Ivan Bunin’s copies of his poetry collection «Selected Poems» (1929) as sources for a critical edition of his works

Abstract

This article analyses copies of Ivan Bunin's “Selected Poems” (1929) recently discovered in the Leeds Russian Archive (University of Leeds, Great Britain). Bunin regarded this collection as a summing up of his achievements in poetry. A characteristic feature of Bunin's approach to the texts of his published works, known to his contemporaries from earlier editions, was to revisit them repeatedly in different periods and stages of his life. For the purposes of a critical edition it is crucially important to establish as precisely as possible Bunin's final wishes for the form in which future generations would read his works. Analysis of five copies of “Selected Poems”, not previously the subject of scholarly attention, shows that Bunin made alterations to them at several stages: in the mid-1930s, the second half of the 1940s and again in 1951 and 1953. From the second stage onwards, Bunin's work on “Selected Poems” repeated in many respects the work he had done for the volumes of his “Collected Works” issued by the Berlin publishing house “Petropolis” in 1934–1936. However, Bunin's subsequent editing of copies of “Selected Poems” did not reach a definite conclusion: taking the recently discovered copies of the collection into consideration, it can be seen that one in seven poems does not have a final authorial version. This confirms the principle established by the author previously and put into effect in her edition of Bunin's “Poems” in “The New Poet's Library” (2014): it is essential to select as the canonical text for a critical edition of Bunin's poetry the main or last text to be published in his lifetime and to reflect all the variations of his subsequent editing in the accompanying scholarly apparatus.

Keywords

• ivan bunin
• archive materials
• text criticism
• “selected poems”
• canonical text
• collected works