astrakhan, Sakhalin Island, sable and beaver fur. It is shown that the structure of the poetic “list” — based on a series of conventions and stable for centuries, implying an unchanging image of the author, chronotope and genre, and therefore perceived as a predictable device — found itself, in the melting pot of Bunin’s diary, immersed in the elements of confessional-lyrical and sharply polemical writing. In these new coordinates, the original meanings and “genre memory” of the “imperial formula” were radically defamiliarized and renewed.
Keywords	I. A. Bunin, diaries, short story ‘Clean Monday’, rhetoric, north-eastern frontier
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