Pushkin’s “The Gypsies”: on a plot precedent in the stories of M. Gorky and I. A. Bunin

Abstract

The paper considers the moral, philosophical, ethical, and aesthetic potential of Pushkin’s poem “The Gypsies” in the vast historical, cultural, and literary context. This potential served as the ideological, semantic, and artistic-eidetic source of all subsequent “gypsy texts” of Russian literature reinterpreting the motifs, images, narratives, mythologemes, and archetypes stemming from the romantic story of the tragic love of Aleko and Zemfira. The focus is on the transformation poetics of the plot under study and its motif-image structure in the prose of the early 20th century. Following the methodological principles of cognitive literary criticism, the phenomenon of the “gypsy semiosphere” is studied in the stories of M. Gorky, “Makar Chudra,” and I. A. Bunin, “Bonfire,” at different levels of textual creation using historical-genetic, structural-semantic, systemic, and holistic research methods. The study has revealed a system of concepts and narrative schemes coming from “The Gypsies” and having a constant character enriched by the life and historical experience of Russian writers of the Silver Age. The ethnographic exoticism of the gypsy world in Russian literature proved to actualize the exceptional feelings and spiritual intensity of the internal processes of human existence subject to the power of the “passions of the fatal.” The love theme in its gypsy national-cultural nuance acquires a stereotypical character in the literature of the late 19th early 20th centuries. The image of the bonfire as a semiotic marker is analyzed through the artistic creation of the precedent “burning heart” plot by M. Gorky and I. A. Bunin.