The Figurative Structure of Ivan Bunin’s Story «The Snow Bull» («Snezhny Byk») (To the 150th Anniversary of the Birth)

Abstract

The study involves a philological analysis of Ivan Bunin’s story and reveals its multilevel structure. The relevance of the study stems from a growing popularity of Bunin’s works among readers and investigators. Moreover, some of his texts are included in a set of testing and assessment materials for the Unified State Exam in the Russian language as source texts for writing composition. The study is aimed at clarifying and specifying the interpretation of the story based on linguistic analysis in terms of the writer’s biography and legacy. The author identifies the patterns of the lexical structure and composition of Bunin’s story, unfolding the text at the common level as well as at the symbolic one. The author focuses on the title character of the work, which is a counterpoint to psychological and moral-philosophical issues, as well as to other means of revealing subtext semantics. The research methodology involves lexical, intertextual and motif analysis; the research results are presented mainly using the method of linguistic commenting. The research outcomes embrace the philological results (interpretation of the story The Snow Bull, identification of the universal patterns of Bunin’s artistic style and dominants of his vision) and didactic findings (validation of such works as The Snow Bull as the examination material for the USE in the Russian language).