by Pavel FOKIN, State Literary Museum (Moscow) From October 2010 till April 2011, The Bowl of Life exhibition, in honor of the 140th birth anniversary of Ivan Bunin (1870-1953), the first national Nobel Prize laureate in literature, was held in Ostroukhov's House in Trubnikov lane. Konstantin Paustovsky dedicated heartfelt words to this outstanding master of word and a fellow-writer (Ivan Bunin (article), 1956): "In the autobiographical book Arsenyev's Life Bunin reached that level of perfection in prose about which Chekhov and Leo Tolstoi spoke a lot,--the level when prose and poetry merge into one organic inseparable whole, when you cannot make a distinction between poetry and prose and each word imprints in the soul like a scorching seal... Most people know Bunin as a prose writer. But as a poet, he is no less interesting. He wrote many beautiful poems. These poems like his prose show his phenomenal gift to be reincarnated, if we can say so, into everything he writes about. Almost instantaneously, he grasps and fixes in words characteristics of people and landscapes, that truly reproduce the essence of what Bunin writes about. No doubt, Bunin is rigorous, almost ruthless. At the same time he is very expressive when he writes about love. Love for him is more global and rich than a common notion about it. Love for him means association with the beauty and complexities of the world. It is nights, days, the sky and стр. 73 boundless noise of the ocean, books and reflections--in short, a world around him. His language is simple, sometimes even reserved, but it is concurrently picturesque and rich in its sound expression--from solemn sounds of brass to transparency of running spring water, from measured expressiveness to intonations of surprising softness, from light melodies to slow peal of thunder. Bunin was an almost unsurpassed master of the language. Like every outstanding w ... Читать далее