Abstract
<jats:p>The article analyzes the history of the book “The Temple of the Sun”, also titled “The Shadow of the Bird” by Ivan Bunin. The author points out the difference between dating and text history of certain sketches of the book, that have been published separately a number of times, and the whole book. The first conclusion is that the book should be titled “The Temple of the Sun” and be dated 1915 (it was the first publication of the whole book). Having analyzed 4 text variants of the book (1915, 1917, 1931, 1936), the author makes the second conclusion that there are two basic versions of the book, 1915 and 1936. These texts have different poetics; the early modernist for the first one; the late modernism for the second one. They have different main ideas, that’s why both of them should be suggested as “main texts” for the academic publication. Such decision is new and non-traditional, but the traditional approaches do not fit well into Ivan Bunin’s works.</jats:p>