Brian Tich, Stanford University
Ivan Bunin’s “Light Breathing” (1916) tells the story of a young schoolgirl named Olya Meshcherskaya, sketching a brief account of her life and her abrupt murder. Yet Bunin’s decidedly non-linear rendering of this straightforward plot suggests that the focus of his narrative is not as simple as it might first appear to be. For this reason, “Light Breathing” attracted the attention of psychologist Lev Vygotsky, who used the story as a case study in his Psychology of Art (1925), claiming that its contorted chronology completely reorients its meaning. In this article, I offer a close reading of “Light Breathing” that builds on Vygotsky’s insights into the story, while foregrounding—as Vygotsky did not—Bunin’s complex and strangely opaque portrayal of Olya herself. I argue that beneath Olya and the other figures in “Light Breathing,” Bunin has delineated a more fundamental and even impersonal ‘force of vibrancy’ that is at work driving the story forward and drawing together all of its fractured elements.
Download file: tich_vol_seven-1z-t0x.pdf
Published: Thursday, October 23, 2014
