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Abstract: The article analyzes the text and context of the miniature “Eve” (“Kanun”) by I. A. Bunin. It is unique because of high concentration of meanings and associations related to the future of the Russian revolution. All the collisions and characters of this short story serve as harbingers of the disaster. Social symbolism of the characters and significant details of their portraits play a great role, being the typical signs of the socio-cultural situation in Russia on the eve of 1917 (“upper” and “lower classes”, the outsider, the rural proletariat and the bourgeoisie). All the characters except the narrator are marked by the specific details of animal nature, social pathology and Asian origin. The generalizing, symbolic nature of the characters suggests a high degree of representatives of their social strata and political crisis, but also their reminiscence to the classical works of the Russian literature (the story “Rattle” by Turgenev and his giant Gerasim from “Mumu”, the first dream of Raskolnikov from the novel “Crime and Punishment” by F. M. Dostoevsky, the flight of the troika-bird from the poem by N. B. Gogol), to the images of Russian history in the ideological and artistic journalism of 1910–1930s. (comparison of intellectuals with wheat and flour in the millstones of the history in essays of Merezhkovsky, Trotsky, Mandelstam, etc.), to the modern Russian literature (“Twelve” by A. Block, “Way of grain” by V. Khodasevich). A special role in Bunin’s context of the story is played by the apocalyptic images of the eponymous poem “Eve” (1916). The images of giants correlate with the genres and symbols of the Russian folklore. The characters of the story have a high degree of self-awareness in relation to the previous works of Bunin, primarily depicting the social crisis of Russia in the 1910s (“Village”, “Damned Days”) and the anthropology of the Russian peasantry (“Zahar Vorobyov”) or the bourgeoisie (“Compatriot”). Structural and motivic similarity allows to compare this miniature with other short stories of the late 1920s — early 1930s. We can also assume a carnival and farce nature of the most active group of characters (their festive behavior, clothing style, some details associated with the flour and the role of miller).