Poetics of parable in the story of I. A. Bunin "Youth and Old Age" (to the 155th anniversary of the birth)

Abstract

The article examines the story "Youth and Old Age" in a broad historical, cultural and ethical-philosophical context, which, in its thematic orientation, gravitates towards the cycle of travel memories that developed in the work of I. A. Bunin in the mid-1930s and compiled one of the writer’s last books – "In the spring, in Judea. Rose of Jericho" (1953). In it included works whose realistic nature, enriched by modernist aesthetics, was filled with symbolic imagery, allegorical valence, realized in stable genre forms, one of them is a parable. The purpose of the article is to give a systematic analysis of the poetics of I. A. Bunin’s story "Youth and Old Age" in the unity of paradigmatics and syntagmatics, revealing in it the meaningful and semantic core, which is the parable of the old Kurd about the essence of human existence, about the life limit released to man by God. To realize this goal, historical-genetic, genre-typological, structural- semantic research methods, elements of cognitive studies (literary and linguistic conceptology) were used, especially to verify the allegorical potential of the plot-forming opposition of youth/old age, neutralized by the very artistic logic of the Bunin story. As a result of the study, the genre range of the parable was determined, specific forms and methods of organizing the plot at the motif-shaped and verbal-style levels of text generation were established, the semantic volume of the concepts of "Youth," "Old age" and their demonstrative diffusion, realized in the conceptual formula "young old age."