Ivan Alekseyevich Bunin
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Ivan Alekseyevich Bunin (Ива́н Алексе́евич Бу́нин) (October 22 [O.S.
October 10] 1870)—November 8, 1953) was the first Russian writer to win
the Nobel Prize for Literature. The texture of his poems and stories,
sometimes referred to as "Bunin brocade", is one of the richest in the
language. In the words of Soviet-era writer K.G. Paustovsky, the 1930
novel Life of Arseniev is not only an apical work of written Russian,
but also "one of the remarkable occurences of world literature."
Early life
Bunin was born on his parents' estate in Voronezh province in central
Russia. He came from a long line of landed gentry and serf owners, but
his grandfather and father had squandered nearly all of the estate.
He was sent to the public school in Yelets (Lipetskaya oblast) in
1881, but had to return home after five years. His brother, who was
university-educated, encouraged him to read the Russian classics and to
write.
At 17, he published his first poem in 1887 in a Saint Petersburg
literary magazine. His first collection of poems, Listopad (1901), was
warmly welcomed by critics. Although his poems are said to continue the
19th-century traditions of the Parnassian poets, they are steeped in
oriental mysticism and sparkle with striking, carefully chosen epithets.
Vladimir Nabokov was a great admirer of Bunin's verse, comparing him
with Alexander Blok, but scorned his prose.
In 1889, he followed his brother to Kharkov, where he became a
government clerk, assistant editor of a local paper, librarian, and
court statistician. Bunin also began a correspondence with Anton
Chekhov, with whom he became close friends. He also had a more distant
relationship with Maxim Gorky and Leo Tolstoy.
In 1891, he published his first short story, "Country Sketch" in a
literary journal. As the time went by, he switched from writing poems to
short stories. His first acclaimed novellas were "On the Farm," "The
News From Home," "To the Edge of the World," "Antonov Apples," and "The
Gentleman from San Francisco," the latter being his most representative
piece and the one translated in English by D. H. Lawrence.
Bunin was a well-known translator himself. The best known of his
translations is Longfellow's "The Song of Hiawatha" for which Bunin was
awarded the Pushkin Prize in 1903. He also did translations of Byron,
Tennyson, and Musset. In 1909, he was elected to the Russian Academy.
Renown
From 1895, Bunin divided
his time between Moscow and Saint Petersburg. He married the daughter of
a Greek revolutionary in 1898, but the marriage ended in divorce.
Although he remarried in 1907, Bunin's romances with other women
continued right up to the end of his life. His tempestuous private life
in emigration is the subject of the internationally acclaimed Russian
movie, His Wife's Diary (or The Diary of His Wife) (Дневник его жены)
(2000)[2].
Bunin published his first full-length work, The Village, when he was
40. It was a bleak portrayal of village life, with its stupidity,
brutality, and violence. Its harsh realism, "the characters having sunk
so far below the average of intelligence as to be scarcely human,"
brought him in touch with Maxim Gorky. Two years later, he published Dry
Valley, which was a veiled portrayal of his family.
Before World War I, Bunin traveled in Ceylon, Palestine, Egypt, and
Turkey, and these travels left their mark on his writing. He spent the
winters from 1912 to 1914 on Capri with Gorky.
Emigration
Bunin left Moscow after the revolution in 1917, moving to Odessa. He
left Odessa on the last French ship in 1919 and settled in Grasse,
France. There, he published his diary The Accursed Days, which voiced
his aristocratic aversion to the Bolshevik regime. About the Soviet
government he wrote: "What a disgusting gallery of convicts!"
Bunin was much lionized in the emigration, where he came to be viewed
as the eldest of living Russian writers in the tradition of Tolstoy and
Chekhov. Accordingly, he was the first Russian to win the Nobel Prize
for Literature in 1933. On the journey through Germany to accept the
prize in Stockholm, he was detained by the Nazis, ostensibly for jewel
smuggling, and forced to drink a bottle of castor oil.
In the 1930s, Bunin published two parts of a projected autobiographic
trilogy: The Life of Arsenyev and Lika, which were "neither a short
novel, nor a novel, nor a long short story, but . . . of a genre yet
unknown." Later, he worked upon his celebrated cycle of nostalgic
stories with a strong erotic undercurrent and a Proustian ring. They
were published as the Dark Avenues or The Dark Alleys in 1943.
Bunin was a strong opponent of the Nazis and sheltered a Jewish
writer in his house in Grasse throughout the occupation.
Decline and death
Towards the end of his life, he became interested in Soviet literature
and even entertained plans of returning to Russia, as Aleksandr Kuprin
had done before. Bunin died of a heart attack in a Paris attic flat,
while his invaluable book of reminiscences on Chekhov was still
unfinished. He was buried in the Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois Russian
Cemetery. Several years later, during the Khrushchev thaw, his works
were allowed for publication in the Soviet Union.
