In examining Ivan Bunin’s short story ‘Light Breathing,’ I break down the work into three ‘images’ of Olga, located at the beginning, middle, and end of the piece. These three images give a certain aesthetic symmetry to the piece, as well as characterize the object (Olga herself) of the narrative.

The first image is of Olga’s gravesite, marked by a cross of oak- “strong, heavy, and smooth,” marked by a ‘solidity’ and permanence that the living Olga evaded, smooth in that all the transgressive ‘bumps’ of the living character (as narrative component) are no longer present. The wreath at the foot of the cross is not made up of living flowers-it is, rather, a porcelain wreath, a substance as ‘pure’ in content as it is ‘dead’ in form. An image of Olga herself is set behind glass: her ‘life’ is put behind a physical barrier (as she is beyond the ‘barrier’ created by death), cast into inanimate representation.

The middle image is of ‘living’ Olga: she is portrayed as both curiously one-sided (as a ‘young girl in flower’ device, a tragic-romantic symbol in which the piece can strike its tone) and as ‘modern,’ living and vital in that, through the form of her discovered diary, she has a voice: Olga-as-life-force is a narrative moment that escapes the moment: her voice is discovered, carving a new structure into the work (found-document cuts into narrated-event). Both of these ‘faces’ for the character are alike in that they are alive, full of an energy stands in contrast to the images on either side of it.

The last image is, once more, of the gravesite. Olga, as a character, has lost the narrative ‘voice’ given by the found diary, and is once more a poetic object (this time for the schoolmistress). While the specific imagery contrasts with the first image (her breathing is light, the oak cross is heavy), notions of ‘purity’ and ‘inanimacy’ remain. The schoolmistress struggles to reconcile this symbolic transformation with the idea of ‘living’ character: “The wreath, the mound, the oaken cross! Could it really be that beneath the cross lay the one whose eyes shone so immortally from the medallion above?” Olga’s “light breathing” (lyogkoye dykhanie), once she has crossed the barrier into death, becomes a (Miltonian-angelic) vapor, ‘pure’ of other elements, dispelled into a world that moves without it. ‘Olga’ as character has become ‘vapor’ as essence, and the transformation evoked at the beginning, from transgressive individual into ‘stable matter,’ is completed.