Surrealism in the Highest Sense. Dostoevsky on the Pages of I. A. Bunin’s Short Story “The Calf’s Head”
Authors:   Viktor Astafyev Krasnoyarsk State Pedagogical University Krasnoyarsk, Russian Federation, Anisimov K.V. 
Published: December 2024

The article considers prose miniature “Calf’s Head” in the perspective of Bunin’s reception of
Dostoevsky, intrinsic peculiarity of the poetics of the former. Several episodes of “Crime and
Punishment” are attributed as sources of Bunin’s story. The nature of intertextual interaction
is perceived as an allusion that “scatters” the source into small fragments and in this respect is
close to parodichnost’ illuminated by Yuri Tynyanov, as well as to the “shortened signsindicators”, as Zara Mints has put it, often used by A. Blok. Thus, the article complements the
three-part sequence of Bunin’s assimilation of Dostoevsky’s artistic experience (imitation –
parody – intertext) proposed by Daniel Riniker. Fragments of “Crime and Punishment”,
which formed the basis of the plot of the “Calf's Head”, were two scenes connected by Bunin,
and the proportionality of the cast of characters in both scenes supported such an overlap. We
mean the depiction of Lizaveta’s murder and Raskolnikov’s dream – a vision in which men
kill a horse. The central point of borrowing is the very gesture of dissecting the head and/or
visual focus on the mutilated head. Taking into account the context, the paper clarifies the artistic task of Bunin’s intertextual experiment. The story “Idol”, which is adjacent to the
“Calf's Head”, is based on the motif of eating raw meat washed down with blood. An allegorical picture provided here correlates with the rhetoric of Bunin’s anti-revolutionary journalism. Thus, if the verbal combinations “to drink blood” and “bloodsucker” are metaphors, then
the plot of “Idol” will be a “lively”, “materialized” metaphor showing resemblance to
Mayakovsky. Revealing the proximity to the avant-garde poetics, the author’s technique in
the “Calf’s Head”, however, is somewhat different. “Want to discover properties of an axe? –
you will get an axe”, – the author seems to tell his readers, bringing the lexeme itself to the
forefront in the latest edition of the story. And in order to assess as clearly as possible what an
axe is, it turned out to be necessary for Bunin to extract the image of this tool not only from
the coordinates of rhetoric, where it was a metonymy of social revolt, but also to treat with
deliberate neutrality the main literary source, in which the axe was the key component of material imagery. The latter notion is evidenced by an allusive and at the same time seemingly
indifferent alternative way of arranging the personages in two intertwined intertexts. In Dostoevsky’s semiosis, the sign was produced out of an axe – a thing, an object stolen in the janitor’s room and hung by the murderer on his left side with a special ribbon. Bunin reverses this
semiosis back – in his little oeuvre the abstract concept is being objectified as if striving for
his original visual materiality. In his struggle for reality, the exiled author formed his own
“realism in the highest sense”, built, however, not on reliable reality, as in Dostoevsky’s aesthetics, but on emptiness, a nonexistent world that has gone to the bottom of memory, i.e.,
to the same place where the impressions of the literature the author once read were located.
The reproduction of this world required the writer to update his poetics radically.