The Elagin Affair

In January 1920, Ivan Alekseyevich Bunin forever left Russia. The long years of emigration in France began. Bunin said that “he can’t live in the new world—that he belongs to the old world, to the world of Goncharov, Tolstoy, where poetry is—while in the new world he doesn’t catch it.”

And yet precisely in emigration, far from the Motherland, he created works that became classics and brought him worldwide fame. Among them is also a rather unusual for the writer work— the “detective” novella “The Case of Cornet Yelagin,” written in 1925.

As is known, the plot was based on materials from a real criminal case from 1890, in which an officer Bartenev was accused of murdering the actress Maria Visnovskaya. In the history of Russian culture, memory of this case entered not only because of Bunin, but also because the defendant was defended by the famous lawyer Plevako in this noisy trial. According to many contemporaries, his speech in defense of the accused was a “brilliant example of Russian courtroom rhetoric” and “became known far beyond the borders of Russia.”

In it, the writer found not only the factual foundations of the narration and psychological characterizations of the heroes, but also a kind of “key” with which he formed an unusual artistic structure of his work. The use of the lawyer’s speech in the text of the novella largely determined its plot. So why did Bunin’s attention turn to this old court case? Probably first of all because of the unusual story of fatal passion that led to the crime—but also because in this incident, in the complex love relationship between the murderer and his victim, Bunin saw and artistically interpreted the main theme of his work: love and the feeling of the tragic nature of the human being as a whole.