The Literary Image of Dervish in Ivan Bunin and Andrey Bely’s Poetics

The mysterious East with its representations of Qur'anic and Sufi imagery and allegories was an important conceptual dominant in The Silver Age of Russian poetry. In the present article we analysed the poetic image of Dervish appearing in literary works of Ivan Bunin (traveller's essay “The Bird’s Shadow”, poems “Temjid”, “The Pilgrim”, “The Beggar”) and in Andrei Bely’s travel literature (essay “Dervish”, travel notes “African Diary”). Both authors, being influenced by their travels throughout countries of Eastern Muslim at the beginning of the 20th century, succeeded to capture and include in their poetical system not only the geo-ethnographic and cultural component of this region, but also the Sufi-mystical images and allegories. Being both an exotic and ethnographic image, the Dervish represents a symbolic manifestation of high spirituality, one’s inner faith in truth, soul-searching and renunciation of the material world in an attempt to merge with the Absolute.