Ivan Alekseyevich Bunin
Encyclopedia
Ivan Alekseyevich Bunin was the first Russia
n writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature for the strict artistry with which he carried on the classical Russian traditions in the writing of prose and poetry. The texture of his poems and stories, sometimes referred to as "Bunin brocade", is considered to be one of the richest in the language.
Best known for his short novels The Village
(1910) and Dry Valley
(1912), his autobiographical novel The Life of Arseniev
(1933, 1939), the book of short stories Dark Avenues
(1946) and his 1917–1918 diary (Cursed Days
, 1926), Bunin was a much revered figure among anti-communist White emigre
s, European critics, and many of his fellow writers, who viewed him as a true heir to the tradition of realism in Russian literature established by Tolstoy
and Chekhov
.
province in Central Russia, the third and youngest son of Aleksei Nikolaevich Bunin (1827–1906) and Liudmila Aleksandrovna Bunina (née Chubarova, 1835–1910). He had two younger sisters: Masha and Nadya (the latter died very young). Having come from a long line of rural gentry family which had a distinguished ancestry with Polish roots, Bunin was especially proud that poets Anna Bunina
(1774–1829) and Vasíly Zhukóvsky
(1783–1852) were among his ancestors. He wrote in his 1952 autobiography:
"The Bunins are direct ancestors of Simeon Bunkovsky, a nobleman who came from Poland to the court of the Great Prince Vasily Vasilyevich," he wrote in 1915, quoting the Russian gentry's Armorial Book. Chubarovs, according to Bunin, "knew very little about themselves except that their ancestors were landowners in Kostromskaya
, Moskovskaya, Orlovskya
and Tambov
skaya Guberniya
s". "As for me, from early childhood I was such a libertine as to be totally indifferent both to my own 'high blood' and to the loss of whatever might have been connected to it", he added.
Ivan Bunin's early childhood, spent in Butyrky Khutor
and later in Ozerky (of Yelets
county, Lipetskaya Oblast
), was a happy one: the boy was surrounded by intelligent and loving people. Father Alexei Nikolayevich was described by Bunin as a very strong man, both physically and mentally, quick-tempered and addicted to gambling, impulsive and generous, eloquent in a theatrical fashion and totally illogical. "Before the Crimean War
he'd neven even known the taste of wine, on return he became a heavy drinker, although never a typical alcoholic", he wrote. His mother Lyudmila Alexandrovna's character was much more subtle, tender and civilized: this Bunin attributed to the fact that "her father spent years in Warsaw
where he acquired certain European tastes which made him quite different from fellow local land-owners". It was Lyudmila Alexandrovna who introduced her son to the world of Russian folklore. Elder brothers Yuly and Yevgeny showed great interest in mathematics and painting respectively, his mother said later, yet, in their mother's words, "Vanya has been different from the moment of birth... none of the others had a soul like his."
Indeed, young Bunin's susceptibility and keenness to the nuances of nature were extraordinary. "The quality of my vision was such that I've seen all seven of the stars of Pleiades
, heard a marmot
's whistle a verst
away, and could get drunk from the smells of landysh
or an old book," he remembered later. Bunin's experiences of rural life had a profound impact on his writing. "There, amidst the deep silence of vast fields, among cornfields – or, in winter, huge snowdrifts which were stepping up to our very doorsteps - I spent my childhood which was full of melancholic poetry", Bunin later wrote of his Ozerky days.
Ivan Bunin's first home tutor was an ex-student named Romashkov whom he later described as a "positively bizarre character", a wanderer full of fascinating stories, "always thought-provoking even if not altogether comprehensible". Later it was university-educated Yuly Bunin (deported home for being a Narodnik activist) who taught his younger brother psychology
, philosophy
and the social sciences as part of his private, domestic education. It was Yuly who encouraged Ivan to read the Russian classics and to write himself. Up until 1920 Yuly (who once described Ivan as 'undeveloped yet gifted and capable of original independent thought') was the latter's closest friend and mentor. "I had a passion for painting, which, I think, shows in my writings. I wrote both poetry and prose fairly early and my works were also published from an early date," wrote Bunin in his short autobiography.
By the end of the 1870s, the Bunins, plagued by gambling habits of the head of the family, had lost most of its wealth. In 1881 Ivan was sent to a public school in Yelets, but never completed the course: he was expelled in March 1886 for failing to return to the school after the Christmas holidays, due to the family's financial difficulties.
literary magazine Rodina (Motherland). In 1891 his first short story Country Sketch (Деревенский эскиз) appeared in N. Mikhaylovsky's journal Russkoye Bogatstvo
. In Spring 1889, Bunin followed his brother to Kharkov, where he became a government clerk, then an assistant editor of a local paper, librarian, and court statistician. In January 1889 he moved to Oryol
to work on the local Orlovsky Vestnik newspaper, first as an editorial assistant and later as de facto editor; this enabled him to publish his short stories, poems and reviews in the paper's literary section. There he met Varvara Paschenko and fell passionately in love with her. In August 1892 the couple moved to Poltava
and settled in the home of Yuly Bunin. The latter helped his younger brother to find a job in the local zemstvo administration.
Ivan Bunin's debut book of poetry Poems. 1887–1891 was published in 1891 in Oryol. Some of his articles, essays and short stories, published earlier in local papers, began to be featured in St.-Petersburg periodicals.
Bunin spent the first half of 1894 traveling all over Ukraine
. "Those were the times when I fell in love with Malorossiya (Little Russia), its villages and steppes, was eagerly meeting its people and listening to Ukrainian songs, this country's very soul", he later wrote.
In 1895 Bunin visited the Russian capital for the first time. There he met the Narodniks Nikolay Mikhaylovsky and Sergey Krivenko, Anton Chekhov
(with whom he began a correspondence and became close friends), Alexander Ertel
, and the poets Konstantin Balmont
and Valery Bryusov
. 1899 saw the beginning of Bunin's friendship with Maxim Gorky
, to whom he dedicated his Falling Leaves (1901) collection of poetry and later visited at Capri
. Bunin became involved with Gorky's Znanie
(Knowledge) group. Another influence and inspiration was Leo Tolstoy
whom he met in Moscow in January 1894. Admittedly infatuated with the latter's prose, Bunin tried desperately to follow the great man's lifestyle too, visiting sectarian settlements and doing a lot of hard work. He was even sentenced to three months in prison for illegally distributing Tolstoyan literature in the autumn of 1894, but avoided jail due to a general amnesty proclaimed on the occasion of the succession to the throne of Nicholas II. Tellingly, it was Tolstoy himself who discouraged Bunin from slipping into what he called "total peasantification". Several years later, while still admiring Tolstoy's prose, Bunin changed hiw views on his philosophy, now seeing most of the great man's ideas as utopical.
In 1895–1896 Bunin divided his time between Moscow
and Saint Petersburg. In 1897 his first short story collection To the Edge of the World and Other Stories came out, followed a year later by In the Open Air (Под открытым небом, 1898), his second book of verse. In June 1898 Bunin moved to Odessa
. Here he became close to the Southern Russia Painters Comradeship, became friends with E. Bukovetski, V. Kurovsky and P. Nilus
. In the winter of 1899–1900 he began attending the Sreda
(Wednesday) literary group in Moscow, striking up a friendship with the writer Nikolay Teleshov
, among others. Here the young writer made himself quite a reputation as an uncompromising advocate of the realistic traditions of classic Russian literature. "Bunin made everybody uncomfortable. Having got this severe and sharp eye for real art, feeling acutely the power of a word, he was full of hatred towards every kind of artistic excess. In times when (quoting Bely) "throwing pineapples to the sky" was the order of the day, Bunin's very presence made words stick in people's throats", Boris Zaitsev later remembered. These were the years when he met Anton Chekov (1896), a strong friendship resulting in this case as well.
, Alexander Blok
and Aleksandr Kuprin
, who praised its 'rare subtlety'. Even though the book testifies to his association with the Symbolists
, primarily Valery Bryusov
, at the time many saw it as an antidote to the pretentiousness of 'decadent' poetry which was then popular in Russia. Falling Leaves was "definitely Pushkin-like", full of "inner poise, sophistication, clarity and wholesomeness", according to Korney Chukovsky
. Soon after the book's release, Gorky called Bunin (in a letter to Bryusov
) "the first poet of out times". It was for Falling Leaves (along with the translation of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
's The Song of Hiawatha
, 1898) that Bunin was awarded his first Pushkin Prize
. Bunin justified a pause of two years in the early 1900s by the need for "inner growth" and spiritual change.
At the turn of the century Bunin made a major switch from poetry to prose which started to change both in form and texture, becoming richer in lexicon, more compact and perfectly poised. Citing Flaubert
, whose work he admired, as an influence, Bunin was 'demonstrating that prose could be driven by poetic rhythms, but still remain prose'. According to the writer's nephew Pusheshnikov, Bunin once told him: "Apparently I was born a versemaker... like Turgenev
, who was a versemaker, first and foremost. Finding the true rhythm of the story was for him the main thing – everything else was supplementary. And for me the crucial thing is to find the proper rhythm. Once its there, everything else comes in spontaneously, and I know when the story is done."
In 1900 the novella Antonov Apples
was published; later it was included in textbooks and is regarded as Bunin’s first real masterpiece, but it was criticized at the time as too nostalgic and elitist, allegedly idealizing "the Russian nobleman's past". Other acclaimed novellas of this period, On the Farm, The News from Home, To the Edge of the World, showing a penchant for extreme precision of language, delicate description of nature, detailed psychological analysis, and masterly control of plot, made him a popular and well-respected young author.
In 1902 Znanie started publishing a Complete Bunin series; five volumes appeared by the year 1909. Three books, Poems (1903), Poems (1903–1906) and Poems of 1907 (the latter published by Znanie in 1908), formed the basis a special (non-numbered) volume of the Complete series which in 1910 was published in Saint Petersburg as Volume VI. Poems and Stories (1907–1909) by the Obschestvennaya polza publishing house. All the while Bunin's works featured regularly in Znanie literary compilations; beginning with Book I, where "Black Earth
" appeared along with several poems, all in all he contributed to 16 books of the series.
In the early 1900s Bunin traveled extensively. He was a close friend of Chekhov and his family and continued visiting them regularly until 1904. The October social turmoil of 1905 found Bunin in Yalta
, Crimea
, from whence he moved back to Odessa
. Scenes of "class struggle" there did not impress the writer for he saw them as little more than the Russian common people's craving for anarchy and destruction.
In November 1906 Bunin's passionate affair with Vera Muromtseva began. The girl's family was unimpressed with Bunin's position as a writer, but they defied social convention, moving in together and in April 1907 leaving Russia for an extended tour through Egypt
and Palestine
. The Bird's Shadow
(1907–1911) collection (published as a separate book in 1931 in Paris) came as a result of this voyage. These travelling sketches made a big difference with the critics. Before them Bunin was mostly regarded as (using his own words) "a melancholy lyricist, singing hymns to noblemen's estates and idylls of the past". In the late 1900s critics started to pay more notice to the colourfulness and dynamics of his poetry and prose. "In terms of artistic precision he has no equal among Russian poets", Vestnik Evropy wrote at the time. Bunin attributed much importance to his traveling schedule, counting himself among that special "type of people who tend to feel strongest for alien times and cultures rather than those of their own" and admitting to being drawn to "all the necropolises of the world". Besides, foreign voyages had, admittedly, an eye-opening effect on the writer, helping him to see Russian reality more objectively. In the early 1910s Bunin produced several famous novellas which came as a direct result of this change in perspective.
In October 1909 Bunin was awarded his second Pushkin Prize for Poems 1903–1906 and translations (Lord Byron's Cain, and parts of Longfellow's The Golden Legend). He was elected as member of the Russian Academy
the same year. In Bunin The Academy crowns "not a daring innovator, not an adventurous searcher but arguably the last gifted pupil of talented teachers who's kept and preserved… all the most beautiful testaments of their school", wrote critic Aleksander Izmailov, formulating the conventional view of the time. It was much later that Bunin was proclaimed one of the most innovative Russian writers of the century.
, a bleak portrayal of Russian country life, full of stupidity, brutality, and violence. This book caused controversy and made him famous. Its harsh realism (with "characters having sunk so far below the average level of intelligence as to be scarcely human") prompted Maxim Gorky to call Bunin "the best Russian writer of the day". "I’ve left behind my "narodnikism" which didn't last very long, my Tolstoyism too and now I’m closer to the social democrats, but I still stay away from political parties," Bunin wrote in the early 1910s. He said he realized now that the working class had become "a powerful force" enough to "overcome the whole of Western Europe," but warned against the possible negative effect of the Russian workers's lack of organization, the one thing that made them different from their Western counterparts. All the while he harshly criticised the Russian intelligentsia
for being ignorant of the common people's life, and spoke of a tragic schism between "the cultured people and the uncultured masses".
In December 1910 Bunin and Muromtseva again travelled to the Middle East
, then visited Ceylon; this four-month journey inspired such stories as Brothers (Братья) and The Tzar of Tzars City (Город царя царей). On his return to Odessa in April 1911, Bunin wrote Waters Aplenty (Воды многие), a travel diary, much lauded after its publication in 1926. In 1912 his novel Dry Valley
came out, his second major piece of semi-autobiographical fiction, concerning the dire state of the Russian rural community. Again it left the literary critics divided: social democrats praised its stark honesty, many others were appalled with the author's negativism. Bunin and Muromtseva spent three winters (1912–1914) on the island of Capri
with Gorky, where they met with Fyodor Shalyapin and Leonid Andreev, among others. In Russia the couple divided their time mainly between Moscow and a Bunin family estate at Glotovo village nearby Oryol
; it was there that they spent the first couple years of World War I
. Dogged by anxieties concerning Russia's future, Bunin was still working hard. In the winter of 1914-15 he finished a new volume of prose and verse entitled Chalice of Life (Чаша жизни), published in early 1915 to wide acclaim (including high praise from the French poet Rene Ghil). The same year saw the publication of The Gentleman from San Francisco
(Господин из Сан-Франциско), arguably the best-known of Bunin's short stories, which was translated into English by D. H. Lawrence
. Bunin was a productive translator himself. After Longfellow's The Song of Hiawatha (1898) he did translations of Byron
, Tennyson
, Musset
and François Coppée
.
During the War years Bunin completed the preparation of a six-volume edition of his Collected Works, which was published by Adolph Marks in 1915. Throughout this time Bunin kept aloof from contemporary literary debates. "I did not belong to any literary school; I was neither a decadent, nor a symbolist nor a romantic, nor a naturalist. Of literary circles I frequented only a few," he commented later. By the spring of 1916, full of pessimism, Bunin all but stopped writing, complaining to his nephew, N.A. Pusheshnikov, of how insignificant he felt as a writer and how depressed he was for being unable to do more than be horrified at the millions of deaths being caused by the War.
In May 1917 the Bunins moved to Glotovo and stayed there until autumn. In October the couple returned to Moscow to stay with Vera's parents. Life in the city was dangerous (residents had to guard their own house, maintaining nightly vigils) but Bunin still visited publishers and took part in the meetings of the Sreda and The Art circles. All political forces in Russia lost credibility for him: while dismissive of such politicians as Ivan Goremykin
(the 1914–1916 Russian Government Premier), he criticised opposition politicians like P.N. Miliukov
as "false defenders of the Russian people". In April 1917 he severed all ties with the pro-revolutionary Gorky, causing a rift which would never be healed. On May 21, 1918, Bunin and Muromtseva obtained official permission to leave Moscow for Kiev, then continued their journey through to Odessa
. By 1919 Bunin was working for the Volunteer Army as the editor of the cultural section of the anti-Bolshevik newspaper Iuzhnoe Slovo. On January 26, 1921, the couple boarded the last French ship in Odessa and soon were in Constantinople
.
and Belgrade
) Bunin and Muromtseva arrived in Paris, from then on dividing their time between apartments at 1, rue Jacques Offenbach in the 16th arrondissement of Paris and rented villas in or near Grasse
in the Alpes Maritimes. Much as he hated Bolshevism, Bunin never endorsed the idea of foreign intervention in Russia. "It's for the common Russian countryman to sort out his problems for himself, not for foreign masters to come and maintain their new order in our home. I'd rather die in exile than return home with the help of Poland or England. As my father taught me: 'Love your own tub even if it's broken up'", he once said, allegedly, to Merezhkovsky who still cherished hopes for Pilsudsky's military success.
Slowly and painfully, overcoming physical and mental stress, Bunin returned to his usual mode of writing. Scream, his first book published in France, was compiled of short stories written in 1911–1912, years he referred to as the happiest of his life.
In France Bunin published many of his pre-revolutionary works and collections of original novellas, regularly contributing to the Russian emigre press. According to Vera Muromtseva, though, her husband often complained of his inability to get used to life in the new world. He said he belonged to "the old world, that of Goncharov
and Tolstoy, of Moscow and St. Petersburg, where his muse had been lost, never to be found again". Yet his new prose was marked with obvious artistic progress: Mitya's Love (Митина любовь, 1924), Sunstroke (Солнечный удаp, 1925), Cornet Yelagin's Case (Дело коpнета Елагина, 1925) and especially The Life of Arseniev
(Жизнь Аpсеньева, written in 1927–1929, published in 1930–1933) were praized by critics as bringing Russian literature to new heights. Konstantin Paustovsky
called The Life of Arseniev an apex of the whole of Russian prose and "one of the most striking phenomena in the world of literature".
In 1925–1926 Cursed Days
, Bunin's diary of the years 1918–1920, started to appear in the Paris-based Vizrozhdenye newspaper (its final version was published by Petropolis in 1936). According to Bunin scholar Thomas Gaiton Marullo, Cursed Days, one of the very few anti-Bolshevik diaries to be preserved from the time of the Russian Revolution and civil war, linked "Russian anti-utopian writing of the nineteenth century to its counterpart in the twentieth" and, "in its painful exposing of political and social utopias, Cursed Days heralded the anti-utopian writing of George Orwell
and Aldous Huxley
. Bunin and Zamyatin had correctly understood that the Soviet experiment was destined to self destruct," Marullo wrote.
In the 1920s and 1930s Bunin was regarded as the moral and artistic spokesman for a generation of expatriates who awaited the collapse of bolshevism, a revered senior figure among living Russian writers, true to the tradition of Tolstoy
and Chekhov
. Accordingly, he was the first Russian to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1933, "for following through and developing with chastity and artfulness the traditions of Russian classic prose". Per Halstroem, in his celebratory speech, noted the laureate's poetic gift. Bunin in his own right praised the Swedish Academy
for honouring a writer in exile. In his speech, addressing the Academy, he said:
In France, for the first time ever, Bunin found himself at the center of public attention. He felt profoundly shocked by the barrage of photos of him in the press. On November 10, 1933 the Paris newspapers came out with huge headlines: "Bunin - the Nobel Prize laureate" giving the whole of the Russian community in France cause for celebration. "You see, up until then we, émigrés, felt like we were at the bottom there. Then all of a sudden our writer has been given an internationally acknowledged prize! And not for some political scribblings, but for real prose! "After having been asked to write a first page column for the Paris Revival newspaper, I stepped out in the middle of the night onto the Place d'Italie and toured the local bistros on my way home, drinking in each and every one of them to the health of Ivan Bunin!" fellow Russian writer Boris Zaitsev wrote. Back in the USSR, though, the reaction was negative: Bunin's triumph was explained there as "an imperialist intrigue".
Dealing with the Prize, Bunin donated 100,000 francs to a literary charity fund, but the process of money distribution caused controversy among his fellow Russian émigré writers. It was during this time that Bunin's relationship with Gippius
and Merezhkovsky
(a fellow Nobel Prize nominee who'd once suggested that they divide the Prize between the two, should one of them get it, and had been refused) deteriorated. Although reluctant to become involved in politics, Bunin was now feted as both a writer and the embodiment of non-Bolshevik Russian values and traditions. Inevitably, his travels throughout Europe featured prominently on the front pages of the Russian emigre press for the remainder of the decade.
In 1934–1936 The Complete Bunin (in 11 volumes) was published in Berlin by the Petropolis company. Bunin cited this edition as the most credible one and warned his future publishers against using any other versions of his work rather than those featured in the Petropolis collection. 1936 was marred by an incident in Lindau
on the Swiss-German border when Bunin, having completed his European voyage, was stopped and unceremoniously searched. The writer (who caught cold and fell ill after the night spent under arrest) responded by writing a letter to the Paris-based Latest News newspaper. The incident caused disbelief and outrage in France. In 1937 Bunin finished his book The Liberation of Tolstoy, held in the highest regard by Leo Tolstoy scholars.
In 1938 Bunin began working on what would later become a celebrated cycle of nostalgic stories with a strong erotic undercurrent and a Proust
ian ring. The first 11 stories of it were published as Dark Avenues
(or Dark Alleys) in New York (1943), then appeared in a full version in 1946 (in France). These stories assumed a more abstract and metaphysical tone which has been identified with his need to find refuge from the "nightmarish reality" of Nazi occupation. Furthermore, Bunin's prose became more introspective, a phenomenon that he attributed to "the fact that the Russian is surrounded by the spectacle of things that were enormous, broad and lasting- the steppes, the sky. In the West everything is cramped and enclosed, and this automatically produces a turning towards the self, inwards."
broke out, Bunin's friends in New York, anxious to help the Nobel Prize laureate get out of France, issued officially endorsed invitations for him to travel to the USA, and in 1941 the Bunins acquired Nansen passport
s enabling them to make the trip. But the couple chose to remain in Grasse. They spent the war years at Villa Jeanette, high in the mountains. Two young writers became long-term residents in the Bunin household at the time: Leonid Zurov (1902–1971), who had arrived on a visit from Latvia
at Bunin's invitation earlier, in late 1929, and remained with them for the rest of their lives, and Nikolai Roschin (1896–1956), who returned to the Soviet Union after the war. Members of this small commune (occasionally including Galina Kuznetsova and Margarita Stepun) were bent on survival: they grew vegetables and greens, helping one another out at a time when, according to Zurov, "Grasse's population have eaten all of their cats and dogs". A journalist who visited the Villa in 1942 described Bunin as a "skinny and emaciated man, looking very much like an ancient patrician". Strangely, it was this isolation that Bunin regarded as a blessing, refusing to re-locate to Paris where conditions might have been better. "It takes 30 minutes of climbing to reach our villa, but there's not another view in the whole world like the one that's facing us", he wrote. "Freezing cold, though, is damnation, and makes it impossible for me to write", he complained in one of his letters. Vera Muromtseva-Bunina remembered: "There were 5 or 6 of us... and we were all writing continuously. This was the only way for us to bear the unbearable, to overcome hunger, cold and fear."
Ivan Bunin was a staunch anti-Nazi. He risked his life, sheltering fugitives (among them were Jews, like pianist A.Liebermann and his wife) in his house in Grasse after Vichy
was occupied by the Germans, referring to Adolf Hitler
and Benito Mussolini
as "rabid monkeys". According to Zurov, Bunin invited some of the Soviet war prisoners ("straight from Gatchina
", who worked in occupied Grasse) to his home in the mountains, risking his life, seeing that the heavily guarded German forces headquarters were only 300 meters away from his home. The athmosphere in the neighbourhood, though, was not that deadly, judging by the Bunin's diary entry for August 1, 1944: "Nearby there were two guards, there were also one German,and one Russian prisoner, Kolesnikov, a student. The three of us talked a bit. Saying our farewells, a German guard shook my hand firmly".
Under the occupation Bunin never ceased writing but, according to Zurov, "published not a single word. He was receiving offers to contribute to newspapers in occupied Switzerland, but declined them. Somebody visited him once, some kind of guest which proved to be an agent, he proposed work, but again Ivan Alekseyevich refused". On September 24, 1944, Bunin wrote to Nikolay Roschin: "Thank God, the Germans have fled Grasse without a fight, on August 23. In the early morning of the 24th the Americans came. What was going on in the town, and in our souls– that's beyond description". "For all this hunger, I'm glad we spent the War years in the South, sharing the life and difficulties of the people, I'm glad that we've managed even to help some", Vera Muromtseva-Bunina later wrote.
) where he was convalescing, Bunin was to remain in the French capital for the rest of his life. On June 15 Russkye Novosty newspaper published its correspondent's account of his meeting with an elderly writer who looked "as sprightly and lively as if he had never had to come through those five years of voluntary exile". According to Bunin's friend N. Roschin, "the liberation of France was a cause of great celebration and exultation for Bunin". Once, in the audience at a Soviet Russian Theater show in Paris, Bunin found himself sitting next to a young Red Army colonel. As the latter rose and bowed, saying: "Do I have the honour of sitting next to Ivan Alekseyevich Bunin?" the writer sprang to his feet: "I have the even higher honour of sitting next to an officer of the great Red Army!" he passionately retorted. On June 19, 1945, Bunin held a literary show in Paris where he read some of the Dark Avenue stories. In the autumn of 1945, on the wave of the great patriotic boom, Bunin’s 75th birthday was widely celebrated in the Paris Russian community. Bunin started to communicate closely with the Soviet connoisseurs, journalist Yuri Zhukov
and literary agent Boris Mikhailov, the latter receiving from the writer several new stories for proposed publishing in the USSR. Rumours started circulating that a Soviet version of The Complete Bunin was already in the works.
In the late 1940s Bunin, having become interested in Soviet literature, the works of Aleksandr Tvardovsky
and Konstantin Paustovsky
in particular, started to entertain plans of returning to the Soviet Union, as Aleksandr Kuprin
had done in the 1930s. In 1946, speaking to his Communist counterparts in Paris, Bunin praised the Supreme Soviet's decision to return Soviet citisenship to Russian exiles in France, still stopping short of saying 'yes' to the continuous urges from the Soviet side for him to return. "It is hard for an old man to go back to places where he's pranced goat-like in better times. Friends and relatives are all buried… That for me would be a graveyard trip", he reportedly said to Zhukov, promising though, to "think more of it". Financial difficulties and the French reading public's relative indifference to the publication of Dark Avenues figured high among his motives, apparently. "Would you mind asking the Union of Writers to send me at least some of the money for books that've been published and re-issued in Moscow in the 1920s and 1930s? I am weak, I am short of breath, I need to go to the South but am too skinny to even dream of it", Bunin wrote to Nikolay Teleshov in a letter on November 19, 1946.
Negotiations for the writer's return came to an end after the publication of his Memoirs (Воспоминания, 1950), full of scathing criticism of Soviet cultural life. Apparently aware of his own negativism, Bunin wrote: "I was born too late. If I had been born earlier, my literary memoirs would have been different. I wouldn't have been a witness to 1905, the First World War, then 1917 and what followed: Lenin, Stalin, Hitler... How can I not be jealous of our forefather Noah
. He lived through only one flood in his lifetime".
Reportedly, the infamous Zhdanov decree was one of the reasons for Bunin's radical change of mind. On September 15, 1947, Bunin wrote to Mark Aldanov: "I have a letter here from Teleshov, written on September 7; 'what a pity (he writes) that you've missed all of this: how your book was set up, how everybody was waiting for you here, in the place where you could have been... rich, feasted, and held in such high honour!' Having read this I spent an hour hair-tearing. Then I suddenly became calm. It just came to me all of a sudden all those other things Zhdanov and Fadeev might have given me instead of feasts, riches and laurels..."
His health deteriorating, after 1948 Bunin concentrated his creative energies on writing his memoirs and a book about Anton Chekhov. At this he was extensively aided by his wife, who, along with Zurov, completed the work after the author's death and saw to its publication in New York in 1955. In Engish translation it was entitled About Chekhov: The Unfinished Symphony. Bunin also revised a number of stories for publication in new collections, spent considerable time looking through his papers and annotated his collected works for a definitive edition. In 1951 Bunin was elected the first ever hononary International PEN
member, representing the community of writers in exile. According to A.J.Heywood, one major event of Bunin's last years was his quarrel in 1948 with Maria Tsetlina and Boris Zaitsev, following the decision by the Union of Russian Writers and Journalists in France to expel holders of Soviet passports from its membership, to which Bunin had responded by resigning from the Union. The writer's last years were marred by bitterness, disillusionment and chronic ill-health; he was suffering from asthma
, bronchitis
and chronic pneumonia
.
On May 2, 1953, Bunin left in his diary a note that proved to be his last one. "Still, this is so dumbfoundingly extraordinary. In a very short while there will be no more of me - and of all the things worldly, of all the affairs and destinies, from then on I will be unaware! And what I'm left to do here is dumbly try to consciously impose upon myself fear and amazement», he wrote. Ivan Alekseyevich Bunin died in a Paris attic flat in the early hours of November 8, 1953. Heart failure, cardiac asthma and lungs sclerosis
were cited as the causes of death. The lavish burial service took place at the Russian Church on Rue Daru. All the major newspapers, both Russian and French, published large obituaries. For quite a while the coffin was held in a vault
. On January 30, 1954, Bunin was buried in the Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois Russian Cemetery
.
In the 1950s Bunin became the first of the Russian writers in exile to be published officially in the USSR. In 1965 The Complete Bunin came out in Moscow in nine volumes. Some of his more controversial books, notably Cursed Days, remained banned in the Soviet Union until the late 1980s.
, but Bunin's legacy is much wider in scope. He's regarded as a master of the short story whom scholar Oleg Mikhaylov described as an "archaist innovator" who, while remaining true to the literary tradition of the XIX century, made huge leaps in terms of artistic expression and purity of style.. " style heralds a historical precedent... technical precision as an instrument of bringing out beauty is sharpened to the extreme. There's hardly another poet who on dozens of pages would fail to produce a single epithet
, analogy
or metaphor
... the ability to perform such a simplification of poetic language without doing any harm to it is the sign of a true artist. When it comes to artistic precision Bunin has no rivals among Russian poets", wrote Vestnik Evropy
.
Bunin's early stories were of uneven quality. They were united in their "earthiness", their lack of plot and signs of a curious longing towards "life's farthest horizons"; young Bunin started his career by trying to approach the ancient dilemmas of the human being, and typically his first characters were old men. His early prose works had one common leitmotif: that of nature's beauty and wisdom bitterly contrasting with humanity's ugly shallowness. As he progressed, Bunin started to receive encouraging reviews: Anton Chekhov warmly greeted his first stories, even if he found too much "density" in them. But it was Gorky
who gave Bunin's prose its highest praise. Till the end of his life Gorky (long after the relationship between former friends had soured) rated Bunin among Russian literature's greatest writers and recommended his prose for younger generations of writers as an example of true and unwithering classicism.
As a poet, Bunin started out as an epigone of Nikitin and Koltsov
, then gravitated towards the Yakov Polonsky
and Afanasy Fet
school, the latter's impressionism becoming a marked influence. The theme of Bunin's early works seemed to be the demise of the traditional Russian nobleman of the past – something which as an artist he simultaneously gravitated toward and felt averted from. In the 1900s this gave way to a more introspective, philosophical style, akin to Tyutchev
and his "poetic cosmology". All the while Bunin remained hostile to modernism
(and the darker side of it, "decadence"), according to O. Mikhaylov, the torch-bearer of Pushkin's tradition of "praising naked simplicity's charms". The symbolist's
flights of imagination and grotesque passions being totally foreign to him, Bunin made nature his field of artistic research and here carved his art to perfection. "Few people are capable of loving nature as Bunin does. And it's this love that makes his scope wide, his vision deep, his colour and aural impressions so rich", wrote Aleksander Blok, a poet from a literary camp Bunin treated as hostile. It was for his books of poetry (the most notable of which is Falling Leaves, 1901) and his poetic translations that Bunin became a three times Pushkin Prize
laureate. His verse was praised by Kuprin and Blok who saw Bunin as among the first in the hierarchy of Russian poets. One great admirer of Bunin's verse was Vladimir Nabokov
, who (even if making scornful remarks about Bunin's prose) compared him to Blok. Some see Bunin as a direct follower of Gogol who was the first in Russian literature to discover the art of fusing poetry and prose together.
The wholesomeness of Bunin's character allowed him to avoid crises to become virtually the only author of the first decades of the XX century to develop gradually and logically. "Bunin is the only one who remains true to himself", Gorky wrote in a letter to Chirikov in 1907. Yet, an outsider to all the contemporary trends and literary movements, Bunin has never been famous in Russia in the common sense of the word. Becoming an Academician in 1909 alienated him even more from the critics, the majority of whom saw the Academy's decision to expel Gorky several years earlier as a disgrace. The closest Bunin came to fame was in 1911-12 when The Village
and Dry Valley
came out. The former, according to the author, "sketched with sharp cruelty the most striking lines of the Russian soul, its light and dark sides, and its often tragic foundations"; it caused passionate, and occasionally very hostile reactions. "Nobody has ever drawn the village in such a deep historical context before", Maxim Gorky
wrote. After this uncompromising book it became impossible to continue to paint the Russian peasantry life in the idealised, narodnik-style way, Bunin single-handedly closed this long chapter in Russian literature. He maintained the truly classic traditions of realism in Russian literature at the very time when they were in the gravest danger, under attack by modernists and decadents. Yet he was far from "traditional" in many ways, introducing to Russian literature a completely new set of characters and a quite novel, laconic way of saying things.
Dry Valley was regarded as another huge step forward for Bunin. While The Village dealt metaphorically with Russia as a whole in a historical context, here, according to the author, the "Russian soul, in the attempt to highlight the Slavic psyche's most prominent features". "It's one of the greatest books of Russian horror, and there's an element of liturgy in it... Like a young priest with his faith destroyed, Bunin buried the whole of his class", wrote Gorky.
Bunin's travel sketches were lauded as innovative, notably Bird Shadow (1907–1911). "He's enchanted with the East, with the 'light-bearing' lands he now describes in such beautiful fashion... For the East, both Biblical and modern, Bunin chooses the appropriate style, solemn and incandescent, full of imagery, bathing in waves of sultry sunlight and adorned with arabesques and precious stones, so that - when he tells of these grey-haired ancient times, disappearing in the distant haze of religion and myth, the impression he achieves is that of watching a great chariot of human history moving before our eyes", wrote Yuri Aychenvald. Critics noted Bunin's uncanny knack of immersing himself into alien cultures, both old and new, best demonstrated in his 'Eastern' cycle of short stories as well as his superb translation of Longfellow
's The Song of Hiawatha
(1898).
Bunin was greatly interested in international myths and folklore, being passionately in love with the Russian folkloric tradition. But, (according to Georgy Adamovich
) "he was absolutely intolerant towards those of his colleagues who employed stylizations, the 'style russe' manufacturers. His cruel - and rightly so - review of Gorodetsky's poetry was one example. Even Blok's Kulikovo Field (for me, an outstanding piece) irritated him as too adorned... 'That's Vasnetsov
', he commented, meaning 'masquerade and opera'. But he treated things that he felt were not masqueradery differently. Of the Slovo o Polku Igoreve
... he said something to the effect that all the poets of the whole world lumped together couldn't have created such wonder, in fact something close to Pushkin's words. Yet translations of the legend... outraged him, particularly that of Balmont
. He despised Shmelyov
for his pseudo-Russian pretenses, though admitting his literary gift. Bunin had an extraordinarily sharp ear for falseness: he instantly recognized this jarring note and was infuriated. That was why he loved Tolstoy so much. Once, I remember, he spoke of Tolstoy as the one 'who's never said a single word that would be an exaggeration'".
Bunin has often been spoken of as a "cold" writer. Some of his conceptual poems of the 1910s refuted this stereotype, tackling philosophical issues like the mission of an artist ("Insensory", 1916) where he showed fiery passion. According to Oleg Mikhaylov, "Bunin just wanted to maintain distance between himself and his reader, being frightened by any closeness... But his pride never excluded passions, just served as a panzer - it was like a flaming torch in an icy shell". On a more personal level, Vera Muromtseva confirmed: "Sure, he wanted to come across as and he succeeded by being a first-class actor... people who didn't know him well enough couldn't begin to imagine what depths of soft tenderness his soul was capable of reaching", she wrote in her memoirs.
The best of Bunin's prose ("The Gentleman from San Francisco
", "Loopy Ears
" and notably, "Brothers", based on Ceylon's religious myth) had a strong philosophical streak to it. In terms of ethics Bunin was under the strong influence of Socrates
(as related by Xenophon
and Plato
), he argued that it was the Greek classic who first expounded many things that were later found in Hindu
and Jewish sacred books. Bunin was particularly impressed with Socrates's ideas on the intrinsic value of human individuality, it being a "kind of focus for higher forces" (quoted from Bunin's short story "Back to Rome"). As a purveyor of Socratic ideals, Bunin very much followed in Leo Tolstoy's footsteps; the latter's observation about beauty being 'the crown of virtue' was very much Bunin's idea too. Critics found deep philosophical motives, and deep undercurrents in Mitya's Love
and The Life of Arseniev
, two pieces in which "Bunin came closest to a deep metaphysical understanding of the human being's tragic essence". Konstantin Paustovsky
called The Life of Arseniev "one of the most outstanding phenomena of world literature".
In his view on Russia and it's history Bunin for a while had much in common with A.K.Tolstoy
(of whom he spoke with great respect); both tended to idealize the pre-Tatar Rus
. Years later he greatly modified his stance on Russian history, forming a more negative outlook. "There are two streaks in our people: one dominated by Rus, another by Chudh
and Merya. Both have in them a frightening instability, sway... As Russian people say of themselves: we are like wood - both club and icon may come of it, depending on who is working on this wood", Bunin wrote years later.
In emigration Bunin continued his experiments with extremely concise, ultra-ionized prose, taking Chekhov and Tolstoy's ideas on expressive economy to the last extreme. The result of this was God's Tree, a collection of stories so short, some of them were half a page long. Professor Pyotr Bitsilly thought God's Tree to be "the most perfect of Bunin’s works and the most exemplary. Nowhere else can such eloquent laconism can be found, such definitive and exquisite writing, such freedom of expression and really magnificent demonstration of over matter. No other book of his has in it such a wealth of material for understanding of Bunin's basic method - a method in which, in fact, there was nothing but basics. This simple but precious quality - honesty bordering on hatred of any pretense - is what makes Bunin so closely related to... Pushkin, Tolstoy and Chekhov", Bitsilli wrote.
Highly influential, even if controversial, was his Cursed Days
1918–1920 diary, of which scholar Thomas Gaiton Marullo wrote:
Despite being virtually banned in the USSR up until the mid-1950s, Bunin exerted a strong influence over several generations of Soviet writers. Among those who owed a lot to Bunin critics mentioned Mikhail Sholokhov, Konstantin Fedin
, Konstantin Paustovsky
, Sokolov-Mikitov
, and later Yuri Kazakov, Vasily Belov
and Viktor Likhonosov
.
Ivan Bunin's books have been translated into many languages, and the world's leading writers praised his gift. Romain Rolland
called Bunin a "artistic genius"; he was spoken and written of in much the same vein by writers like Henri de Régnier
, Thomas Mann
, Rainer Maria Rilke
, Jerome K. Jerome
, and Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz. In 1950, on the eve of his 80th birthday, François Mauriac
expressed in a letter his delight and admiration, but also his deep sympathy to Bunin's personal qualities and the dignified way he'd got through all the tremendous difficulties life had thrown at him. In a letter published by Figaro André Gide
greeted Bunin "on behalf of all France", calling him "the great artist" and adding: "I don't know of any other writer... who's so to the point in expressing human feelings, simple and yet always so fresh and new". European critics often compared Bunin to both Tolstoy
and Dostoyevsky, crediting him with having renovated the Russian realist tradition both in essence and in form.
and settled in Yuly Bunin's home, but by 1892 their relations deteriorated, Pashchenko complaining in a letter to Yuli Bunin that serious quarrels were frequent, and begging for assistance in bringing their union to an end. The affair eventually ended in 1894 with her marrying actor and writer A.N. Bibikov, Ivan Bunin's close friend. Bunin felt betrayed, and for a time his family feared the possibility of his committing suicide. According to some sources it was Varvara Paschenko who many years later would appear under the name of Lika in The Life of Arseniev
(chapter V of the book, entitled Lika, was also published as a short story). Scholar Tatyana Alexandrova, though, later put this to doubt (suggesting Mirra Lokhvitskaya
might have been the major prototype), while Vera Muromtseva thought of Lika as a 'collective' character aggregating the writer's reminiscences of several women he knew in his youth.
In the summer of 1898 while staying with writer A. M. Fedorov, Bunin became acquainted with N. P. Tsakni, a Greek
social-democrat activist, the publisher and editor of the Odessa newspaper Yuzhnoe Obozrenie. Invited to contribute to the paper, Bunin became virtually a daily visitor to the Tsakni family dacha and fell in love with the latter's eighteen-year-old daughter, Anna (1879–1963). On September 23, 1898, the two married, but by 1899 signs of alienation between them were obvious. At the time of their acrimonious separation in March 1900 Anna was pregnant. She gave birth to a son, Nikolai, in Odessa on August 30 of the same year. The boy, of whom his father saw very little, died on January 16, 1905, from a combination of scarlet fever
, measles
and heart complications.
Ivan Bunin's second wife was Vera Muromtseva (1881–1961, niece of the high-ranking politician Sergey Muromtsev
). The two had initially been introduced to each other by writer Ekaterina Lopatina some years earlier, but it was their encounter at the house of the writer Boris Zaitsev in November 1906 which led to an intense relationship which resulted in the couple becoming inseparable until Bunin's dying day. Bunin and Muromtseva married officially only in 1922, after he managed at last to divorce Tsakni legally. Decades later Vera Muromtseva-Bunina became famous in her own right with her book Life of Bunin.
In 1927, while in Grasse, Bunin fell for the Russian poet Galina Kuznetsova, on vacation there with her husband. The latter, outraged by the well-publicized affair, stormed off, while Bunin not only managed to somehow convince Vera Muromtseva that his love for Galina was purely platonic but also invite the latter to stay in the house as a secretary and 'a family member'. The situation was complicated by the fact that Leonid Zurov who stayed with the Bunins as a guest for many years, was secretly in love with Vera (of which her husband was aware); this made it more of a "love quadrilateral" than a mere triangle. Bunin and Kuznetsova affair ended dramatically in 1942 when the latter, now deep in love with another frequent guest, opera singer Margo Stepun, sister of Fyodor Stepun
, left Bunin, who felt disgraced and insulted. The writer's tempestuous private life in emigration became the subject of the internationally acclaimed Russian movie, His Wife's Diary
(or The Diary of His Wife) (Дневник его жены) (2000). which caused controversy and was described by some as masterful and thought-provoking, by others - as vulgar, inaccurate and done in bad taste. Vera Muromtseva-Bunina later accepted both Kuznetsova, and Margarita Stepun, as friends: "nashi" ("ours"), as she called them, lived with the Bunins for long periods during the Second World War. According to Anthony J. Heywood of Leeds University, in Germany and then New York, after the war, Kuznetsova and Stepun negotiated with publishers on Bunin's behalf and maintained a regular correspondence with Ivan and Vera up until their respective deaths.
See also:
Russia
Russia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...
n writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature for the strict artistry with which he carried on the classical Russian traditions in the writing of prose and poetry. The texture of his poems and stories, sometimes referred to as "Bunin brocade", is considered to be one of the richest in the language.
Best known for his short novels The Village
The Village (Ivan Bunin novel)
The Village is a short novel by a Nobel Prize-winning Russian author Ivan Bunin written in 1909 and first published in Sovremenny Mir journal under the title Novelet...
(1910) and Dry Valley
Dry Valley (Ivan Bunin novel)
Dry Valley is a short novel by a Nobel Prize-winning Russian author Ivan Bunin, first published in the April 1912 issue of the Saint Petersburg Vestnik Evropy magazine...
(1912), his autobiographical novel The Life of Arseniev
The Life of Arseniev
The Life of Arseniev is an autobiographical novel by a Nobel Prize-winning Russian author Ivan Bunin seen by many as his most important work written in emigration. The Life of Arseniev was being written and published in parts in the course of the 12 years, in 1927-1939, in France...
(1933, 1939), the book of short stories Dark Avenues
Dark Avenues
Dark Avenues is a collection of short stories by a Nobel Prize-winning Russian author Ivan Bunin written in 1937-1944, mostly in Grasse, France, first 11 novellas of which were published in New York, USA, in 1943. The book's full version came out in 1946 in Paris...
(1946) and his 1917–1918 diary (Cursed Days
Cursed Days
Cursed Days is a book by a Nobel Prize-winning Russian author Ivan Bunin, compiled of diaries and notes he made while in Moscow and Odessa in 1918-1920. Fragments from it were being published throughout 1925 and 1926 by the Paris-based Vozrozhdenye newspaper. In its full version Cursed Days...
, 1926), Bunin was a much revered figure among anti-communist White emigre
White Emigre
A white émigré was a Russian who emigrated from Russia in the wake of the Russian Revolution and Russian Civil War, and who was in opposition to the contemporary Russian political climate....
s, European critics, and many of his fellow writers, who viewed him as a true heir to the tradition of realism in Russian literature established by Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy was a Russian writer who primarily wrote novels and short stories. Later in life, he also wrote plays and essays. His two most famous works, the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, are acknowledged as two of the greatest novels of all time and a pinnacle of realist...
and Chekhov
Anton Chekhov
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was a Russian physician, dramatist and author who is considered to be among the greatest writers of short stories in history. His career as a dramatist produced four classics and his best short stories are held in high esteem by writers and critics...
.
Biography
Ivan Bunin was born on his parental estate in VoronezhVoronezh
Voronezh is a city in southwestern Russia, the administrative center of Voronezh Oblast. It is located on both sides of the Voronezh River, away from where it flows into the Don. It is an operating center of the Southeastern Railway , as well as the center of the Don Highway...
province in Central Russia, the third and youngest son of Aleksei Nikolaevich Bunin (1827–1906) and Liudmila Aleksandrovna Bunina (née Chubarova, 1835–1910). He had two younger sisters: Masha and Nadya (the latter died very young). Having come from a long line of rural gentry family which had a distinguished ancestry with Polish roots, Bunin was especially proud that poets Anna Bunina
Anna Bunina
Anna Petrovna Bunina was a Russian poet. She was the first major Russian woman writer, and the first Russian woman to make a living solely from literary work. She was an ancestor of Nobel Prize winner Ivan Bunin.-Biography:...
(1774–1829) and Vasíly Zhukóvsky
Vasily Zhukovsky
Vasily Andreyevich Zhukovsky was the foremost Russian poet of the 1810s and a leading figure in Russian literature in the first half of the 19th century...
(1783–1852) were among his ancestors. He wrote in his 1952 autobiography:
"The Bunins are direct ancestors of Simeon Bunkovsky, a nobleman who came from Poland to the court of the Great Prince Vasily Vasilyevich," he wrote in 1915, quoting the Russian gentry's Armorial Book. Chubarovs, according to Bunin, "knew very little about themselves except that their ancestors were landowners in Kostromskaya
Kostroma
Kostroma is a historic city and the administrative center of Kostroma Oblast, Russia. A part of the Golden Ring of Russian towns, it is located at the confluence of the Volga and Kostroma Rivers...
, Moskovskaya, Orlovskya
Oryol
Oryol or Orel is a city and the administrative center of Oryol Oblast, Russia, located on the Oka River, approximately south-southwest of Moscow...
and Tambov
Tambov
Tambov is a city and the administrative center of Tambov Oblast, Russia, located at the confluence of the Tsna and Studenets Rivers southeast of Moscow...
skaya Guberniya
Guberniya
A guberniya was a major administrative subdivision of the Russian Empire usually translated as government, governorate, or province. Such administrative division was preserved for sometime upon the collapse of the empire in 1917. A guberniya was ruled by a governor , a word borrowed from Latin ,...
s". "As for me, from early childhood I was such a libertine as to be totally indifferent both to my own 'high blood' and to the loss of whatever might have been connected to it", he added.
Ivan Bunin's early childhood, spent in Butyrky Khutor
Khutor
Khutor or khutir is usually taken to refer to a single-homestead rural settlement of Eastern Europe.In Cossack-settled lands that encompassed today's Ukraine, Kuban, and the lower Don river basin the word khutor was used to describe new settlements which had detached themselves from stanitsas...
and later in Ozerky (of Yelets
Yelets
Yelets is a city in Lipetsk Oblast, Russia, situated on the Sosna River, which is a tributary of the Don. Population: -History:Yelets is the oldest center of the Central Black Earth Region. It is mentioned in historical documents as far back as 1146, when it belonged to the Princes of Ryazan...
county, Lipetskaya Oblast
Lipetsk
Lipetsk is a city and the administrative center of Lipetsk Oblast, Russia, located on the banks of the Voronezh River in the Don basin, southeast of Moscow.-History:...
), was a happy one: the boy was surrounded by intelligent and loving people. Father Alexei Nikolayevich was described by Bunin as a very strong man, both physically and mentally, quick-tempered and addicted to gambling, impulsive and generous, eloquent in a theatrical fashion and totally illogical. "Before the Crimean War
Crimean War
The Crimean War was a conflict fought between the Russian Empire and an alliance of the French Empire, the British Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and the Kingdom of Sardinia. The war was part of a long-running contest between the major European powers for influence over territories of the declining...
he'd neven even known the taste of wine, on return he became a heavy drinker, although never a typical alcoholic", he wrote. His mother Lyudmila Alexandrovna's character was much more subtle, tender and civilized: this Bunin attributed to the fact that "her father spent years in Warsaw
Warsaw
Warsaw is the capital and largest city of Poland. It is located on the Vistula River, roughly from the Baltic Sea and from the Carpathian Mountains. Its population in 2010 was estimated at 1,716,855 residents with a greater metropolitan area of 2,631,902 residents, making Warsaw the 10th most...
where he acquired certain European tastes which made him quite different from fellow local land-owners". It was Lyudmila Alexandrovna who introduced her son to the world of Russian folklore. Elder brothers Yuly and Yevgeny showed great interest in mathematics and painting respectively, his mother said later, yet, in their mother's words, "Vanya has been different from the moment of birth... none of the others had a soul like his."
Indeed, young Bunin's susceptibility and keenness to the nuances of nature were extraordinary. "The quality of my vision was such that I've seen all seven of the stars of Pleiades
Pleiades (star cluster)
In astronomy, the Pleiades, or Seven Sisters , is an open star cluster containing middle-aged hot B-type stars located in the constellation of Taurus. It is among the nearest star clusters to Earth and is the cluster most obvious to the naked eye in the night sky...
, heard a marmot
Marmot
The marmots are a genus, Marmota, of squirrels. There are 14 species in this genus.Marmots are generally large ground squirrels. Those most often referred to as marmots tend to live in mountainous areas such as the Alps, northern Apennines, Eurasian steppes, Carpathians, Tatras, and Pyrenees in...
's whistle a verst
Verst
A verst or werst is an obsolete Russian unit of length. It is defined as being 500 sazhen long, which makes a verst equal to 1.0668 kilometres ....
away, and could get drunk from the smells of landysh
Lily of the Valley
Convallaria majalis , commonly known as the lily-of-the-valley, is a poisonous woodland flowering plant native throughout the cool temperate Northern Hemisphere in Asia and Europe....
or an old book," he remembered later. Bunin's experiences of rural life had a profound impact on his writing. "There, amidst the deep silence of vast fields, among cornfields – or, in winter, huge snowdrifts which were stepping up to our very doorsteps - I spent my childhood which was full of melancholic poetry", Bunin later wrote of his Ozerky days.
Ivan Bunin's first home tutor was an ex-student named Romashkov whom he later described as a "positively bizarre character", a wanderer full of fascinating stories, "always thought-provoking even if not altogether comprehensible". Later it was university-educated Yuly Bunin (deported home for being a Narodnik activist) who taught his younger brother psychology
Psychology
Psychology is the study of the mind and behavior. Its immediate goal is to understand individuals and groups by both establishing general principles and researching specific cases. For many, the ultimate goal of psychology is to benefit society...
, philosophy
Philosophy
Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...
and the social sciences as part of his private, domestic education. It was Yuly who encouraged Ivan to read the Russian classics and to write himself. Up until 1920 Yuly (who once described Ivan as 'undeveloped yet gifted and capable of original independent thought') was the latter's closest friend and mentor. "I had a passion for painting, which, I think, shows in my writings. I wrote both poetry and prose fairly early and my works were also published from an early date," wrote Bunin in his short autobiography.
By the end of the 1870s, the Bunins, plagued by gambling habits of the head of the family, had lost most of its wealth. In 1881 Ivan was sent to a public school in Yelets, but never completed the course: he was expelled in March 1886 for failing to return to the school after the Christmas holidays, due to the family's financial difficulties.
Literary career
In May 1887 Bunin published his first poem Village Paupers (Деревенские нищие) in the Saint PetersburgSaint Petersburg
Saint Petersburg is a city and a federal subject of Russia located on the Neva River at the head of the Gulf of Finland on the Baltic Sea...
literary magazine Rodina (Motherland). In 1891 his first short story Country Sketch (Деревенский эскиз) appeared in N. Mikhaylovsky's journal Russkoye Bogatstvo
Russkoye Bogatstvo
Russkoye Bogatstvo was a monthly magazine published in St. Petersburg, Russia, from 1876 to mid-1918. In the early 1890s, it was an organ of the liberal Narodniks. Beginning in 1906, it became an organ of the Popular Socialists....
. In Spring 1889, Bunin followed his brother to Kharkov, where he became a government clerk, then an assistant editor of a local paper, librarian, and court statistician. In January 1889 he moved to Oryol
Oryol
Oryol or Orel is a city and the administrative center of Oryol Oblast, Russia, located on the Oka River, approximately south-southwest of Moscow...
to work on the local Orlovsky Vestnik newspaper, first as an editorial assistant and later as de facto editor; this enabled him to publish his short stories, poems and reviews in the paper's literary section. There he met Varvara Paschenko and fell passionately in love with her. In August 1892 the couple moved to Poltava
Poltava
Poltava is a city in located on the Vorskla River in central Ukraine. It is the administrative center of the Poltava Oblast , as well as the surrounding Poltava Raion of the oblast. Poltava's estimated population is 298,652 ....
and settled in the home of Yuly Bunin. The latter helped his younger brother to find a job in the local zemstvo administration.
Ivan Bunin's debut book of poetry Poems. 1887–1891 was published in 1891 in Oryol. Some of his articles, essays and short stories, published earlier in local papers, began to be featured in St.-Petersburg periodicals.
Bunin spent the first half of 1894 traveling all over Ukraine
Ukraine
Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It has an area of 603,628 km², making it the second largest contiguous country on the European continent, after Russia...
. "Those were the times when I fell in love with Malorossiya (Little Russia), its villages and steppes, was eagerly meeting its people and listening to Ukrainian songs, this country's very soul", he later wrote.
In 1895 Bunin visited the Russian capital for the first time. There he met the Narodniks Nikolay Mikhaylovsky and Sergey Krivenko, Anton Chekhov
Anton Chekhov
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was a Russian physician, dramatist and author who is considered to be among the greatest writers of short stories in history. His career as a dramatist produced four classics and his best short stories are held in high esteem by writers and critics...
(with whom he began a correspondence and became close friends), Alexander Ertel
Alexander Ertel
Alexander Ivanovich Ertel , , was a Russian novelist and short story writer.-Biography:Ertel was born near Voronezh, where his father was a Russified German estate agent. He never completed school, and was largely self-educated. He published his first collection of stories called Notes from the...
, and the poets Konstantin Balmont
Konstantin Balmont
Konstantin Dmitriyevich Balmont was a Russian symbolist poet, translator, one of the major figures of the Silver Age of Russian Poetry.-Biography:Konstantin Balmont was born in v...
and Valery Bryusov
Valery Bryusov
Valery Yakovlevich Bryusov was a Russian poet, prose writer, dramatist, translator, critic and historian. He was one of the principal members of the Russian Symbolist movement.-Biography:...
. 1899 saw the beginning of Bunin's friendship with Maxim Gorky
Maxim Gorky
Alexei Maximovich Peshkov , primarily known as Maxim Gorky , was a Russian and Soviet author, a founder of the Socialist Realism literary method and a political activist.-Early years:...
, to whom he dedicated his Falling Leaves (1901) collection of poetry and later visited at Capri
Capri
Capri is an Italian island in the Tyrrhenian Sea off the Sorrentine Peninsula, on the south side of the Gulf of Naples, in the Campania region of Southern Italy...
. Bunin became involved with Gorky's Znanie
Znanie (publishing company)
Znanie , was a publishing company based in St. Petersburg, Russia founded by Konstantin Pyatnitsky and other members of the Committee for Literacy. It operated from 1898 until 1913.-History:...
(Knowledge) group. Another influence and inspiration was Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy was a Russian writer who primarily wrote novels and short stories. Later in life, he also wrote plays and essays. His two most famous works, the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, are acknowledged as two of the greatest novels of all time and a pinnacle of realist...
whom he met in Moscow in January 1894. Admittedly infatuated with the latter's prose, Bunin tried desperately to follow the great man's lifestyle too, visiting sectarian settlements and doing a lot of hard work. He was even sentenced to three months in prison for illegally distributing Tolstoyan literature in the autumn of 1894, but avoided jail due to a general amnesty proclaimed on the occasion of the succession to the throne of Nicholas II. Tellingly, it was Tolstoy himself who discouraged Bunin from slipping into what he called "total peasantification". Several years later, while still admiring Tolstoy's prose, Bunin changed hiw views on his philosophy, now seeing most of the great man's ideas as utopical.
In 1895–1896 Bunin divided his time between Moscow
Moscow
Moscow is the capital, the most populous city, and the most populous federal subject of Russia. The city is a major political, economic, cultural, scientific, religious, financial, educational, and transportation centre of Russia and the continent...
and Saint Petersburg. In 1897 his first short story collection To the Edge of the World and Other Stories came out, followed a year later by In the Open Air (Под открытым небом, 1898), his second book of verse. In June 1898 Bunin moved to Odessa
Odessa
Odessa or Odesa is the administrative center of the Odessa Oblast located in southern Ukraine. The city is a major seaport located on the northwest shore of the Black Sea and the fourth largest city in Ukraine with a population of 1,029,000 .The predecessor of Odessa, a small Tatar settlement,...
. Here he became close to the Southern Russia Painters Comradeship, became friends with E. Bukovetski, V. Kurovsky and P. Nilus
Pyotr Nilus
Pyotr Alexandrovich Nilus was a Russian impressionist painter and writer.Pyotr was born to a russified Swiss family in their family estate in Podolsk guberniya. At the age of seven he moved to Odessa where he studied at the local Peter and Paul real school and attended art classes of Kyriak Kostandi...
. In the winter of 1899–1900 he began attending the Sreda
Sreda (literary group)
The Moscow Literary Sreda was a Moscow literary group founded in 1899 by Nikolay Teleshov. The name Sreda means Wednesday, taken from the day of the week on which writers and other artists met at Teleshov's home. The last meeting of the Sreda took place in 1916...
(Wednesday) literary group in Moscow, striking up a friendship with the writer Nikolay Teleshov
Nikolay Teleshov
Nikolay Dmitryevich Teleshov , , was a Russian/Soviet writer.-Biography:Teleshov was born in Moscow where his father was a merchant. His poems were first published in 1884. In the 1880s and 1890s he wrote short stories and novellas, including the story he's best known for, The Duel...
, among others. Here the young writer made himself quite a reputation as an uncompromising advocate of the realistic traditions of classic Russian literature. "Bunin made everybody uncomfortable. Having got this severe and sharp eye for real art, feeling acutely the power of a word, he was full of hatred towards every kind of artistic excess. In times when (quoting Bely) "throwing pineapples to the sky" was the order of the day, Bunin's very presence made words stick in people's throats", Boris Zaitsev later remembered. These were the years when he met Anton Chekov (1896), a strong friendship resulting in this case as well.
1900–1909
The collections Poems and Stories (1900) and Flowers of the Field (1901) were followed by Falling Leaves (Листопад, 1901), Bunin's third book of poetry (including a large poem of the same title first published in the October 1900 issue of Zhizn (Life) magazine). It was welcomed by both critics and colleagues, among them Alexander ErtelAlexander Ertel
Alexander Ivanovich Ertel , , was a Russian novelist and short story writer.-Biography:Ertel was born near Voronezh, where his father was a Russified German estate agent. He never completed school, and was largely self-educated. He published his first collection of stories called Notes from the...
, Alexander Blok
Alexander Blok
Alexander Alexandrovich Blok was a Russian lyrical poet.-Life and career:Blok was born in Saint Petersburg, into a sophisticated and intellectual family. Some of his relatives were literary men, his father being a law professor in Warsaw, and his maternal grandfather the rector of Saint Petersburg...
and Aleksandr Kuprin
Aleksandr Kuprin
Aleksandr Ivanovich Kuprin , was a Russian writer, pilot, explorer and adventurer who is perhaps best known for his story The Duel . Other well-known works include Moloch , Olesya , Junior Captain Rybnikov , Emerald , and The Garnet Bracelet...
, who praised its 'rare subtlety'. Even though the book testifies to his association with the Symbolists
Symbolism (arts)
Symbolism was a late nineteenth-century art movement of French, Russian and Belgian origin in poetry and other arts. In literature, the style had its beginnings with the publication Les Fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire...
, primarily Valery Bryusov
Valery Bryusov
Valery Yakovlevich Bryusov was a Russian poet, prose writer, dramatist, translator, critic and historian. He was one of the principal members of the Russian Symbolist movement.-Biography:...
, at the time many saw it as an antidote to the pretentiousness of 'decadent' poetry which was then popular in Russia. Falling Leaves was "definitely Pushkin-like", full of "inner poise, sophistication, clarity and wholesomeness", according to Korney Chukovsky
Korney Chukovsky
Korney Ivanovich Chukovsky was one of the most popular children's poets in the Russian language. His poems, Doctor Aybolit , The Giant Roach , The Crocodile , and Wash'em'clean have been favourites with many generations of Russophone children...
. Soon after the book's release, Gorky called Bunin (in a letter to Bryusov
Valery Bryusov
Valery Yakovlevich Bryusov was a Russian poet, prose writer, dramatist, translator, critic and historian. He was one of the principal members of the Russian Symbolist movement.-Biography:...
) "the first poet of out times". It was for Falling Leaves (along with the translation of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was an American poet and educator whose works include "Paul Revere's Ride", The Song of Hiawatha, and Evangeline...
's The Song of Hiawatha
The Song of Hiawatha
The Song of Hiawatha is an 1855 epic poem, in trochaic tetrameter, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, featuring an Indian hero and loosely based on legends and ethnography of the Ojibwe and other Native American peoples contained in Algic Researches and additional writings of Henry Rowe Schoolcraft...
, 1898) that Bunin was awarded his first Pushkin Prize
Pushkin Prize
The Pushkin Prize was established in 1881 by the Russian Academy of Sciences to honor one of the greatest Russian poets Alexander Pushkin . The prize was awarded to the Russian who achieved the highest standard of literary excellence. The prize was discontinued during the Soviet period. It was...
. Bunin justified a pause of two years in the early 1900s by the need for "inner growth" and spiritual change.
At the turn of the century Bunin made a major switch from poetry to prose which started to change both in form and texture, becoming richer in lexicon, more compact and perfectly poised. Citing Flaubert
Gustave Flaubert
Gustave Flaubert was a French writer who is counted among the greatest Western novelists. He is known especially for his first published novel, Madame Bovary , and for his scrupulous devotion to his art and style.-Early life and education:Flaubert was born on December 12, 1821, in Rouen,...
, whose work he admired, as an influence, Bunin was 'demonstrating that prose could be driven by poetic rhythms, but still remain prose'. According to the writer's nephew Pusheshnikov, Bunin once told him: "Apparently I was born a versemaker... like Turgenev
Ivan Turgenev
Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev was a Russian novelist, short story writer, and playwright. His first major publication, a short story collection entitled A Sportsman's Sketches, is a milestone of Russian Realism, and his novel Fathers and Sons is regarded as one of the major works of 19th-century...
, who was a versemaker, first and foremost. Finding the true rhythm of the story was for him the main thing – everything else was supplementary. And for me the crucial thing is to find the proper rhythm. Once its there, everything else comes in spontaneously, and I know when the story is done."
In 1900 the novella Antonov Apples
Antonov Apples
Antonov Apples is a short story by a Nobel Prize-winning Russian author Ivan Bunin, written in 1900 and published the same year in the October issue of the Saint Petersburg Zhiznh magazine, subtitled "Sketches from the Epitaph book".- Background :Scholars...
was published; later it was included in textbooks and is regarded as Bunin’s first real masterpiece, but it was criticized at the time as too nostalgic and elitist, allegedly idealizing "the Russian nobleman's past". Other acclaimed novellas of this period, On the Farm, The News from Home, To the Edge of the World, showing a penchant for extreme precision of language, delicate description of nature, detailed psychological analysis, and masterly control of plot, made him a popular and well-respected young author.
In 1902 Znanie started publishing a Complete Bunin series; five volumes appeared by the year 1909. Three books, Poems (1903), Poems (1903–1906) and Poems of 1907 (the latter published by Znanie in 1908), formed the basis a special (non-numbered) volume of the Complete series which in 1910 was published in Saint Petersburg as Volume VI. Poems and Stories (1907–1909) by the Obschestvennaya polza publishing house. All the while Bunin's works featured regularly in Znanie literary compilations; beginning with Book I, where "Black Earth
Dreams (Ivan Bunin)
Dreams is a novella by a Nobel Prize-winning Russian author Ivan Bunin, written in the late 1903 and first published in the first book of the Znanie Saint Petersburg literary almanach in 1904, where it was coupled with another short novella, "The Golden Bottom" , under the common title "Black...
" appeared along with several poems, all in all he contributed to 16 books of the series.
In the early 1900s Bunin traveled extensively. He was a close friend of Chekhov and his family and continued visiting them regularly until 1904. The October social turmoil of 1905 found Bunin in Yalta
Yalta
Yalta is a city in Crimea, southern Ukraine, on the north coast of the Black Sea.The city is located on the site of an ancient Greek colony, said to have been founded by Greek sailors who were looking for a safe shore on which to land. It is situated on a deep bay facing south towards the Black...
, Crimea
Crimea
Crimea , or the Autonomous Republic of Crimea , is a sub-national unit, an autonomous republic, of Ukraine. It is located on the northern coast of the Black Sea, occupying a peninsula of the same name...
, from whence he moved back to Odessa
Odessa
Odessa or Odesa is the administrative center of the Odessa Oblast located in southern Ukraine. The city is a major seaport located on the northwest shore of the Black Sea and the fourth largest city in Ukraine with a population of 1,029,000 .The predecessor of Odessa, a small Tatar settlement,...
. Scenes of "class struggle" there did not impress the writer for he saw them as little more than the Russian common people's craving for anarchy and destruction.
In November 1906 Bunin's passionate affair with Vera Muromtseva began. The girl's family was unimpressed with Bunin's position as a writer, but they defied social convention, moving in together and in April 1907 leaving Russia for an extended tour through Egypt
Egypt
Egypt , officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, Arabic: , is a country mainly in North Africa, with the Sinai Peninsula forming a land bridge in Southwest Asia. Egypt is thus a transcontinental country, and a major power in Africa, the Mediterranean Basin, the Middle East and the Muslim world...
and Palestine
Palestine
Palestine is a conventional name, among others, used to describe the geographic region between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, and various adjoining lands....
. The Bird's Shadow
Bird's Shadow
Bird's Shadow is a collection of short stories by a Nobel Prize-winning Russian author Ivan Bunin. Based on memories and impressions of the vast tour over the Middle East he and Vera Muromtseva undertook in the 1900s...
(1907–1911) collection (published as a separate book in 1931 in Paris) came as a result of this voyage. These travelling sketches made a big difference with the critics. Before them Bunin was mostly regarded as (using his own words) "a melancholy lyricist, singing hymns to noblemen's estates and idylls of the past". In the late 1900s critics started to pay more notice to the colourfulness and dynamics of his poetry and prose. "In terms of artistic precision he has no equal among Russian poets", Vestnik Evropy wrote at the time. Bunin attributed much importance to his traveling schedule, counting himself among that special "type of people who tend to feel strongest for alien times and cultures rather than those of their own" and admitting to being drawn to "all the necropolises of the world". Besides, foreign voyages had, admittedly, an eye-opening effect on the writer, helping him to see Russian reality more objectively. In the early 1910s Bunin produced several famous novellas which came as a direct result of this change in perspective.
In October 1909 Bunin was awarded his second Pushkin Prize for Poems 1903–1906 and translations (Lord Byron's Cain, and parts of Longfellow's The Golden Legend). He was elected as member of the Russian Academy
Russian Academy of Sciences
The Russian Academy of Sciences consists of the national academy of Russia and a network of scientific research institutes from across the Russian Federation as well as auxiliary scientific and social units like libraries, publishers and hospitals....
the same year. In Bunin The Academy crowns "not a daring innovator, not an adventurous searcher but arguably the last gifted pupil of talented teachers who's kept and preserved… all the most beautiful testaments of their school", wrote critic Aleksander Izmailov, formulating the conventional view of the time. It was much later that Bunin was proclaimed one of the most innovative Russian writers of the century.
1910–1920
In 1910 Bunin published The VillageThe Village (Ivan Bunin novel)
The Village is a short novel by a Nobel Prize-winning Russian author Ivan Bunin written in 1909 and first published in Sovremenny Mir journal under the title Novelet...
, a bleak portrayal of Russian country life, full of stupidity, brutality, and violence. This book caused controversy and made him famous. Its harsh realism (with "characters having sunk so far below the average level of intelligence as to be scarcely human") prompted Maxim Gorky to call Bunin "the best Russian writer of the day". "I’ve left behind my "narodnikism" which didn't last very long, my Tolstoyism too and now I’m closer to the social democrats, but I still stay away from political parties," Bunin wrote in the early 1910s. He said he realized now that the working class had become "a powerful force" enough to "overcome the whole of Western Europe," but warned against the possible negative effect of the Russian workers's lack of organization, the one thing that made them different from their Western counterparts. All the while he harshly criticised the Russian intelligentsia
Intelligentsia
The intelligentsia is a social class of people engaged in complex, mental and creative labor directed to the development and dissemination of culture, encompassing intellectuals and social groups close to them...
for being ignorant of the common people's life, and spoke of a tragic schism between "the cultured people and the uncultured masses".
Middle East
The Middle East is a region that encompasses Western Asia and Northern Africa. It is often used as a synonym for Near East, in opposition to Far East...
, then visited Ceylon; this four-month journey inspired such stories as Brothers (Братья) and The Tzar of Tzars City (Город царя царей). On his return to Odessa in April 1911, Bunin wrote Waters Aplenty (Воды многие), a travel diary, much lauded after its publication in 1926. In 1912 his novel Dry Valley
Dry Valley (Ivan Bunin novel)
Dry Valley is a short novel by a Nobel Prize-winning Russian author Ivan Bunin, first published in the April 1912 issue of the Saint Petersburg Vestnik Evropy magazine...
came out, his second major piece of semi-autobiographical fiction, concerning the dire state of the Russian rural community. Again it left the literary critics divided: social democrats praised its stark honesty, many others were appalled with the author's negativism. Bunin and Muromtseva spent three winters (1912–1914) on the island of Capri
Capri
Capri is an Italian island in the Tyrrhenian Sea off the Sorrentine Peninsula, on the south side of the Gulf of Naples, in the Campania region of Southern Italy...
with Gorky, where they met with Fyodor Shalyapin and Leonid Andreev, among others. In Russia the couple divided their time mainly between Moscow and a Bunin family estate at Glotovo village nearby Oryol
Oryol
Oryol or Orel is a city and the administrative center of Oryol Oblast, Russia, located on the Oka River, approximately south-southwest of Moscow...
; it was there that they spent the first couple years of World War I
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
. Dogged by anxieties concerning Russia's future, Bunin was still working hard. In the winter of 1914-15 he finished a new volume of prose and verse entitled Chalice of Life (Чаша жизни), published in early 1915 to wide acclaim (including high praise from the French poet Rene Ghil). The same year saw the publication of The Gentleman from San Francisco
The Gentleman from San Francisco
The Gentleman from San Francisco is a short story by a Nobel Prize-winning Russian author Ivan Bunin, written in 1915 and published the same year in Moscow, in the 5th volume of Slovo anthology...
(Господин из Сан-Франциско), arguably the best-known of Bunin's short stories, which was translated into English by D. H. Lawrence
D. H. Lawrence
David Herbert Richards Lawrence was an English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic and painter who published as D. H. Lawrence. His collected works represent an extended reflection upon the dehumanising effects of modernity and industrialisation...
. Bunin was a productive translator himself. After Longfellow's The Song of Hiawatha (1898) he did translations of Byron
George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron
George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron, later George Gordon Noel, 6th Baron Byron, FRS , commonly known simply as Lord Byron, was a British poet and a leading figure in the Romantic movement...
, Tennyson
Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson
Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson, FRS was Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom during much of Queen Victoria's reign and remains one of the most popular poets in the English language....
, Musset
Alfred de Musset
Alfred Louis Charles de Musset-Pathay was a French dramatist, poet, and novelist.Along with his poetry, he is known for writing La Confession d'un enfant du siècle from 1836.-Biography:Musset was born on 11 December 1810 in Paris...
and François Coppée
François Coppée
François Edouard Joachim Coppée was a French poet and novelist.-Biography:He was born in Paris to a civil servant. After attending the Lycée Saint-Louis he became a clerk in the ministry of war, and won public favour as a poet of the Parnassian school. His first printed verses date from 1864...
.
During the War years Bunin completed the preparation of a six-volume edition of his Collected Works, which was published by Adolph Marks in 1915. Throughout this time Bunin kept aloof from contemporary literary debates. "I did not belong to any literary school; I was neither a decadent, nor a symbolist nor a romantic, nor a naturalist. Of literary circles I frequented only a few," he commented later. By the spring of 1916, full of pessimism, Bunin all but stopped writing, complaining to his nephew, N.A. Pusheshnikov, of how insignificant he felt as a writer and how depressed he was for being unable to do more than be horrified at the millions of deaths being caused by the War.
In May 1917 the Bunins moved to Glotovo and stayed there until autumn. In October the couple returned to Moscow to stay with Vera's parents. Life in the city was dangerous (residents had to guard their own house, maintaining nightly vigils) but Bunin still visited publishers and took part in the meetings of the Sreda and The Art circles. All political forces in Russia lost credibility for him: while dismissive of such politicians as Ivan Goremykin
Ivan Goremykin
Ivan Logginovitch Goremykin was a Russian prime minister during World War I and politician with extremely conservative political views.-Biography:He was born on 8 November 1839....
(the 1914–1916 Russian Government Premier), he criticised opposition politicians like P.N. Miliukov
Pavel Milyukov
Pavel Nikolayevich Milyukov , a Russian politician, was the founder, leader, and the most prominent member of the Constitutional Democratic party...
as "false defenders of the Russian people". In April 1917 he severed all ties with the pro-revolutionary Gorky, causing a rift which would never be healed. On May 21, 1918, Bunin and Muromtseva obtained official permission to leave Moscow for Kiev, then continued their journey through to Odessa
Odessa
Odessa or Odesa is the administrative center of the Odessa Oblast located in southern Ukraine. The city is a major seaport located on the northwest shore of the Black Sea and the fourth largest city in Ukraine with a population of 1,029,000 .The predecessor of Odessa, a small Tatar settlement,...
. By 1919 Bunin was working for the Volunteer Army as the editor of the cultural section of the anti-Bolshevik newspaper Iuzhnoe Slovo. On January 26, 1921, the couple boarded the last French ship in Odessa and soon were in Constantinople
Constantinople
Constantinople was the capital of the Roman, Eastern Roman, Byzantine, Latin, and Ottoman Empires. Throughout most of the Middle Ages, Constantinople was Europe's largest and wealthiest city.-Names:...
.
Emigration
On March 28 (after short stints in SofiaSofia
Sofia is the capital and largest city of Bulgaria and the 12th largest city in the European Union with a population of 1.27 million people. It is located in western Bulgaria, at the foot of Mount Vitosha and approximately at the centre of the Balkan Peninsula.Prehistoric settlements were excavated...
and Belgrade
Belgrade
Belgrade is the capital and largest city of Serbia. It is located at the confluence of the Sava and Danube rivers, where the Pannonian Plain meets the Balkans. According to official results of Census 2011, the city has a population of 1,639,121. It is one of the 15 largest cities in Europe...
) Bunin and Muromtseva arrived in Paris, from then on dividing their time between apartments at 1, rue Jacques Offenbach in the 16th arrondissement of Paris and rented villas in or near Grasse
Grasse
-See also:*Route Napoléon*Ancient Diocese of Grasse*Communes of the Alpes-Maritimes department-External links:*...
in the Alpes Maritimes. Much as he hated Bolshevism, Bunin never endorsed the idea of foreign intervention in Russia. "It's for the common Russian countryman to sort out his problems for himself, not for foreign masters to come and maintain their new order in our home. I'd rather die in exile than return home with the help of Poland or England. As my father taught me: 'Love your own tub even if it's broken up'", he once said, allegedly, to Merezhkovsky who still cherished hopes for Pilsudsky's military success.
Slowly and painfully, overcoming physical and mental stress, Bunin returned to his usual mode of writing. Scream, his first book published in France, was compiled of short stories written in 1911–1912, years he referred to as the happiest of his life.
In France Bunin published many of his pre-revolutionary works and collections of original novellas, regularly contributing to the Russian emigre press. According to Vera Muromtseva, though, her husband often complained of his inability to get used to life in the new world. He said he belonged to "the old world, that of Goncharov
Ivan Goncharov
Ivan Alexandrovich Goncharov was a Russian novelist best known as the author of Oblomov .- Biography :Ivan Goncharov was born in Simbirsk ; his father was a wealthy grain merchant and respected official who was elected mayor of Simbirsk several times...
and Tolstoy, of Moscow and St. Petersburg, where his muse had been lost, never to be found again". Yet his new prose was marked with obvious artistic progress: Mitya's Love (Митина любовь, 1924), Sunstroke (Солнечный удаp, 1925), Cornet Yelagin's Case (Дело коpнета Елагина, 1925) and especially The Life of Arseniev
The Life of Arseniev
The Life of Arseniev is an autobiographical novel by a Nobel Prize-winning Russian author Ivan Bunin seen by many as his most important work written in emigration. The Life of Arseniev was being written and published in parts in the course of the 12 years, in 1927-1939, in France...
(Жизнь Аpсеньева, written in 1927–1929, published in 1930–1933) were praized by critics as bringing Russian literature to new heights. Konstantin Paustovsky
Konstantin Paustovsky
Konstantin Georgiyevich Paustovsky was a Russian Soviet writer nominated for the Nobel Prize for literature in 1965.-Early life:Konstantin Paustovsky was born in Moscow. His father, descendant of the Zaporizhia Cossacks, was a railroad statistician, and was “an incurable romantic and Protestant”....
called The Life of Arseniev an apex of the whole of Russian prose and "one of the most striking phenomena in the world of literature".
In 1925–1926 Cursed Days
Cursed Days
Cursed Days is a book by a Nobel Prize-winning Russian author Ivan Bunin, compiled of diaries and notes he made while in Moscow and Odessa in 1918-1920. Fragments from it were being published throughout 1925 and 1926 by the Paris-based Vozrozhdenye newspaper. In its full version Cursed Days...
, Bunin's diary of the years 1918–1920, started to appear in the Paris-based Vizrozhdenye newspaper (its final version was published by Petropolis in 1936). According to Bunin scholar Thomas Gaiton Marullo, Cursed Days, one of the very few anti-Bolshevik diaries to be preserved from the time of the Russian Revolution and civil war, linked "Russian anti-utopian writing of the nineteenth century to its counterpart in the twentieth" and, "in its painful exposing of political and social utopias, Cursed Days heralded the anti-utopian writing of George Orwell
George Orwell
Eric Arthur Blair , better known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English author and journalist...
and Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley
Aldous Leonard Huxley was an English writer and one of the most prominent members of the famous Huxley family. Best known for his novels including Brave New World and a wide-ranging output of essays, Huxley also edited the magazine Oxford Poetry, and published short stories, poetry, travel...
. Bunin and Zamyatin had correctly understood that the Soviet experiment was destined to self destruct," Marullo wrote.
In the 1920s and 1930s Bunin was regarded as the moral and artistic spokesman for a generation of expatriates who awaited the collapse of bolshevism, a revered senior figure among living Russian writers, true to the tradition of Tolstoy
Tolstoy
Tolstoy, or Tolstoi is a prominent family of Russian nobility, descending from Andrey Kharitonovich Tolstoy who served under Vasily II of Moscow...
and Chekhov
Chekhov
- People :* Alexander Chekhov, older brother of Anton Chekhov* Anton Chekhov , Russian writer** Chekhov Gymnasium, school, and now museum in Taganrog** Chekhov Library, public library in Taganrog** Anton Chekhov class motorship...
. Accordingly, he was the first Russian to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1933, "for following through and developing with chastity and artfulness the traditions of Russian classic prose". Per Halstroem, in his celebratory speech, noted the laureate's poetic gift. Bunin in his own right praised the Swedish Academy
Swedish Academy
The Swedish Academy , founded in 1786 by King Gustav III, is one of the Royal Academies of Sweden.-History:The Swedish Academy was founded in 1786 by King Gustav III. Modelled after the Académie française, it has 18 members. The motto of the Academy is "Talent and Taste"...
for honouring a writer in exile. In his speech, addressing the Academy, he said:
In France, for the first time ever, Bunin found himself at the center of public attention. He felt profoundly shocked by the barrage of photos of him in the press. On November 10, 1933 the Paris newspapers came out with huge headlines: "Bunin - the Nobel Prize laureate" giving the whole of the Russian community in France cause for celebration. "You see, up until then we, émigrés, felt like we were at the bottom there. Then all of a sudden our writer has been given an internationally acknowledged prize! And not for some political scribblings, but for real prose! "After having been asked to write a first page column for the Paris Revival newspaper, I stepped out in the middle of the night onto the Place d'Italie and toured the local bistros on my way home, drinking in each and every one of them to the health of Ivan Bunin!" fellow Russian writer Boris Zaitsev wrote. Back in the USSR, though, the reaction was negative: Bunin's triumph was explained there as "an imperialist intrigue".
Dealing with the Prize, Bunin donated 100,000 francs to a literary charity fund, but the process of money distribution caused controversy among his fellow Russian émigré writers. It was during this time that Bunin's relationship with Gippius
Zinaida Gippius
Zinaida Nikolaevna Gippius, was a Russian poet, playwright, editor, short story writer and religious thinker, regarded as a co-founder of Russian symbolism and seen as "one of the most enigmatic and intelligent women of her time in Russia"....
and Merezhkovsky
Dmitry Merezhkovsky
Dmitry Sergeyevich Merezhkovsky, , 1865, St Petersburg – December 9, 1941, Paris) was a Russian novelist, poet, religious thinker, and literary critic. A seminal figure of the Silver Age of Russian Poetry, regarded as a co-founder of the Symbolist movement, Merezhkovsky – with his poet wife Zinaida...
(a fellow Nobel Prize nominee who'd once suggested that they divide the Prize between the two, should one of them get it, and had been refused) deteriorated. Although reluctant to become involved in politics, Bunin was now feted as both a writer and the embodiment of non-Bolshevik Russian values and traditions. Inevitably, his travels throughout Europe featured prominently on the front pages of the Russian emigre press for the remainder of the decade.
In 1934–1936 The Complete Bunin (in 11 volumes) was published in Berlin by the Petropolis company. Bunin cited this edition as the most credible one and warned his future publishers against using any other versions of his work rather than those featured in the Petropolis collection. 1936 was marred by an incident in Lindau
Lindau
Lindau is a Bavarian town and an island on the eastern side of Lake Constance, the Bodensee. It is the capital of the Landkreis or rural district of Lindau. The historic city of Lindau is located on an island which is connected with the mainland by bridge and railway.- History :The name Lindau was...
on the Swiss-German border when Bunin, having completed his European voyage, was stopped and unceremoniously searched. The writer (who caught cold and fell ill after the night spent under arrest) responded by writing a letter to the Paris-based Latest News newspaper. The incident caused disbelief and outrage in France. In 1937 Bunin finished his book The Liberation of Tolstoy, held in the highest regard by Leo Tolstoy scholars.
In 1938 Bunin began working on what would later become a celebrated cycle of nostalgic stories with a strong erotic undercurrent and a Proust
Marcel Proust
Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust was a French novelist, critic, and essayist best known for his monumental À la recherche du temps perdu...
ian ring. The first 11 stories of it were published as Dark Avenues
Dark Avenues
Dark Avenues is a collection of short stories by a Nobel Prize-winning Russian author Ivan Bunin written in 1937-1944, mostly in Grasse, France, first 11 novellas of which were published in New York, USA, in 1943. The book's full version came out in 1946 in Paris...
(or Dark Alleys) in New York (1943), then appeared in a full version in 1946 (in France). These stories assumed a more abstract and metaphysical tone which has been identified with his need to find refuge from the "nightmarish reality" of Nazi occupation. Furthermore, Bunin's prose became more introspective, a phenomenon that he attributed to "the fact that the Russian is surrounded by the spectacle of things that were enormous, broad and lasting- the steppes, the sky. In the West everything is cramped and enclosed, and this automatically produces a turning towards the self, inwards."
The war years
As World War IIWorld War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
broke out, Bunin's friends in New York, anxious to help the Nobel Prize laureate get out of France, issued officially endorsed invitations for him to travel to the USA, and in 1941 the Bunins acquired Nansen passport
Nansen passport
Nansen passports were internationally recognized identity cards first issued by the League of Nations to stateless refugees.-Origins:Designed in 1921 by Fridtjof Nansen, in 1942 they were honored by governments in 52 countries and were the first refugee travel documents...
s enabling them to make the trip. But the couple chose to remain in Grasse. They spent the war years at Villa Jeanette, high in the mountains. Two young writers became long-term residents in the Bunin household at the time: Leonid Zurov (1902–1971), who had arrived on a visit from Latvia
Latvia
Latvia , officially the Republic of Latvia , is a country in the Baltic region of Northern Europe. It is bordered to the north by Estonia , to the south by Lithuania , to the east by the Russian Federation , to the southeast by Belarus and shares maritime borders to the west with Sweden...
at Bunin's invitation earlier, in late 1929, and remained with them for the rest of their lives, and Nikolai Roschin (1896–1956), who returned to the Soviet Union after the war. Members of this small commune (occasionally including Galina Kuznetsova and Margarita Stepun) were bent on survival: they grew vegetables and greens, helping one another out at a time when, according to Zurov, "Grasse's population have eaten all of their cats and dogs". A journalist who visited the Villa in 1942 described Bunin as a "skinny and emaciated man, looking very much like an ancient patrician". Strangely, it was this isolation that Bunin regarded as a blessing, refusing to re-locate to Paris where conditions might have been better. "It takes 30 minutes of climbing to reach our villa, but there's not another view in the whole world like the one that's facing us", he wrote. "Freezing cold, though, is damnation, and makes it impossible for me to write", he complained in one of his letters. Vera Muromtseva-Bunina remembered: "There were 5 or 6 of us... and we were all writing continuously. This was the only way for us to bear the unbearable, to overcome hunger, cold and fear."
Ivan Bunin was a staunch anti-Nazi. He risked his life, sheltering fugitives (among them were Jews, like pianist A.Liebermann and his wife) in his house in Grasse after Vichy
Vichy France
Vichy France, Vichy Regime, or Vichy Government, are common terms used to describe the government of France that collaborated with the Axis powers from July 1940 to August 1944. This government succeeded the Third Republic and preceded the Provisional Government of the French Republic...
was occupied by the Germans, referring to Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler was an Austrian-born German politician and the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party , commonly referred to as the Nazi Party). He was Chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945, and head of state from 1934 to 1945...
and Benito Mussolini
Benito Mussolini
Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini was an Italian politician who led the National Fascist Party and is credited with being one of the key figures in the creation of Fascism....
as "rabid monkeys". According to Zurov, Bunin invited some of the Soviet war prisoners ("straight from Gatchina
Gatchina
Gatchina is a town and the administrative center of Gatchinsky District of Leningrad Oblast, Russia, located south of St. Petersburg by the road leading to Pskov...
", who worked in occupied Grasse) to his home in the mountains, risking his life, seeing that the heavily guarded German forces headquarters were only 300 meters away from his home. The athmosphere in the neighbourhood, though, was not that deadly, judging by the Bunin's diary entry for August 1, 1944: "Nearby there were two guards, there were also one German,and one Russian prisoner, Kolesnikov, a student. The three of us talked a bit. Saying our farewells, a German guard shook my hand firmly".
Under the occupation Bunin never ceased writing but, according to Zurov, "published not a single word. He was receiving offers to contribute to newspapers in occupied Switzerland, but declined them. Somebody visited him once, some kind of guest which proved to be an agent, he proposed work, but again Ivan Alekseyevich refused". On September 24, 1944, Bunin wrote to Nikolay Roschin: "Thank God, the Germans have fled Grasse without a fight, on August 23. In the early morning of the 24th the Americans came. What was going on in the town, and in our souls– that's beyond description". "For all this hunger, I'm glad we spent the War years in the South, sharing the life and difficulties of the people, I'm glad that we've managed even to help some", Vera Muromtseva-Bunina later wrote.
Ivan Bunin's last years
In May 1945 the Bunins returned to 1, rue Jacques Offenbach in Paris. Aside from several spells at the Russian House (Русский дом, a clinic in Juan-les-PinsJuan-les-Pins
Juan-les-PinsCountry:Region:Department: Alpes-MaritimesArrondissement: GrasseCanton: Vallauris-Antibes-OuestMunicipality: AntibesPopulation:?Coordinates:Time zone:CET, UTC+1Elevation:10 amslPostal code:06600...
) where he was convalescing, Bunin was to remain in the French capital for the rest of his life. On June 15 Russkye Novosty newspaper published its correspondent's account of his meeting with an elderly writer who looked "as sprightly and lively as if he had never had to come through those five years of voluntary exile". According to Bunin's friend N. Roschin, "the liberation of France was a cause of great celebration and exultation for Bunin". Once, in the audience at a Soviet Russian Theater show in Paris, Bunin found himself sitting next to a young Red Army colonel. As the latter rose and bowed, saying: "Do I have the honour of sitting next to Ivan Alekseyevich Bunin?" the writer sprang to his feet: "I have the even higher honour of sitting next to an officer of the great Red Army!" he passionately retorted. On June 19, 1945, Bunin held a literary show in Paris where he read some of the Dark Avenue stories. In the autumn of 1945, on the wave of the great patriotic boom, Bunin’s 75th birthday was widely celebrated in the Paris Russian community. Bunin started to communicate closely with the Soviet connoisseurs, journalist Yuri Zhukov
Yuri Zhukov
Yuri Georgy Aleksandrovich Zhukov was a prominent journalist and political figure in the Soviet Union.Member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Around 1938-1945 he toured Dalkrai and wrote books on Soviet Far East and Japan....
and literary agent Boris Mikhailov, the latter receiving from the writer several new stories for proposed publishing in the USSR. Rumours started circulating that a Soviet version of The Complete Bunin was already in the works.
In the late 1940s Bunin, having become interested in Soviet literature, the works of Aleksandr Tvardovsky
Aleksandr Tvardovsky
Aleksandr Trifonovich Tvardovsky was a Soviet poet, chief editor of Novy Mir literary magazine from 1950 to 1954 and 1958 to 1970...
and Konstantin Paustovsky
Konstantin Paustovsky
Konstantin Georgiyevich Paustovsky was a Russian Soviet writer nominated for the Nobel Prize for literature in 1965.-Early life:Konstantin Paustovsky was born in Moscow. His father, descendant of the Zaporizhia Cossacks, was a railroad statistician, and was “an incurable romantic and Protestant”....
in particular, started to entertain plans of returning to the Soviet Union, as Aleksandr Kuprin
Aleksandr Kuprin
Aleksandr Ivanovich Kuprin , was a Russian writer, pilot, explorer and adventurer who is perhaps best known for his story The Duel . Other well-known works include Moloch , Olesya , Junior Captain Rybnikov , Emerald , and The Garnet Bracelet...
had done in the 1930s. In 1946, speaking to his Communist counterparts in Paris, Bunin praised the Supreme Soviet's decision to return Soviet citisenship to Russian exiles in France, still stopping short of saying 'yes' to the continuous urges from the Soviet side for him to return. "It is hard for an old man to go back to places where he's pranced goat-like in better times. Friends and relatives are all buried… That for me would be a graveyard trip", he reportedly said to Zhukov, promising though, to "think more of it". Financial difficulties and the French reading public's relative indifference to the publication of Dark Avenues figured high among his motives, apparently. "Would you mind asking the Union of Writers to send me at least some of the money for books that've been published and re-issued in Moscow in the 1920s and 1930s? I am weak, I am short of breath, I need to go to the South but am too skinny to even dream of it", Bunin wrote to Nikolay Teleshov in a letter on November 19, 1946.
Negotiations for the writer's return came to an end after the publication of his Memoirs (Воспоминания, 1950), full of scathing criticism of Soviet cultural life. Apparently aware of his own negativism, Bunin wrote: "I was born too late. If I had been born earlier, my literary memoirs would have been different. I wouldn't have been a witness to 1905, the First World War, then 1917 and what followed: Lenin, Stalin, Hitler... How can I not be jealous of our forefather Noah
Noah
Noah was, according to the Hebrew Bible, the tenth and last of the antediluvian Patriarchs. The biblical story of Noah is contained in chapters 6–9 of the book of Genesis, where he saves his family and representatives of all animals from the flood by constructing an ark...
. He lived through only one flood in his lifetime".
Reportedly, the infamous Zhdanov decree was one of the reasons for Bunin's radical change of mind. On September 15, 1947, Bunin wrote to Mark Aldanov: "I have a letter here from Teleshov, written on September 7; 'what a pity (he writes) that you've missed all of this: how your book was set up, how everybody was waiting for you here, in the place where you could have been... rich, feasted, and held in such high honour!' Having read this I spent an hour hair-tearing. Then I suddenly became calm. It just came to me all of a sudden all those other things Zhdanov and Fadeev might have given me instead of feasts, riches and laurels..."
His health deteriorating, after 1948 Bunin concentrated his creative energies on writing his memoirs and a book about Anton Chekhov. At this he was extensively aided by his wife, who, along with Zurov, completed the work after the author's death and saw to its publication in New York in 1955. In Engish translation it was entitled About Chekhov: The Unfinished Symphony. Bunin also revised a number of stories for publication in new collections, spent considerable time looking through his papers and annotated his collected works for a definitive edition. In 1951 Bunin was elected the first ever hononary International PEN
International PEN
PEN International , the worldwide association of writers, was founded in London in 1921 to promote friendship and intellectual co-operation among writers everywhere....
member, representing the community of writers in exile. According to A.J.Heywood, one major event of Bunin's last years was his quarrel in 1948 with Maria Tsetlina and Boris Zaitsev, following the decision by the Union of Russian Writers and Journalists in France to expel holders of Soviet passports from its membership, to which Bunin had responded by resigning from the Union. The writer's last years were marred by bitterness, disillusionment and chronic ill-health; he was suffering from asthma
Asthma
Asthma is the common chronic inflammatory disease of the airways characterized by variable and recurring symptoms, reversible airflow obstruction, and bronchospasm. Symptoms include wheezing, coughing, chest tightness, and shortness of breath...
, bronchitis
Bronchitis
Acute bronchitis is an inflammation of the large bronchi in the lungs that is usually caused by viruses or bacteria and may last several days or weeks. Characteristic symptoms include cough, sputum production, and shortness of breath and wheezing related to the obstruction of the inflamed airways...
and chronic pneumonia
Pneumonia
Pneumonia is an inflammatory condition of the lung—especially affecting the microscopic air sacs —associated with fever, chest symptoms, and a lack of air space on a chest X-ray. Pneumonia is typically caused by an infection but there are a number of other causes...
.
On May 2, 1953, Bunin left in his diary a note that proved to be his last one. "Still, this is so dumbfoundingly extraordinary. In a very short while there will be no more of me - and of all the things worldly, of all the affairs and destinies, from then on I will be unaware! And what I'm left to do here is dumbly try to consciously impose upon myself fear and amazement», he wrote. Ivan Alekseyevich Bunin died in a Paris attic flat in the early hours of November 8, 1953. Heart failure, cardiac asthma and lungs sclerosis
Sclerosis (medicine)
In medicine, sclerosis refers to the stiffening of a structure, usually caused by a replacement of the normal organ-specific tissue with connective tissue.Types include:...
were cited as the causes of death. The lavish burial service took place at the Russian Church on Rue Daru. All the major newspapers, both Russian and French, published large obituaries. For quite a while the coffin was held in a vault
Burial vault (enclosure)
A burial vault is a sturdy box designed to protect the coffin inside of it. The body is placed within the coffin, which is then placed inside the vault. Body, coffin, and vault are buried. A burial vault serves as an outer enclosure for buried remains; the coffin serves as an inner enclosure.Vaults...
. On January 30, 1954, Bunin was buried in the Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois Russian Cemetery
Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois Russian Cemetery
Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois Cemetery, specifically the one known as Cimetière de Liers, as there are two cemeteries in the city, is a Russian Orthodox cemetery, located on Rue Léo Lagrange in Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois, département Essonne, France....
.
In the 1950s Bunin became the first of the Russian writers in exile to be published officially in the USSR. In 1965 The Complete Bunin came out in Moscow in nine volumes. Some of his more controversial books, notably Cursed Days, remained banned in the Soviet Union until the late 1980s.
Legacy
Ivan Bunin made history as the first Russian writer to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. The immediate pretext for the award was the autobiographical novel The Life of ArsenievThe Life of Arseniev
The Life of Arseniev is an autobiographical novel by a Nobel Prize-winning Russian author Ivan Bunin seen by many as his most important work written in emigration. The Life of Arseniev was being written and published in parts in the course of the 12 years, in 1927-1939, in France...
, but Bunin's legacy is much wider in scope. He's regarded as a master of the short story whom scholar Oleg Mikhaylov described as an "archaist innovator" who, while remaining true to the literary tradition of the XIX century, made huge leaps in terms of artistic expression and purity of style.. "
Epithet
An epithet or byname is a descriptive term accompanying or occurring in place of a name and having entered common usage. It has various shades of meaning when applied to seemingly real or fictitious people, divinities, objects, and binomial nomenclature. It is also a descriptive title...
, analogy
Analogy
Analogy is a cognitive process of transferring information or meaning from a particular subject to another particular subject , and a linguistic expression corresponding to such a process...
or metaphor
Metaphor
A metaphor is a literary figure of speech that uses an image, story or tangible thing to represent a less tangible thing or some intangible quality or idea; e.g., "Her eyes were glistening jewels." Metaphor may also be used for any rhetorical figures of speech that achieve their effects via...
... the ability to perform such a simplification of poetic language without doing any harm to it is the sign of a true artist. When it comes to artistic precision Bunin has no rivals among Russian poets", wrote Vestnik Evropy
Vestnik Evropy
Vestnik Evropy was the major liberal magazine of late-nineteenth-century Russia; it lasted from 1866 to 1918....
.
Bunin's early stories were of uneven quality. They were united in their "earthiness", their lack of plot and signs of a curious longing towards "life's farthest horizons"; young Bunin started his career by trying to approach the ancient dilemmas of the human being, and typically his first characters were old men. His early prose works had one common leitmotif: that of nature's beauty and wisdom bitterly contrasting with humanity's ugly shallowness. As he progressed, Bunin started to receive encouraging reviews: Anton Chekhov warmly greeted his first stories, even if he found too much "density" in them. But it was Gorky
Maxim Gorky
Alexei Maximovich Peshkov , primarily known as Maxim Gorky , was a Russian and Soviet author, a founder of the Socialist Realism literary method and a political activist.-Early years:...
who gave Bunin's prose its highest praise. Till the end of his life Gorky (long after the relationship between former friends had soured) rated Bunin among Russian literature's greatest writers and recommended his prose for younger generations of writers as an example of true and unwithering classicism.
As a poet, Bunin started out as an epigone of Nikitin and Koltsov
Aleksey Koltsov
Aleksey Vasilievich Koltsov was a Russian poet who has been called a Russian Burns. His poems, frequently placed in the mouth of women, stylize peasant-life songs and idealize agricultural labour....
, then gravitated towards the Yakov Polonsky
Yakov Polonsky
Yakov Petrovich Polonsky was a leading Pushkinist poet who tried to uphold the waning traditions of Russian Romantic poetry during the heyday of realistic prose....
and Afanasy Fet
Afanasy Fet
Afanasy Afanasyevich Fet , was a Russian poet regarded as one of the finest lyricists in Russian literature.-Origins:...
school, the latter's impressionism becoming a marked influence. The theme of Bunin's early works seemed to be the demise of the traditional Russian nobleman of the past – something which as an artist he simultaneously gravitated toward and felt averted from. In the 1900s this gave way to a more introspective, philosophical style, akin to Tyutchev
Fyodor Tyutchev
Fyodor Ivanovich Tyutchev is generally considered the last of three great Romantic poets of Russia, following Alexander Pushkin and Mikhail Lermontov.- Life :...
and his "poetic cosmology". All the while Bunin remained hostile to modernism
Modernism
Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes the modernist movement, its set of cultural tendencies and array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society...
(and the darker side of it, "decadence"), according to O. Mikhaylov, the torch-bearer of Pushkin's tradition of "praising naked simplicity's charms". The symbolist's
Symbolism
Symbolism is the applied use of symbols. It is a representation that carries a particular meaning. It is a device in literature where an object represents an idea.A symbol is an object, action, or idea that represents something other than itself....
flights of imagination and grotesque passions being totally foreign to him, Bunin made nature his field of artistic research and here carved his art to perfection. "Few people are capable of loving nature as Bunin does. And it's this love that makes his scope wide, his vision deep, his colour and aural impressions so rich", wrote Aleksander Blok, a poet from a literary camp Bunin treated as hostile. It was for his books of poetry (the most notable of which is Falling Leaves, 1901) and his poetic translations that Bunin became a three times Pushkin Prize
Pushkin Prize
The Pushkin Prize was established in 1881 by the Russian Academy of Sciences to honor one of the greatest Russian poets Alexander Pushkin . The prize was awarded to the Russian who achieved the highest standard of literary excellence. The prize was discontinued during the Soviet period. It was...
laureate. His verse was praised by Kuprin and Blok who saw Bunin as among the first in the hierarchy of Russian poets. One great admirer of Bunin's verse was Vladimir Nabokov
Vladimir Nabokov
Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was a multilingual Russian novelist and short story writer. Nabokov wrote his first nine novels in Russian, then rose to international prominence as a master English prose stylist...
, who (even if making scornful remarks about Bunin's prose) compared him to Blok. Some see Bunin as a direct follower of Gogol who was the first in Russian literature to discover the art of fusing poetry and prose together.
The wholesomeness of Bunin's character allowed him to avoid crises to become virtually the only author of the first decades of the XX century to develop gradually and logically. "Bunin is the only one who remains true to himself", Gorky wrote in a letter to Chirikov in 1907. Yet, an outsider to all the contemporary trends and literary movements, Bunin has never been famous in Russia in the common sense of the word. Becoming an Academician in 1909 alienated him even more from the critics, the majority of whom saw the Academy's decision to expel Gorky several years earlier as a disgrace. The closest Bunin came to fame was in 1911-12 when The Village
The Village (Ivan Bunin novel)
The Village is a short novel by a Nobel Prize-winning Russian author Ivan Bunin written in 1909 and first published in Sovremenny Mir journal under the title Novelet...
and Dry Valley
Dry valley
A dry valley is a valley found in either karst or chalk terrain that no longer has a surface flow of water.There are many examples of the latter along the North and South Downs in southern England...
came out. The former, according to the author, "sketched with sharp cruelty the most striking lines of the Russian soul, its light and dark sides, and its often tragic foundations"; it caused passionate, and occasionally very hostile reactions. "Nobody has ever drawn the
Maxim Gorky
Alexei Maximovich Peshkov , primarily known as Maxim Gorky , was a Russian and Soviet author, a founder of the Socialist Realism literary method and a political activist.-Early years:...
wrote. After this uncompromising book it became impossible to continue to paint the Russian peasantry life in the idealised, narodnik-style way, Bunin single-handedly closed this long chapter in Russian literature. He maintained the truly classic traditions of realism in Russian literature at the very time when they were in the gravest danger, under attack by modernists and decadents. Yet he was far from "traditional" in many ways, introducing to Russian literature a completely new set of characters and a quite novel, laconic way of saying things.
Dry Valley was regarded as another huge step forward for Bunin. While The Village dealt metaphorically with Russia as a whole in a historical context, here, according to the author, the "Russian soul
Bunin's travel sketches were lauded as innovative, notably Bird Shadow (1907–1911). "He's enchanted with the East, with the 'light-bearing' lands he now describes in such beautiful fashion... For
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was an American poet and educator whose works include "Paul Revere's Ride", The Song of Hiawatha, and Evangeline...
's The Song of Hiawatha
The Song of Hiawatha
The Song of Hiawatha is an 1855 epic poem, in trochaic tetrameter, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, featuring an Indian hero and loosely based on legends and ethnography of the Ojibwe and other Native American peoples contained in Algic Researches and additional writings of Henry Rowe Schoolcraft...
(1898).
Bunin was greatly interested in international myths and folklore, being passionately in love with the Russian folkloric tradition. But, (according to Georgy Adamovich
Georgy Adamovich
Georgy Viktorovich Adamovich was a Russian poet of the acmeist school, a literary critic, translator and memoirist.- Biography :Georgy Adamovich was born in the family of senior military officer Viktor Adamovich, an ethnic Pole, who in the rank of major general served as a head of Moscow military...
) "he was absolutely intolerant towards those of his colleagues who employed stylizations, the 'style russe' manufacturers. His cruel - and rightly so - review of Gorodetsky's poetry was one example. Even Blok's Kulikovo Field (for me, an outstanding piece) irritated him as too adorned... 'That's Vasnetsov
Viktor Vasnetsov
Viktor Mikhaylovich Vasnetsov , 1848 — Moscow, July 23, 1926) was a Russian artist who specialized in mythological and historical subjects. He was described as co-founder of folklorist/romantic modernism in the Russian painting and a key figure of the revivalist movement in Russian art.- Childhood ...
', he commented, meaning 'masquerade and opera'. But he treated things that he felt were not masqueradery differently. Of the Slovo o Polku Igoreve
The Tale of Igor's Campaign
The Tale of Igor's Campaign is an anonymous epic poem written in the Old East Slavic language.The title is occasionally translated as The Song of Igor's Campaign, The Lay of Igor's Campaign, and The Lay of...
... he said something to the effect that all the poets of the whole world lumped together couldn't have created such wonder, in fact something close to Pushkin's words. Yet translations of the legend... outraged him, particularly that of Balmont
Konstantin Balmont
Konstantin Dmitriyevich Balmont was a Russian symbolist poet, translator, one of the major figures of the Silver Age of Russian Poetry.-Biography:Konstantin Balmont was born in v...
. He despised Shmelyov
Ivan Shmelyov
Ivan Sergeyevich Shmelyov was a Russian émigré writer best known for his full-blooded idyllic recreations of the pre-revolutionary past spent in the merchant district of Moscow...
for his pseudo-Russian pretenses, though admitting his literary gift. Bunin had an extraordinarily sharp ear for falseness: he instantly recognized this jarring note and was infuriated. That was why he loved Tolstoy so much. Once, I remember, he spoke of Tolstoy as the one 'who's never said a single word that would be an exaggeration'".
Bunin has often been spoken of as a "cold" writer. Some of his conceptual poems of the 1910s refuted this stereotype, tackling philosophical issues like the mission of an artist ("Insensory", 1916) where he showed fiery passion. According to Oleg Mikhaylov, "Bunin just wanted to maintain distance between himself and his reader, being frightened by any closeness... But his pride never excluded passions, just served as a panzer - it was like a flaming torch in an icy shell". On a more personal level, Vera Muromtseva confirmed: "Sure, he wanted to come across as
The best of Bunin's prose ("The Gentleman from San Francisco
The Gentleman from San Francisco
The Gentleman from San Francisco is a short story by a Nobel Prize-winning Russian author Ivan Bunin, written in 1915 and published the same year in Moscow, in the 5th volume of Slovo anthology...
", "Loopy Ears
Loopy Ears
Loopy Ears is a short story by a Nobel Prize-winning Russian author Ivan Bunin which was written in 1917 and gave his postumous 1954 collection its title...
" and notably, "Brothers", based on Ceylon's religious myth) had a strong philosophical streak to it. In terms of ethics Bunin was under the strong influence of Socrates
Socrates
Socrates was a classical Greek Athenian philosopher. Credited as one of the founders of Western philosophy, he is an enigmatic figure known chiefly through the accounts of later classical writers, especially the writings of his students Plato and Xenophon, and the plays of his contemporary ...
(as related by Xenophon
Xenophon
Xenophon , son of Gryllus, of the deme Erchia of Athens, also known as Xenophon of Athens, was a Greek historian, soldier, mercenary, philosopher and a contemporary and admirer of Socrates...
and Plato
Plato
Plato , was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the...
), he argued that it was the Greek classic who first expounded many things that were later found in Hindu
Hindu
Hindu refers to an identity associated with the philosophical, religious and cultural systems that are indigenous to the Indian subcontinent. As used in the Constitution of India, the word "Hindu" is also attributed to all persons professing any Indian religion...
and Jewish sacred books. Bunin was particularly impressed with Socrates's ideas on the intrinsic value of human individuality, it being a "kind of focus for higher forces" (quoted from Bunin's short story "Back to Rome"). As a purveyor of Socratic ideals, Bunin very much followed in Leo Tolstoy's footsteps; the latter's observation about beauty being 'the crown of virtue' was very much Bunin's idea too. Critics found deep philosophical motives, and deep undercurrents in Mitya's Love
Mitya's Love
Mitya's Love is a short novel by a Nobel Prize-winning Russian author Ivan Bunin written in 1924 and first published in books XXIII and XXIV of the Sovremennye Zapiski Paris-based literary journal in 1925...
and The Life of Arseniev
The Life of Arseniev
The Life of Arseniev is an autobiographical novel by a Nobel Prize-winning Russian author Ivan Bunin seen by many as his most important work written in emigration. The Life of Arseniev was being written and published in parts in the course of the 12 years, in 1927-1939, in France...
, two pieces in which "Bunin came closest to a deep metaphysical understanding of the human being's tragic essence". Konstantin Paustovsky
Konstantin Paustovsky
Konstantin Georgiyevich Paustovsky was a Russian Soviet writer nominated for the Nobel Prize for literature in 1965.-Early life:Konstantin Paustovsky was born in Moscow. His father, descendant of the Zaporizhia Cossacks, was a railroad statistician, and was “an incurable romantic and Protestant”....
called The Life of Arseniev "one of the most outstanding phenomena of world literature".
In his view on Russia and it's history Bunin for a while had much in common with A.K.Tolstoy
Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy
Count Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy, often referred to as A. K. Tolstoy , was a Russian poet, novelist and playwright, considered to be the most important nineteenth-century Russian historical dramatist...
(of whom he spoke with great respect); both tended to idealize the pre-Tatar Rus
Rus (name)
Originally, the name Rus referred to the people, the region, and the medieval states of the Rus' Khaganate and Kievan Rus' polities...
. Years later he greatly modified his stance on Russian history, forming a more negative outlook. "There are two streaks in our people: one dominated by Rus, another by Chudh
Chud
Chud or Chude is a term historically applied in the early Russian annals to several Finnic peoples in the area of what is now Finland, Estonia and Northwestern Russia....
and Merya. Both have in them a frightening instability, sway... As Russian people say of themselves: we are like wood - both club and icon may come of it, depending on who is working on this wood", Bunin wrote years later.
In emigration Bunin continued his experiments with extremely concise, ultra-ionized prose, taking Chekhov and Tolstoy's ideas on expressive economy to the last extreme. The result of this was God's Tree, a collection of stories so short, some of them were half a page long. Professor Pyotr Bitsilly thought God's Tree to be "the most perfect of Bunin’s works and the most exemplary. Nowhere else can such eloquent laconism can be found, such definitive and exquisite writing, such freedom of expression and really magnificent demonstration of
Highly influential, even if controversial, was his Cursed Days
Cursed Days
Cursed Days is a book by a Nobel Prize-winning Russian author Ivan Bunin, compiled of diaries and notes he made while in Moscow and Odessa in 1918-1920. Fragments from it were being published throughout 1925 and 1926 by the Paris-based Vozrozhdenye newspaper. In its full version Cursed Days...
1918–1920 diary, of which scholar Thomas Gaiton Marullo wrote:
Despite being virtually banned in the USSR up until the mid-1950s, Bunin exerted a strong influence over several generations of Soviet writers. Among those who owed a lot to Bunin critics mentioned Mikhail Sholokhov, Konstantin Fedin
Konstantin Fedin
-Biography:Born in Saratov of humble origins, Fedin studied in Moscow and Germany and was interned there during World War I. After his release he worked as an interpreter in the first Soviet embassy in Berlin...
, Konstantin Paustovsky
Konstantin Paustovsky
Konstantin Georgiyevich Paustovsky was a Russian Soviet writer nominated for the Nobel Prize for literature in 1965.-Early life:Konstantin Paustovsky was born in Moscow. His father, descendant of the Zaporizhia Cossacks, was a railroad statistician, and was “an incurable romantic and Protestant”....
, Sokolov-Mikitov
Ivan Sokolov-Mikitov
Ivan Sergeevich Sokolov-Mikitov was a Russian/Soviet writer and journalist who took part in numerous journeys and expreditions...
, and later Yuri Kazakov, Vasily Belov
Vasily Belov
Vasily Ivanovich Belov is a Soviet/Russian writer, poet and dramatist, who published more than 60 books which sold 7 million copies...
and Viktor Likhonosov
Viktor Likhonosov
Viktor Ivanovich Likhonosov is a Soviet, Russian writer, laureate of the Russian State Prize , the International Mikhail Sholokhov prize and the first Yasnaya Polyana Prize...
.
Ivan Bunin's books have been translated into many languages, and the world's leading writers praised his gift. Romain Rolland
Romain Rolland
Romain Rolland was a French dramatist, novelist, essayist, art historian and mystic who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1915.-Biography:...
called Bunin a "artistic genius"; he was spoken and written of in much the same vein by writers like Henri de Régnier
Henri de Régnier
Henri François Joseph de Régnier was a French symbolist poet, considered one of the most important of France during the early 20th century....
, Thomas Mann
Thomas Mann
Thomas Mann was a German novelist, short story writer, social critic, philanthropist, essayist, and 1929 Nobel Prize laureate, known for his series of highly symbolic and ironic epic novels and novellas, noted for their insight into the psychology of the artist and the intellectual...
, Rainer Maria Rilke
Rainer Maria Rilke
René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke , better known as Rainer Maria Rilke, was a Bohemian–Austrian poet. He is considered one of the most significant poets in the German language...
, Jerome K. Jerome
Jerome K. Jerome
Jerome Klapka Jerome was an English writer and humorist, best known for the humorous travelogue Three Men in a Boat.Jerome was born in Caldmore, Walsall, England, and was brought up in poverty in London...
, and Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz. In 1950, on the eve of his 80th birthday, François Mauriac
François Mauriac
François Mauriac was a French author; member of the Académie française ; laureate of the Nobel Prize in Literature . He was awarded the Grand Cross of the Légion d'honneur .-Biography:...
expressed in a letter his delight and admiration, but also his deep sympathy to Bunin's personal qualities and the dignified way he'd got through all the tremendous difficulties life had thrown at him. In a letter published by Figaro André Gide
André Gide
André Paul Guillaume Gide was a French author and winner of the Nobel Prize in literature in 1947. Gide's career ranged from its beginnings in the symbolist movement, to the advent of anticolonialism between the two World Wars.Known for his fiction as well as his autobiographical works, Gide...
greeted Bunin "on behalf of all France", calling him "the great artist" and adding: "I don't know of any other writer... who's so to the point in expressing human feelings, simple and yet always so fresh and new". European critics often compared Bunin to both Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy was a Russian writer who primarily wrote novels and short stories. Later in life, he also wrote plays and essays. His two most famous works, the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, are acknowledged as two of the greatest novels of all time and a pinnacle of realist...
and Dostoyevsky, crediting him with having renovated the Russian realist tradition both in essence and in form.
Private life
Bunin's first love was Varvara Paschenko, his classmate in Yelets, daughter of a doctor and an actress, whom he fell for in 1889 and then went on to work with in Oryol in 1892. Their relationship was difficult in many ways: the girl's father detested the union because of Bunin's impecunious circumstances, Varvara herself wasn't sure if she wanted to marry and Bunin too was uncertain whether marriage was really appropriate for him. The couple moved to PoltavaPoltava
Poltava is a city in located on the Vorskla River in central Ukraine. It is the administrative center of the Poltava Oblast , as well as the surrounding Poltava Raion of the oblast. Poltava's estimated population is 298,652 ....
and settled in Yuly Bunin's home, but by 1892 their relations deteriorated, Pashchenko complaining in a letter to Yuli Bunin that serious quarrels were frequent, and begging for assistance in bringing their union to an end. The affair eventually ended in 1894 with her marrying actor and writer A.N. Bibikov, Ivan Bunin's close friend. Bunin felt betrayed, and for a time his family feared the possibility of his committing suicide. According to some sources it was Varvara Paschenko who many years later would appear under the name of Lika in The Life of Arseniev
The Life of Arseniev
The Life of Arseniev is an autobiographical novel by a Nobel Prize-winning Russian author Ivan Bunin seen by many as his most important work written in emigration. The Life of Arseniev was being written and published in parts in the course of the 12 years, in 1927-1939, in France...
(chapter V of the book, entitled Lika, was also published as a short story). Scholar Tatyana Alexandrova, though, later put this to doubt (suggesting Mirra Lokhvitskaya
Mirra Lokhvitskaya
Mirra Lokhvitskaya was a Russian poet who rose to fame in the late 1890s and, due to the flamboyantly erotic sensuality of her works, was regarded as the "Russian Sappho" by her contemporaries...
might have been the major prototype), while Vera Muromtseva thought of Lika as a 'collective' character aggregating the writer's reminiscences of several women he knew in his youth.
In the summer of 1898 while staying with writer A. M. Fedorov, Bunin became acquainted with N. P. Tsakni, a Greek
Greeks
The Greeks, also known as the Hellenes , are a nation and ethnic group native to Greece, Cyprus and neighboring regions. They also form a significant diaspora, with Greek communities established around the world....
social-democrat activist, the publisher and editor of the Odessa newspaper Yuzhnoe Obozrenie. Invited to contribute to the paper, Bunin became virtually a daily visitor to the Tsakni family dacha and fell in love with the latter's eighteen-year-old daughter, Anna (1879–1963). On September 23, 1898, the two married, but by 1899 signs of alienation between them were obvious. At the time of their acrimonious separation in March 1900 Anna was pregnant. She gave birth to a son, Nikolai, in Odessa on August 30 of the same year. The boy, of whom his father saw very little, died on January 16, 1905, from a combination of scarlet fever
Scarlet fever
Scarlet fever is a disease caused by exotoxin released by Streptococcus pyogenes. Once a major cause of death, it is now effectively treated with antibiotics...
, measles
Measles
Measles, also known as rubeola or morbilli, is an infection of the respiratory system caused by a virus, specifically a paramyxovirus of the genus Morbillivirus. Morbilliviruses, like other paramyxoviruses, are enveloped, single-stranded, negative-sense RNA viruses...
and heart complications.
Ivan Bunin's second wife was Vera Muromtseva (1881–1961, niece of the high-ranking politician Sergey Muromtsev
Sergey Muromtsev
Sergei Andreevich Muromtsev was a Russian lawyer and politician, and chairman of the First Imperial Duma in 1906....
). The two had initially been introduced to each other by writer Ekaterina Lopatina some years earlier, but it was their encounter at the house of the writer Boris Zaitsev in November 1906 which led to an intense relationship which resulted in the couple becoming inseparable until Bunin's dying day. Bunin and Muromtseva married officially only in 1922, after he managed at last to divorce Tsakni legally. Decades later Vera Muromtseva-Bunina became famous in her own right with her book Life of Bunin.
In 1927, while in Grasse, Bunin fell for the Russian poet Galina Kuznetsova, on vacation there with her husband. The latter, outraged by the well-publicized affair, stormed off, while Bunin not only managed to somehow convince Vera Muromtseva that his love for Galina was purely platonic but also invite the latter to stay in the house as a secretary and 'a family member'. The situation was complicated by the fact that Leonid Zurov who stayed with the Bunins as a guest for many years, was secretly in love with Vera (of which her husband was aware); this made it more of a "love quadrilateral" than a mere triangle. Bunin and Kuznetsova affair ended dramatically in 1942 when the latter, now deep in love with another frequent guest, opera singer Margo Stepun, sister of Fyodor Stepun
Fyodor Stepun
Fyodor Stepun was a Russian and German writer, philosopher, historian and sociologist...
, left Bunin, who felt disgraced and insulted. The writer's tempestuous private life in emigration became the subject of the internationally acclaimed Russian movie, His Wife's Diary
His Wife's Diary
His Wife's Diary is a 2000 Russian film directed by Alexei Uchitel. It is a story about the last love affair of Ivan Bunin . It is set in the French Riviera in the 1940s....
(or The Diary of His Wife) (Дневник его жены) (2000). which caused controversy and was described by some as masterful and thought-provoking, by others - as vulgar, inaccurate and done in bad taste. Vera Muromtseva-Bunina later accepted both Kuznetsova, and Margarita Stepun, as friends: "nashi" ("ours"), as she called them, lived with the Bunins for long periods during the Second World War. According to Anthony J. Heywood of Leeds University, in Germany and then New York, after the war, Kuznetsova and Stepun negotiated with publishers on Bunin's behalf and maintained a regular correspondence with Ivan and Vera up until their respective deaths.
Short novels
- The VillageThe Village (Ivan Bunin novel)The Village is a short novel by a Nobel Prize-winning Russian author Ivan Bunin written in 1909 and first published in Sovremenny Mir journal under the title Novelet...
(Деревня, 1910) - Dry ValleyDry Valley (Ivan Bunin novel)Dry Valley is a short novel by a Nobel Prize-winning Russian author Ivan Bunin, first published in the April 1912 issue of the Saint Petersburg Vestnik Evropy magazine...
(Суходол, 1912) - Mitya's LoveMitya's LoveMitya's Love is a short novel by a Nobel Prize-winning Russian author Ivan Bunin written in 1924 and first published in books XXIII and XXIV of the Sovremennye Zapiski Paris-based literary journal in 1925...
(Митина любовь, 1924)
Short story collections
- To the Edge of the World and Other Stories (На край света и другие рассказы, 1897)
- Flowers of the Field (Цветы полевые, 1901)
- Bird's ShadowBird's ShadowBird's Shadow is a collection of short stories by a Nobel Prize-winning Russian author Ivan Bunin. Based on memories and impressions of the vast tour over the Middle East he and Vera Muromtseva undertook in the 1900s...
(Тень птицы, 1907–1911; Paris, 1931) - Ioann the Mourner (Иоанн Рыдалец, 1913)
- Chalice of Life (Чаша жизни, Petersburg, 1915; Paris, 1922)
- The Gentleman from San FranciscoThe Gentleman from San FranciscoThe Gentleman from San Francisco is a short story by a Nobel Prize-winning Russian author Ivan Bunin, written in 1915 and published the same year in Moscow, in the 5th volume of Slovo anthology...
(Господин из Сан-Франциско, 1916) - Chang's Dreams (Сны Чанга, 1916, 1918)
- Temple of the Sun (Храм Солнца, 1917)
- Primal Love (Начальная любовь, Prague, 1921)
- Scream (Крик, Paris, 1921)
- Rose of Jerico (Роза Иерихона, Berlin, 1924)
- Mitya's Love (Митина любовь, Paris, 1924; New York, 1953)
- Sunstroke (Солнечный удар, Paris, 1927)
- Sacred Tree (Божье древо, Paris, 1931)
- Dark AvenuesDark AvenuesDark Avenues is a collection of short stories by a Nobel Prize-winning Russian author Ivan Bunin written in 1937-1944, mostly in Grasse, France, first 11 novellas of which were published in New York, USA, in 1943. The book's full version came out in 1946 in Paris...
(Тёмные аллеи, New York, 1943; Paris, 1946) - Judea in Spring (Весной в Иудее, New York, 1953)
- Loopy Ears and Other StoriesLoopy EarsLoopy Ears is a short story by a Nobel Prize-winning Russian author Ivan Bunin which was written in 1917 and gave his postumous 1954 collection its title...
(Петлистые уши и другие рассказы, 1954, New York, posthumous)
Poetry
- Poems (1887–1891) (1891, originally as a literary supplement to Orlovsky vestnik newspaper)
- Under the Open Skies (Под открытым небом, 1898)
- Falling Leaves (Листопад, Moscow, 1901)
- Poems (1903) (Стихотворения, 1903)
- Poems (1903–1906) (Стихотворения, 1906)
- Poems of 1907 (Saint Petersburg, 1908)
- Selected Poems (Paris, 1929)
Memoirs and diaries
- Waters Aplenty (Воды многие, 1910, 1926)
- Cursed DaysCursed DaysCursed Days is a book by a Nobel Prize-winning Russian author Ivan Bunin, compiled of diaries and notes he made while in Moscow and Odessa in 1918-1920. Fragments from it were being published throughout 1925 and 1926 by the Paris-based Vozrozhdenye newspaper. In its full version Cursed Days...
(Окаянные дни, 1925–1926) - Memoirs. Under the Sickle and the Hammer. (Воспоминания. Под серпом и молотом. 1950)
See also:
- List of poems by Ivan Bunin
- List of short stories by Ivan Bunin
Additional reading
- Night of Denial: Stories and Novellas, Ivan Bunin. Trans. Robert Bowie. Northwestern 2006 ISBN 0-8101-1403-8
- The Life of ArsenievThe Life of ArsenievThe Life of Arseniev is an autobiographical novel by a Nobel Prize-winning Russian author Ivan Bunin seen by many as his most important work written in emigration. The Life of Arseniev was being written and published in parts in the course of the 12 years, in 1927-1939, in France...
, Ivan Bunin. edited by Andrew Baruch Wachtel. Northwestern 1994 ISBN 0-8101-1172-1 - Dark AvenuesDark AvenuesDark Avenues is a collection of short stories by a Nobel Prize-winning Russian author Ivan Bunin written in 1937-1944, mostly in Grasse, France, first 11 novellas of which were published in New York, USA, in 1943. The book's full version came out in 1946 in Paris...
, Ivan Bunin. Translated by Hugh Aplin. Oneworld Classics 2008 ISBN 978–1847490476 - Thomas Gaiton Marullo. Ivan Bunin: Russian Requiem, 1885–1920: A Portrait from Letters, Diaries, and Fiction (1993, Vol.1)
- Thomas Gaiton Marullo. From the Other Shore, 1920–1933: A Portrait from Letters, Diaries, and Fiction. (1995, Vol.2)
- Thomas Gaiton Marullo. Ivan Bunin: The Twilight of Emigre Russia, 1934–1953: A Portrait from Letters, Diaries, and Memoirs. (2002, Vol.3)
- Alexander F. Zweers. The Narratology of the Autobiography: An analysis of the literary devices employed in Ivan Bunin's The life of Arsenév. Peter Lang Publishing 1997 ISBN 0-8204-3357-8
External links
Ivan Bunin site. A comprehensive collection of biographies, autobiographies, articles, photos and memoirs. Bunin: biography, photos, poems, prose, diaries, critical essays- Biography in English
- Biography
- Works by Ivan Bunin at Internet ArchiveInternet ArchiveThe Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It offers permanent storage and access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, music, moving images, and nearly 3 million public domain books. The Internet Archive...
(scanned books original editions) - Ivan Bunin's Gravesite
- Ivan Bunin in The Literary Encyclopedia