Ivan Bunin

• 1. Introduction

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  Ivan Alekseyevich Bunin became the first Russian writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Swedish Academy gave it to him in 1933, while he was living as an exile in France. On the 10th of November that year, Paris newspapers ran huge headlines announcing his name, and the Russian community in France found a reason to celebrate. Back in the Soviet Union, officials dismissed his triumph as an imperialist intrigue.

  He was a man of nobility who claimed indifference to his own high blood. He was a poet who insisted he was born a versemaker, then made his name in prose. He sheltered fugitives from the Nazis in a freezing mountain villa, and he wrote a diary so anti-Bolshevik that it stayed banned in his homeland until the late 1980s. How did a boy expelled from a provincial school become the moral spokesman for a generation of exiles? What did he find, and lose, in leaving Russia for good?

• 2. An Old And Noble House

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  Bunin was born on a parental estate in Voronezh province, the youngest of the three sons of Aleksey Nikolayevich Bunin and Lyudmila Aleksandrovna. He took particular pride in his ancestors, naming the poets Anna Bunina and Vasily Zhukovsky among them. In his 1952 autobiography he wrote that he came from an old and noble house that had given Russia many illustrious figures in politics and the arts.

  His father he remembered as a strong man, quick-tempered and generous, addicted to gambling and eloquent in a theatrical way. Before the Crimean War, Bunin recalled, his father had never even known the taste of wine. His mother Lyudmila was the gentler of the two, and it was she who opened the world of Russian folklore to her son. She said of him that none of her other children had a soul like his.

  The boy's senses were extraordinarily acute. He claimed he could see all seven stars of the Pleiades, hear a marmot's whistle a verst away, and get drunk on the smell of a lily of the valley or an old book. He spent a childhood full of melancholic poetry amid vast fields and huge winter snowdrifts at Ozerky. By the end of the 1870s, the family's gambling losses had stripped away most of their wealth. Sent to a public school in Yelets in 1881, he never finished, expelled in March 1886 for failing to return after the Christmas holidays.

• 3. From Verse To Brocade

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  In May 1887, Bunin published his first poem, "Village Paupers," in the Saint Petersburg magazine Rodina. His debut book of poetry appeared in Oryol in 1891. The teacher who first pushed him toward writing was his own elder brother Yuly, a Narodnik activist deported home, who taught him philosophy and the social sciences and urged him to read the Russian classics. Until 1920, Yuly remained his closest friend and mentor.

  Bunin made a major switch from poetry to prose at the turn of the century. He cited Gustave Flaubert as an influence and tried to show that prose could be driven by poetic rhythms and still remain prose. He told his nephew Pusheshnikov that finding the proper rhythm of a story was the crucial thing, and that once it was there, everything else came spontaneously. The texture of his work grew so rich it earned a nickname, Bunin brocade, considered one of the densest in the language.

  The novella "Antonov Apples" appeared in 1900 and is regarded as his first real masterpiece, though critics of the day attacked it as too nostalgic and elitist. His third book of poetry, "Falling Leaves," won praise from Alexander Blok and Aleksandr Kuprin, and Gorky called him the first poet of our times. For "Falling Leaves" and his translation of Longfellow's "The Song of Hiawatha," Bunin received his first Pushkin Prize. In October 1909 he won a second Pushkin Prize and was elected to the Russian Academy.

• 4. The Bleak Village

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  In 1910, Bunin published "The Village," a bleak portrait of Russian country life full of stupidity, brutality, and violence. Its harsh realism stunned readers and made him famous. Maxim Gorky responded by calling him the best Russian writer of the day. Bunin himself said the book sketched with sharp cruelty the most striking lines of the Russian soul, its light and dark sides.

  "Dry Valley" followed in 1912, his second major piece of semi-autobiographical fiction, again dividing critics between those who praised its honesty and those appalled by its negativism. Gorky called it one of the greatest books of Russian horror, with an element of liturgy in it, and said that like a young priest with his faith destroyed, Bunin had buried the whole of his class. After "The Village," Bunin believed it had become impossible to paint Russian peasant life in the old idealised, Narodnik style.

  His politics shifted along with his fiction. He wrote in the early 1910s that he had left his Narodnicism and his Tolstoyism behind, moving closer to the social democrats while staying out of all parties. He criticised the Russian intelligentsia for being ignorant of the common people, and spoke of a tragic schism between the cultured and the uncultured masses. In 1915 came "The Gentleman from San Francisco," arguably his best-known short story, later translated into English by D. H. Lawrence.

• 5. The Last French Ship

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  On the 26th of January 1920, Bunin and Vera Muromtseva boarded the last French ship in Odessa and soon reached Constantinople. By 1919 he had been working for the Volunteer Army, editing the cultural section of the anti-Bolshevik newspaper Iuzhnoe Slovo. After short stays in Sofia and Belgrade, the couple arrived in Paris on the 28th of March 1920, dividing their time between an apartment in the 16th arrondissement and rented villas near Grasse.

  Much as he hated Bolshevism, Bunin refused to endorse foreign intervention in Russia. He said he would rather die in exile than return home with the help of Poland or England, quoting his father's lesson to love your own tub even if it is broken up. His wife recalled that he often complained he could never get used to the new world, saying he belonged to the old world of Goncharov and Tolstoy, of Moscow and Saint Petersburg, where his muse had been lost.

  Yet his exile prose showed clear artistic progress. "Mitya's Love," "Sunstroke," and especially "The Life of Arseniev," written between 1927 and 1929, were hailed as bringing Russian literature to new heights. Konstantin Paustovsky called "The Life of Arseniev" an apex of the whole of Russian prose. From 1925, his diary of the years 1918 to 1920 began appearing under the title "Cursed Days," one of the very few anti-Bolshevik diaries preserved from the revolution and civil war.

• 6. An Exile Honoured

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  Standing before the Swedish Academy in 1933, Bunin noted that for the first time since the prize was founded it had gone to an exile. He asked who he was in truth and answered, an exile enjoying the hospitality of France. He told the gentlemen of the Academy that their choice was a gesture of great beauty, because the world needed centers of absolute independence, and that for writers especially, freedom is a dogma and an axiom.

  The award itself honoured him for developing the traditions of Russian classic prose with chastity and artfulness. Fellow writer Boris Zaitsev described stepping out into the Paris night, touring the local bistros, and drinking in every one to the health of Ivan Bunin. The emigres, he said, had felt they were at the bottom, and now their writer had won an internationally acclaimed prize for real prose.

  Bunin donated 100,000 francs to a literary charity fund, though distributing the money stirred quarrels among his fellow exiles. His relations soured with Zinaida Gippius and Dmitry Merezhkovsky, who had once suggested they split the prize between them should either win. Feted as the embodiment of non-Bolshevik Russian values, Bunin found his European travels filling the front pages of the emigre press for the rest of the decade. In 1936 he was stopped and searched on the German border at Lindau, an incident that caused outrage in France.

• 7. Villa In The Mountains

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  As the Second World War broke out, friends in New York arranged officially endorsed invitations for Bunin to travel to the United States, and in 1941 the couple received Nansen passports for the trip. They chose instead to remain in Grasse, spending the war years high in the mountains at Villa Jeanette. Two young writers lived with them: Leonid Zurov, who had arrived from Latvia and stayed for the rest of their lives, and Nikolai Roshchin.

  The small commune grew vegetables and helped one another survive. According to Zurov, the population of Grasse had eaten all of their cats and dogs. A journalist who visited in 1942 described Bunin as skinny and emaciated, looking like an ancient patrician. Vera Muromtseva-Bunina remembered five or six of them writing continuously, the only way to bear the unbearable and overcome hunger, cold, and fear.

  Bunin was a staunch anti-Nazi who called Hitler and Mussolini rabid monkeys. He risked his life sheltering fugitives, including Jews such as the pianist A. Liebermann and his wife, in his house after Vichy was occupied. By Zurov's account, German forces' headquarters sat only 300 metres from his home. On the 24th of September 1944, Bunin wrote to Roshchin that the Germans had fled Grasse without a fight on the 23rd of August, and that the Americans had come the next morning. It was in 1938, just before all this, that he had begun "Dark Avenues," the cycle of nostalgic, erotically charged stories that appeared in full in 1946.

• 8. A Graveyard Trip

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  In the autumn of 1945, on a wave of patriotic feeling, the Parisian Russian community widely celebrated Bunin's 75th birthday. He began communicating closely with Soviet figures, the journalist Yuri Zhukov and the literary agent Boris Mikhailov, and entertained plans of returning to the Soviet Union as Aleksandr Kuprin had done. In 1946 he praised the decision to return Soviet citizenship to Russian exiles, while still stopping short of saying yes.

  He explained his hesitation in human terms. It was hard for an old man to go back to places where he had pranced goat-like in better times, he told Zhukov, since friends and relatives were all buried and the trip would be a graveyard trip. Negotiations for his return collapsed after his 1950 "Memoirs," full of scathing criticism of Soviet cultural life. He wrote that he had been born too late, and asked how he could not be jealous of Noah, who lived through only one flood in his lifetime.

  On the 2nd of May 1953, Bunin made the last entry in his diary, writing that it was dumbfoundingly extraordinary that in a short while there would be no more of him. He died in a Paris attic flat in the early hours of the 8th of November 1953, with heart failure, cardiac asthma, and pulmonary sclerosis cited as causes. A lavish service took place at the Russian Church on Rue Daru, and on the 30th of January 1954 he was buried in the Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois Russian Cemetery. In 1965 the Complete Bunin appeared in Moscow in nine volumes, though "Cursed Days" stayed banned in the Soviet Union until the late 1980s.