Realistic Features Of Bunin's Short Stories

Ivan Alekseyevich Bunin (1870-1953 ) was one of the most outstanding realist writers in the"Silver Age"of Russia and also one of the most excellent emigrant writers. He was regarded as"the most outstanding Russian writer"in the 20th century in the European Literature. In 1993, Bunin became the first Russian writer who won the Nobel Prize for Literature "because of his outstanding artistic talent which can convey the Russian classical tradition and his pursuit of truth". Ivan Bunin was one of the most important and most complex writers in the history of Russian literature during the end of the 19th to the mid-20th century. As a poet, a fiction writer and a translator, he was a great literary master in the world. And his short stories are most valuable part of all his creations. Ivan Bunin was usually viewed as the inheritor of the Russian realistic tradition and classicalism, but he himself refused to admit that he is a realist by saying"Calling me a realist means that they don't understand me as a writer Actually, Bunin's realistic writing techniques were remarkably different from those of Tolstoy, Chekhov and other writers. Reviewing Bunin's works, we can notice that a series of realistic features existed in Bunin's realistic writing style. The realistic features, like human's instinctive desire and tragic concept of love, mysterious colors, universal consciousness, and the perfect combination of poems and novels, were especially embodied in Bunin's short stories. These features show that Bunin not only embodied realistic meaning in his works, but also broke through the realistic frame in writing short stories. He also mixed some features of realism in the contents of thoughts, language style and rhetoric. This was a kind of exploitation and new breakthrough to realism.This paper aims to discuss the realistic features of Bunin's short stories and outstanding the breakthroughs in realism in his writing by analyzing his realistic features. The full text is divided into five major parts:In Part One, the creation experience and the characteristic of Bunin's short story is introduced in two phases.InPart Two, the significance of modernism in Russia is analysed, and the relationship of Bunin with the modernism literature is expounded, through the elaboration and the comparison of the origins and the development of modernism theory in Europe and Russia.In Part Three, this paper reflect that Bunin's short stories broke through the sole realism in his artistic style, even on the literature esthetic is different from traditional realism too. Beauty and clown, kindness and evil and ethic moral were no longer the subjects in Bunin's writing.In Part Four, it is emphasized that Bunin paid great attention to exaggerating the circumstances , expressing the personality's emotions, to emphasizing psychology impression and to downplay the plot characteristic in his short stories. This means another breakthrough to traditional realism art expression that the great artist, Bunin did in the last century.In Part Five, the paper summarizes that Bunin stylistically inherited kind of new innovation based on Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev's short stories'literature tradition --"the model of union form of poetry and the prose, but as a whole, kind of poetry sinks to the prose".In the concluding, the paper briefly summarizeds Bunin's short stories'modernism characteristics, and points out its function and influence of modernism characteristic in the Russian literature.