Аннотация:The article deals with folklorism in the prose by I.A. Bunin. The object of study is the novel “Arseniev’s Life”, Book One. Scholars have already addressed the functioning of the folklore traditions in the writer’s poetry, but they paid more attention to the external forms of folklorism. However, it has seemingly become imminent to consider the internal manifestations of the folklore traditions, which are expressed at the level of interaction of various space models, including mundane and ideal. The latter is seen by Arseniev through various elements of the environment and books, Russian fairy tales, and world literature. Parallels with Pushkin's works are indicative, including Ruslan and Ludmila, the fairy-tale poem that is also mentioned in the novel.
The folkloric comments to the text allow identifying the peculiar features of the national axiology in the novel, penetrate into the mystery of Arseniev’s “Russian sole.” The article uses the historically functional, historically genetic, and systematically typological methods.