부닌의 「형제들」: 구성과 이념의 시학

Abstract

This article offers a structural and thematic reading of Ivan Bunin’s short story “Brothers” by dividing it into two parts and examining how each develops the motif of “brotherhood” through different narrative and ideological registers. The first part is reinterpreted as a text that enacts a Buddhist worldview within the colonial space of Ceylon, following a nameless rickshaw puller and his son through numbered labor, loss of a fiancée, and suicide. Their lives and deaths expose how human existence, grounded in desire for love, possession, family, and happiness, is ultimately destroyed by those very desires, while the final dissolution of the individual into the cosmic whole points to Buddhist notions of samsara and universal unity rather than mere exotic local color. The second part shifts to the confession of a British colonel, expanding the earlier micro-level tragedy into the macro-historical dimensions of imperial wars and colonial rule. Through his self-testimony, the story reveals a European civilization estranged from nature and instinct, numbed to others’ suffering, and bereft of any real sense of brotherhood. The overlap between the Buddhist Sutta-Nipāta and the Gospel motif of human fraternity allows Bunin to portray humanity as “brothers” who slaughter one another, thereby foregrounding the ethical question of whether human beings can truly recognize each other as brothers across the divides of nature and civilization, East and West, rulers and ruled.