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Fiction as Mapmaking: Moscow as Ivan Bunin's Russian Memory Palace
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 January 2017
Abstract
In his fiction written from the 1920s through 1940s Ivan Bunin set a number of stories in Moscow, naming specific places, many of which were closed or destroyed after the 1917 Revolution by the Soviet regime or by Nazi bombing during World War II. In so doing, Bunin used Moscow to map the cultural memory of the Russian emigration, with the ancient city of Moscow standing as its “memory palace” while contributing to the “Moscow text.“ In his 1944 story “Cleansing Monday,” in particular, Bunin conducted this mnemonic project on three levels: historical, spiritual, and didactic. He did so for both a Russian readership—his compatriots abroad and potential (future) readers back home—and a foreign audience increasingly interested in Russia. Through close reading of the story, diary entries, and Bunin's biography, this article explores the idea of a memory palace and four specific memory images, comparing Bunin's depiction of Russia to a 1915 depiction by English traveler Stephen Graham.
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References
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14. I will be citing the story from Ivan Alekseevich Bunin, “Cleansing Monday,” The Elagin Affair and Other Stories, trans. Graham Hettlinger (Chicago, 2005).
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17. My project here focuses on Bunin as a writer addressing at least two different audiences while inserting his fiction into the Russian literary and historical narrative. In that sense, my work differs from Julie A. Buckler's in her magisterial Mapping St. Petersburg: Imperial Text and Cityscape (Princeton, 2004), where she explores the vast sweep of St. Petersburg's “textual map” (1) and illuminates its “sociocultural middle ground” (5). Bunin could not by himself accommodate in his prose, as Buckler writes, the vast “complexities of urban life” (8), nor did he strive to. But using as she does the “guiding metaphor of the map,” I will walk along with Bunin's protagonists and reconstitute the cultural cityscape and its historical dimensions. Olga Matich has argued that maps “by definition picture geographic space from a bird's eye view,” but here we will aim for a more three- and even four-dimensional sensation of motion and chronology in “Cleansing Monday.” Matich, introduction to Petersburg/Petersburg: Novel and City, 1900-1921, ed. Olga Matich (Madison, 2010), 8.
18. Oboukhova, “Moskva i moskovskii tekst,” 108.
19. Lotman, “Simvolika Peterburga,” 14.
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24. See correspondence 1940-1948, especially May 1943 through July 1944. PSS 12:123-46.
25. Archimandrite Kiprian (Kern) to I. A. Bunin, 3 May 1943, PSS 12:126.
26. Kiprian to Bunin, 10 March 1944, PSS 12:127-28.
27. Bunin's disdain for Merezhkovskii and Gippius caused him to cross the street to avoid Gippius after the war. An anecdote about a photography session in 1915 highlights Bunin's concerns about Russia in the early years of the twentieth century: ‘“Russia is perishing,’ ‘she faces many dangers, the power of the dark masses from below and the darkness of power from above'… but what's happening in Moscow, in Petersburg? Celebrations every day.” PSS 15:262.
28. The isolation Bunin felt in Grasse increased when Mark Aldanov relocated to the United States. Aldanov obtained visas and tickets for the Bunins in August 1942, but Bunin balked at the opportunity, thinking that given his age (then seventy-two) and his declining health further emigration would be an additional hardship. See Gabriel Simonoff, “La Vie des Bounine à Grasse pendant la Deuxieme Guerre mondiale,” in Bounine Revisité, 146-51.
29. Bunin to S. A. Tsion, 31 January 1941, PSS 12:289-90. Bunin published the abridged version of Dark Avenues in the United States rather than Europe in part to avoid collaborating with the Germans in any way. Publication of the fuller Russian language edition was repeatedly delayed because of paper shortages. When it came out in 1946 Bunin had added “Cleansing Monday,” among other stories.
30. See, among others, Connolly, Julian, Ivan Bunin (Boston, 1982), 66;Google Scholar Rogatchevski, Andrei, “Ivan Bunin's Life,” in Bunin, Ivan, Dark Avenues, trans. Hugh Aplin (London, 2008), 289–308;Google Scholar Roshchin, Mikhail, Ivan Bunin (Moscow, 2000), 206 Google Scholar. Rogatchevski calls Dark Avenues a “veritable encyclopedia of heterosexual relationships.” Rogatchevski, 303.
31. “A sharp incompatibility of spiritual tension, the requirements two people have toward life, are revealed.” M. Iof'ev, quoted in Mikhailov, O. N., Zhizri Bunina: Lish’ slovu zhizri dana … (Moscow, 2001), 438.Google Scholar
32. 23 June 1947, I. A. Bunin: Novye materialy, 1:315-16.
33. Mumford, Lewis, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects (New York, 1961), 562.Google Scholar
34. Wachtel, , “Editor's Introduction,” in Bunin, The Life of Arseniev: Youth, 8.Google Scholar
35. Schama's exploration of the layered past focuses more on the pastoral, rather than the urban archeology we investigate here. See Schama, Simon, Landscape and Memory (New York, 1995), 16–17.Google Scholar On Bunin and the pastoral, see Nivat, Georges, “The Russian Landscape as Myth,” Russian Studies In Literature 39, no. 2 (March 2003): 51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
36. Diary excerpt, 19 May 1918, in A. Boboreko, “Novoe o Bunine,” Problemy realizma 7 (Vologda, 1980), 157-8, quoted in Marullo, Thomas Gaiton, introduction to Ivan Bunin, Cursed Days: A Diary of Revolution (Chicago, 1998), 7n8.Google Scholar
37. Okaiannye dni, 20 February 1918, PSS 6:288.
38. 26 June 1891, PSS 9:242.
39. Clark, Katerina, Moscow, the Fourth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Evolution of Soviet Culture, 1931-1941 (Cambridge, Mass., 2011).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
40. Ibid., 94.
41. Mumford, 562.
42. Mikhailov, Zhizri Bunina, 417-21. It is unlikely that Bunin knew that many in the Russian army, along with the blockaded citizens of Leningrad, were also rereading Tolstoi for hope and inspiration in these months. In the story the relationship between love, loss, and Tolstoi is highlighted when the young woman quotes Platon Karataev's simple maxim about the meaning of happiness. Bunin, PSS 6:350. For more on 1812, see Dickinson, “Representing Moscow in 1812.“
43. Wolfe, 252.
44. Here again I am invoking Spence. See below and figures 1-4.
45. Graham, Stephen, The Way of Martha and the Way of Mary (London, 1915).Google Scholar
46. Bunin, 349.
47. PSS 6:402.
48. Bunin referred to Iverskaia Chapel in precisely these words. PSS 6:277.
49. On Bunin and postwar, pro-Soviet émigré literature, see David M. Bethea, “1944-1953: Ivan Bunin and the Time of Troubles in Russian Émigré Literature,” Slavic Review 43, no. 1 (Spring 1984): 1-16. Bunin to Teleshov, 8 May 1941, in Marullo, Ivan Bunin, 143-44. See also Bunin's diary entry of 2 April 1943, PSS 9:397. His wife Vera Muromtseva- Bunina reacted to Sergei Rachmaninoff's death thus: “He did not live to see the end of the war… or the possibility of returning to the homeland.” Diary entry, 29 March 1943, in Marullo, Ivan Bunin, 216. On Bunin and rapprochement with the Soviet government, see Muromtseva-Bunina, diary entry of 3 May 1946, in Militsa Grin, ed., Ustami Buninykh: Dnevniki Ivana Alekseevicha i Very Nikolaevnoi i drugie arkhivnye materialy, 3 vols. (Frankfurt am Main, 1977-82), 3:181; Connolly, Ivan Bunin, 161; and Andrei Sedykh's memoirs, Dalekie, blizkie (New York, 1962), 213-20.
50. Wachtel, “Editor's Introduction,” 14. In the early 1900s Bunin belonged to a “Wednesday” club in which the members were given nicknames based on Moscow streets. See Inovenkova, “Moskva v zhizni i tvorchestve I. A. Bunina,” in PSS 15:252-53.
51. He has “a particular affection for burbot pasties with eel-pout stew and pink hazel grouse in heavily fried sour cream.” Bunin, 347. See Molokhovets's, Elena famous cookbook A Gift for Young Housewives (Bloomington, 1998)Google Scholar for recipes featuring burbot and hazel grouse.
52. Bunin, 348.
53. Ibid.
54. Ibid., 347.
55. I. V. Rebrova contends that the description of the heroine's father identifies him as an “Old Believer.” I. V. Rebrova, “Istoriko-kul'turnyi intertekst v rasskaze I.A. Bunina 'Chistyi ponedel'nik,'” in Materialy kongressa “Russkaia literatura v mirovom kul'turnom i obrazovatel'nom prostranstve,” Sankt-Peterburg, 15-17 oktiabria 2008 goda, 2 vols., Literatura XlX-nachalo XX vekov: novye vzgliady i kontseptsii (St. Petersburg, 2008), part 1, 2:223-32. Mikhailov notes that the heroine “is searching for something sound, heroic, and self-sacrificial, and she finds her ideal in the religion of old. Contemporary life seems to her pathetic and untenable.” Mikhailov, Zhizri Bunina, 438.
56. Bunin, 354.
57. Ivan Bunin to Archimandrite Kiprian, 14 March 1944, PSS 12:128-29.
58. In 1915 Bunin had taken his nephew N. A. Pusheshnikov on a tour of religious places in and around Moscow: the Kremlin churches, Chudov, Novodevichii, and Zachat'evskii monasteries, the Marfo-Mariinskii Convent, and the Troitse-Sergeevskaia Lavra; by the 1940s a number of these sites had been destroyed. See Inovenkova, , “Moskva v zhizni i tvorchestve I. A. Bunina,” in PSS 15:278.Google Scholar
59. The original version of the icon, held at the Iveron Monastery on Mount Athos in Greece, is said to have been painted by Luke the Evangelist, and during the ninth-century wars of iconoclasm it was allegedly stabbed by a soldier. According to religious tradition, blood then flowed from the icon, thus ending the wars. The first copy of this icon was commissioned for Russia in 1648 by the archimandrite destined to become Patriarch Nikon, who would in turn preside over the religious strife in Russia that resulted in the Raskol.
60. We might note that this union, between Elizabeth of Hesse and Sergei, son of Tsar Aleksandr III, like many royal marriages of the era, brought together the Germans, English, and Russians—Elizabeth was a granddaughter of Queen Victoria. The violent disruption of that union in 1905 presaged the rupture between Germany and the rest of Europe that was World War I and the destruction of the world as Bunin and his contemporaries knew it.
61. As her biographer has it, “Elle ne conçoit plus, dans la vie, d'autre but, d'autre intérêt que la charité… . Alors, pour se mieux consacrer aux ceuvres charitables, elle decide qu'elle va quitter le monde.” Paléologue, Maurice, Auxportes dujugement dernier: Élisabeth-Féodorowna, Grande-Duchesse de Russie (Paris, 1940),Google Scholar 62.See also Paleologue, 63. According to this and other sources, Elizaveta Fedorovna also forgave the assassin and strove (unsuccessfully) to have him pardoned. Paléologue, 41-46. It is entirely possible that Bunin was acquainted with this little book.
62. Bunin, 359.
63. Aux portes du jugement dernier describes in vivid and dramatic detail how the body of Elizaveta Fedorovna was recovered by Admiral Aleksandr Kolchak's troops and transported through Beijing to Jerusalem for burial. See Paleologue, 218-26.
64. Sedakova believes that Bunin portrayed life using the genre of elegy or requiem. See Sedakova, O. A., “Lux Aeterna: Ob I.A. Bunine,” Filologicheskie zapiski, no. 20 (2003): 35–38 Google Scholar, reprinted at www.olgasedakova.com/Poetica/222 (last accessed 31 October 2013).
65. Bunin, 353. In his memoiristic prose as well, Bunin recalled A. I. Ertel', writing in 1929 that “he is now almost forgotten, and to some utterly unknown.” “Ertel',” reprinted in GegeV, frak, metel', 457-65. Ertel’ spent time in exile in Tver’ between 1884 and 1888, and, as Bunin notes, experienced a “period of passionate religious fervor” in his youth. GegeV, frak, metel', 460,463. This cemetery outing on Forgiveness Sunday evokes the ritual that requires cemetery visitors to ask forgiveness of the dead. However, no specific meaning for the visit is imparted, and the young woman has visited a different Old Believer cemetery the day before. Bunin, 351.
66. Indeed, the narrator points to that missing explanation, asking, “What did Griboedov mean to them?” GegeV, frak, metel', 353. Twice more in the story we hear the “for some reason,” which marks revelatory moments. When, near the end of the story, the young man finds himself at the Marfo-Mariinskii Convent, he is compelled “for some reason“ to enter the gates, whereupon he sees the abbess. Again, “for some reason” he carefully watches the procession of women dressed just like the abbess, and in that row he sees his beloved, thus finally discovering what happened to her when she disappeared.
67. On “conviviality,” see Lilly, Ian K., “Conviviality in the Prerevolutionary ‘Moscow Text’ of Russian Culture,” Russian Review 63, no. 3 (July 2004): 427-48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
68. Griboedov was arrested on suspicion of being a Decembrist, and he subsequently became a government official in the early years of Nicholas I's reign. As minister plenipotentiary to Teheran, in 1829, he perished in an attack on the mission, and it is possible to read his death as martyrdom to the conflict between Russia and the east.
69. On Orthodox traditions, see Ware, Timothy, Bishop Kallistos of Diokleia, The Orthodox Church (New York, 1987).Google Scholar
70. Bunin, 353.
71. I.e., she tells a portion of the Life of Petr and Fevroniia. See Lyubomira Parpulova Gribble, “The Life of Peter and Fevroniia: Transformations and Interpretations in Modern Russian Literature and Music,” Russian Review 52, no. 2 (April 1993): 184-97, esp. 186-87.
72. Matich, Erotic Utopia, 163.
73. The original of this popular icon resides at the Hilandar Monastery on Mount Athos, having arrived there, according to legend, in an unmanned boat. Later it served as the “abbot” of the monastery. One more detail from the history of the icon is important: donations from Russia flowed to the Hilandar and with them, in east Slavic tradition, the icon was “clothed” in a silver and semiprecious stone frame, a frame that now hides the third hand from sight. It is not clear whether Bunin would have known about the “clothing“ of the original icon, but the copy he describes in the story remained uncovered, thus highlighting the miracle. Predrag Matejic, Curator of the Hilandar Collection at Ohio State University Thompson Library, personal communication.
74. As Michael Hughes has written, there were several books published in 1915 that attempted to highlight Russian culture and thus influence Anglo-Russian relations on the eve of the revolution. The Ballets Russes and their annual British tours also contributed to English perceptions that there was such a thing as “Russian culture.” See Hughes, Michael, “Searching for the Soul of Russia: British Perceptions of Russia during the First World War,” Twentieth Century British History 20, no. 2 (June 2009): 198–226.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
75. See unsigned review of Gentleman from San Francisco, by Bunin, Ivan, The Times (London), 17 May 1922, 16;Google Scholar unsigned review of Grammar of Love, by Bunin, Ivan, The Times (London), 8 March 1935, 11.Google Scholar
76. “The Russian has an extraordinary capacity for belief,” he opines. Graham, 291. In this work he also narrates events which took place during the Easter season. Graham, 206-14.
77. Ibid., 200.
78. Ibid., 103.
79. Ibid., 217.
80. Ibid., 267-68. Emphasis in the original.
81. See Graham, Stephen, “Russian Writers in Exile I: Ivan Bunin,” The Times (London), 3 April 1925, 17,Google Scholar and “Russian Writers in Exile II: Alexey Remizof,” 28 April 1925, 17.
82. Graham, The Way of Martha and the Way of Mary, 267-68. According to Graham, women who joined the order had to be physically strong and under the age of 40.
83. Marina Romanenkova writes: “This, in essence, was a thought characteristic of the émigré consciousness of the artist's responsibility for the fate of his homeland and, looking back, Bunin establishes with bitterness that in the bustle and whirlwind of bohemian life his generation missed the looming threat.” Marina Romanenkova, “Antroponimy kak kul'turnyi komponent struktury rasskaza Ivana Bunina ‘Chistyi ponedel'nik,'“ Žmogus ir žodis / People and the World 2, no. 4 (2002): 83.
84. Bunin, 359.
85. Quoted in Marullo, Ivan Bunin, 238-39. The translator calls the story “The First Monday in Lent“; I have changed that title here to avoid confusion.