Journal archive

Abstract: The study dwells on the evolution of Bunin reception in the French leftist press of the interwar period. The objects of the research are the reviews in Newspapers of the corresponding ideological orientation of the writer's books in French translations, articles and notes about him. The main attention is paid to the analysis of the Central Communist newspaper of France «L’Humanité», which is due, in particular, to the close cooperation with this edition of Maurice Donzel (Parijanine), the main translator of Bunin's works into French. The author resorts to the end-to-end examination of materials about Bunin in the leftist press, considering this material on a wide historical and cultural background of the era and at the same time resorting to the semantic analysis of journalistic discourse in Frenchlanguage articles on Bunin. Most of them are translated into Russian for the first time and introduced into scholarly circulation. The paper rejects the stereotype of constant hostility between Bunin and the far left camp. A sequential review of the reactions to the early French-language editions of the writer leads to the conclusion that in the first half of the 1920s. The leftist Parisian press makes attempts to ideologically appropriate the newly discovered master of Russian literature, to adapt his work to its own value patterns. It is shown that in the early 1920s the literary reputation of anti-Soviet Bunin in the French leftist circles remained quite labile and flexible, which allowed Romain Rolland to attract him for cooperation with the review «Europe». However, the combined attempts to involve Bunin under the canopy of the leftist press and to accommodate his work in the semantically expanded patterns of art «involved revolutionism» began to cause anxiety in the writer, who eventually decided to demonstratively distance himself from the imposed role. As a result, the author shows how for 15 years in the reception by the far leftist French press the former «subconscious revolutionary» Bunin turned into a fascist, and concludes that such an evolution in the scale of the dynamics of the literary reputation of one particular writer reflected a much broader process of totalitarization of social institutions, ideological consciousness, and rhetorical practices.