Literary Circle of the Poet I.A. Bunin in 1895–1900

This article traces the history of the formation of Ivan Bunin’s poetic circle during the first years of his metropolitan literary career: from his first visit to Moscow in early 1895 to the time when he was preparing his key collection of poems, “Autumn” (1901). Those were the years when Bunin established contacts with the senior symbolists Konstantin Balmont and Valeriy Bryusov, made the acquaintance of Chekhov and Gorky and became friends with Aleksander Fedorov, Aleksander Kuprin and the members of the Fellowship of South Russian Artists, some of whom influenced the young Bunin’s literary work. By the beginning of the 1900s Bunin had formed links which subsequently strengthened with the Moscow Literary Circle, which included poets and writers from various movements, and the “Parnasus” association, which from 1899 was renamed “Wednesday” and included poets and writers of a non-symbolist tendency, among whom Bunin’s literary biography moved forward. Particular attention is paid in the article to the mutual influence between and textual echoes in Bunin’s poems and those of symbolists, which have to be taken into consideration in the scholarly annotations to the recently launched first complete edition of Bunin’s works.