EN
This article investigates the psychological and philosophical significance of childhood images in I.A. Bunin’s novel Life of Arsenyev, written in emigration. It is concluded that the worldview of a childhood spent in Russia and the memory of this time become the main ethical categories in the work, correlated with the author’s religious symbols of salvation – with words, the happiness of the creative process, with the actualization of the meaning of life and the self-realization of per-sonality.