The short story «A Night at Sea» by Ivan Bunin represents a dialog between two characters, which includes a parenthetical parable about Gautama. The parable stands out on the background of the main story through its conciseness, ornamentality, oriental motifs and refrains. It intensifies the history of the characters. The present paper interprets the sense of the parable as a juxtaposition of the two attitudes: for and against a person’s alienation from the world. Polar oppositions (such as the world vs. the individual, consciousness vs. the elements, the eternal vs. the transient) play an important role in the poetics of the story. The paper also points out some literary subtexts of the story «A Night at Sea», such as a hidden «Chekhovian subtext» which is revealed through the reference to Bunin’s memoirs about Chekhov, and an imprecise quotation from Pushkin’s elegy «Under the Blue Sky of her Native Land».