The semiotics of the alley, “where the leaves dance”: Turgenev, Gumilev, Bunin

The article shows the semantic and semiotic dynamics in Russian literature of the 19th–20th centuries of the locus of alley as an element of an “estate topos” associated with love between a man and a woman. If the summer “dark alleys” were a place of romantic dates and clarifications in the Pushkin- Turgenev tradition, dating back to the European discourse of the 18th century, the autumn alleys, having something in common with famous Zhukovsky’s and Lermontov’s elegies, constitute a part of the Silver age literature as the idealization of the “Onegino-Larin” estate in the context of its irreparable loss (N. S. Gumilev, etc.). In the post-revolutionary works by I. A. Bunin the estate culture is seen as the apogee of Russian history, which has maintained, despite the loss of empirical existence, the status of an unfading timeless standard. The cycle of stories “Dark alleys” (1937–1953) — a monument of Russian estate culture — presents the seasonal completeness of the alleys; their symbolism extends to the entire past Russian and present emigrant life, overpassing thematic, time and even national bounderies. The “Estate topos” and its elements assume unexpected modifications and undergo deep, almost unrecognizable transformations, up to a Bedouin tent in the Judean desert and an extinct town in the south of Spain. The unusual dynamics of the image of the alley in the story “Muse”: from spring directly to winter is a symptom of the shift and break in the estate topography of both the Golden and Silver ages in Russian literature. Discreteness, an internal breach, a terrifying proximity of death brings it back to the origins of the Renaissance (“Decameron” by G. Boccaccio), actualizes its specific universal character. Therefore, a scientific originality of the article consists in revealing of the dynamics of the “estate topos” in Russian literature of the 19th–20th centuries, related to the change of the modes of its representation: from the ”summer” completeness of existence to the “autumn” decline; in the proposal of the term “estate habitus” that explains the capacity of the “estate topos” for new modifications; as well as in the display of an all-European substrate of the estate image in Russian literature of the middle of 20th century.