Landscape Syntax in I. A. Bunin’s Cycle “The Bird’s Shadow”

The article is devoted to the problem of syntactic organization of I. A. Bunin’s texts. The aim of the work is to describe the features of the landscape syntax of eleven ‘travel poems’ of 1907–1911, included in the writers’s cycle ‘The Bird’s Shadow’, and to identify the syntactic dominants of various compositional and plot types of Bunin’s landscape. As a result of the conducted research, it is established that in his landscapes I. A. Bunin regularly uses these structural and semantic types of sentences: nominative sentences with proper-being and subject-being meanings; verbal impersonal sentences with the meaning of olfactory perception of the world; binary complex sentences with connective-productive relations; multicomponent asyndetic complex sentences with enumerative semantic relations, and some others. It is noted that in different plot-compositional types of landscapes (for example, exposition landscape, completion landscape, retardation landscapen and motivation landscapes) Bunin as a prose writer uses different syntactic dominants. Due to the synthesis of various syntactic units the writer constantly changes the objective landscape to a subjective and measured, meditative tone to the soulfully-enthusiastic. The above mentioned syntactic structures help to create antinomic, contrasting landscape, as well as ensures the merging of the long shot picture and a close-up, with the accentuation of specific details. The article reveals that in the analyzed Bunin’s cycle, different plot-compositional types of landscapes correspond to different syntactic dominants. Thus, completion landscapes are characterized by rows of narrative-exclamatory sentences, retardation landscapes - by elliptical sentences. Exposure landscapes are formed mainly due to simple sentences complicated by homogeneous compound nominal predicates, and binomial asyndetic complex sentences with enumerative relations. Motivation landscapes are formed by compound sentences with connective-enumerative and connective-resultative semantic relations, asyndetic multicomponent sentences of an ungrouped structure and complex syntactic structures with an asyndetic coordination or asyndetic subordination. In the cycle ‘The Bird’s Shadow’ the landscape sketches are important communicative and aesthetic units of the text, which express the sensuality and concreteness in the perception of the world of I. A. Bunin’s artistic consciousness, as well as dynamism, colorfulness and love of exoticism in his image.