Musa (Ivan Bunin)
Musa ( Russian Муза ) is a short story by the Russian Nobel Prize winner for literature Ivan Bunin , which was completed on October 17, 1938 and was published on October 30 of the same year in the Paris émigré newspaper Poslednije Novosti .
The first-person narrator, a landowner from the Tambov governorate , studies painting in Moscow over the winter . Although the young man was not poor at the time, he lived modestly in his room in the Hotel Stoliza - which is next to the Praha restaurant on the Arbat . While he was drawing one fine day in March, someone knocked. A tall, strange girl comes in, introduces herself as Musa Graf and wants to get to know the first-person narrator, this “interesting man”. The budding painter has to take off the beautiful young music student's wet shoes and hand her the handkerchief from her coat. The sturdy doctor's daughter, who lives nearby on Pretschistenski Boulevard, attests that the surprised narrator looks pretty good, chats about her concert visit yesterday, when she saw the young man, and impatiently demands food. The room waiter has to buy apples quickly. The narrator is allowed to sit down next to Musa on the sofa and is kissed rousingly with the promise "More ... the day after tomorrow". The day after tomorrow, Musa wants the narrator to take him to Praha for dinner. He, she confesses, is her first love.
The narrator quits the painting and, at Musa's request, rents an old property in a Moscow park. He is visited there daily by the music student Musa. Both spend the summer like husband and wife on the narrator's estate in the Tambow area. From autumn onwards, the young couple is visited every day by an impoverished neighbor, the musician Wikenti Wikentjitsch Sawistowski. The single neighbor sometimes plays the piano four hands with Musa in winter.
Musa runs away. The narrator finds them on the neighboring property. Musa is already singing the narrator again, while she is already on the greetings of her fellow musician Sawistowski. The practical woman makes the desperate narrator clear about the end of the relationship that began at the Arbat. He stumbles out.
German-language editions
- Used edition
- Musa. German by Charlotte Kossuth . P. 326–333 in: Karlheinz Kasper (Ed.): Iwan Bunin: Dunkle Alleen. Stories 1920–1953 . 580 pages. Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin 1985
Web links
- The text
- Penultimate text in part 1: online at Lib.ru (Russian)
- online at bunin.niv.ru (Russian)
- online in the Komarow library (Russian)
- Reference to first appearance in the Laboratory of Fantastics (Russian)