Some Issues of Commenting Ivan Bunin’s Early Stories of 1887–1902

Abstract

The paper examines the principles and methods of commenting Ivan Bunin’s early fiction prose. It is pointed out that research into the type and level of completeness of scholarly commentaries on works of classics of Russian literature has been conducted for almost a century. The structure of the commentary in academic collections of Russian writers’ works is presented. The article offers a methodology of writing a commentary on the early literary prose of Ivan Bunin, while exploring the problems and questions that arise in the commentaries on the writer’s prose written for the future academic Complete Works and Letters by Ivan Bunin, the work on which has already begun. The principles of writing each section of the commentary for this scholarly edition of Bunin’s literary heritage are outlined: textual, historical-literary, and realhistorical ones. The latter section is presented in a more detailed structure of seven paragraphs. For each item, the paper provides several examples of commentary on specific realities from Bunin’s early stories. A separate section is devoted to linguistic commentary, for which several examples of commentary on particular regional words and folk expressions are also given. Thus, the commentary on Bunin’s prose should be comprehensive, combining with the greatest possible completeness all the necessary information about each work.