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A hot summer’s day, in the fields, behind the garden of an old country estate, a long-neglected graveyard – hummocks covered in tall flowers and grasses and a solitary, ramshackle, brick-built chapel, all wildly overgrown with flowers and grasses, nettles and alliums. Children from the estate, squatting beside the chapel, are looking in with sharp eyes through a long and narrow broken window at ground level. Nothing can be seen there, there’s only a cold draught coming from it. Everywhere else it’s light and hot, but there it’s dark and cold: there in iron boxes lie granddads and grannies of some sort, and some man who shot himself too. It’s all very interesting and amazing: we here have the sunshine, flowers, grasses, flies, bumblebees and butterflies, we can play and run about, it’s scary for us, yet fun too, squatting down, but they’re always lying there in the darkness, like at night-time, in thick and cold iron boxes; the granddads and grannies are all old, but the man is still young…
“But why did he shoot himself?”
“He was very much in love, and when very much in love, they always shoot themselves…”
In the blue sea of the sky, there are beautiful white clouds in places like islands, and the warm wind from the fields bears the sweet scent of flowering rye. And the hotter and more joyously the sun burns, the colder the draught from the dark, from the window.
2nd July 1944
This translation of Dark Avenues has been made from the last Russian edition published in Bunin’s lifetime, Temnye allei (Paris, 1946). Bunin continued to work on the stories in the years leading up to his death, but there is no definitive text incorporating all the amendments he might have made to them in any subsequent edition. It is known, however, that he did intend to add two stories to the selection published in 1946, and these are represented here in the Appendix. The translations have again been made from the last Russian edition published in the writer’s lifetime, Vesnoi, v ludee. Roza Ierikhona (New York, 1953), pp. 13–18 and 24–32.
Ivan Alexeyevich Bunin was born in the city of Voronezh, in south-western Russia, on 10th October 1870. His father Alexei Nikolayevich, a landowner with property in the Oryol and Tula Provinces, was a descendant of an aristocratic family, known since the fifteenth century. A gifted but impractical man, who was prone to occasional bouts of drinking and gambling, he lost all of his estates, one after another, and ended up destitute when Bunin was already a young man. Alexei and his wife Lyudmila Alexandrovna (née Chubarova, also an aristocrat) had nine children, four of whom survived infancy. Bunin had two older brothers, Yuli and Yevgeny, and a younger sister called Maria.
In an attempt to break Alexei’s bad habits and to reduce living expenses, in 1874 the family moved from Voronezh to their estate in Butyrki in the Elets region of the Oryol Province, some 130 km north of Voronezh. This is where Bunin remained until 1881, tutored privately by Nikolai Osipovich Romashkov, a talented amateur artist and musician, who had studied at the Lazarev Institute of Oriental Languages in Moscow and at Moscow University. Under Romashkov’s influence, Bunin contemplated becoming an artist too. Romashkov taught his pupil to read and write using Russian translations of Homer’s Odyssey and Cervantes’s Don Quixote. One of the first books Bunin read – an anthology of English poetry from Chaucer to Tennyson, in Russian translation, edited by Nikolai Gerbel (Angliiskie poety v biografiiakh i obraztsakh, 1875) – inspired him to become a poet. Spending a great deal of time outdoors, and in close contact with servants and peasants, fostered Bunin’s love of nature and detailed knowledge of rural life.
In August 1881, Bunin entered a school in Elets, where he had to stay, mostly in rented accommodation, for four and a half years, going back to Butyrki for vacations (and, from spring 1883, to the village of Ozerki in the same region, where the family relocated to take possession of an inheritance). Bunin was not a particularly diligent student: he had to repeat his third year because he had failed maths, and was permanently excluded in March 1886 for non-attendance. He preferred to study at home with his brother Yuli, a member of the Populist “Black Repartition” group, who was taken into custody in September 1884 for revolutionary activity and eventually sentenced to a three-year detention at his parents’ estate in 1885.
While in Ozerki, in 1886–87 Bunin wrote his first novel, Attraction (Uvlechenie), and the first part of the long poem Pyotr Rogachev (an imitation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin) – but these did not appear in print in Bunin’s lifetime. His first publication, in the St Petersburg weekly Rodina (Motherland) of 22nd February 1887, was a poem commemorating the untimely death of Semyon Nadson, a fashionable civic poet. Bunin must have been embarrassed by the rather clichéd rhetoric of the piece, because he later claimed that he had made his literary debut with a poem called ‘The Village Beggar’ (in Rodina, 17th May 1887), an emotive snapshot of an old vagabond. In the course of 1888, more of Bunin’s poems came out in the St Petersburg literary monthly Knizhki “Nedeli” (Book Supplements to The Weekly), run by Liberal Populists. His contributions to various periodicals led to a job offer as a staff writer and copy editor at the regional newspaper Orlovskii vestnik (The Oryol Herald), which he accepted in the autumn of 1889. Subsequently, Orlovskii vestnik issued Bunin’s first book (a collection of poems written in 1887–91) and printed a number of his stories (most notably ‘Small Landowners’ in 1891, a series of satirical sketches of Gogolesque types in and around Elets, with Romashkov serving as a model for the character of Yakov Matveyev). However, Bunin engaged in fiction writing in earnest only in Poltava, where he moved in late August 1892, following his brother Yuli, to become a local administration employee.
Bunin came to Poltava with Varvara Paschenko, the daughter of an Elets physician. They met when she was a proofreader for Orlovskii vestnik, and lived as an unmarried couple, against the will of her parents who feared that Bunin would not be capable of earning a stable income. In Poltava, Bunin worked as a librarian and a statistician and contributed regularly to the newspaper Poltavskie gubernskie vedomosti (The Poltava Regional News) – as well as, occasionally, to the periodicals in the capital, including prestigious magazines such as Vestnik Evropy (The European Herald) and Russkoe bogatstvo (The Russian Wealth). He also joined the Tolstoyans and tried to disseminate the output of their publishing house Posrednik (The Intermediary). He was arrested for doing so without a licence, and sentenced to three months’ imprisonment, but was amnestied before he could serve the time, following the death of Alexander III in October 1894 and Nicholas II’s accession to the throne. Bunin’s ambivalent view of the Tolstoyans is reflected in his later story ‘At the Summer House’ (1896). That same year, Paschenko ended her turbulent relationship with Bunin, to marry his wealthy friend Arseny Bibikov. In January 1895, Bunin left Poltava for St Petersburg and Moscow to pursue the career of a freelance writer.
On arrival, Bunin became acquainted with representatives of the four most important Russian literary generations, such as the doyen of the Russian realist school Dmitry Grigorovich, the Populist novelists Nikolai Zlatovratsky and Alexander Ertel, as well as Anton Chekhov and the Symbolist poets Konstantin Balmont and Valery Bryusov. Although Bunin strove to maintain independence and impartiality, and did not wish to join any literary camp in particular, he felt more attracted by the classical Russian tradition than by its decadent modernist counterpart (although in 1901 he did bring out his Falling Leaves (Listopad) poetry collection in the Symbolist publishing house Skorpion). In St Petersburg Bunin published a collection of short stories, To the End of the World (Na krai sveta, 1897), the title piece describing Ukrainian peasant settlers on their way to the Russian Far East; in Moscow, yet another book of poetry, entitled Under the Open Sky (Pod otkrytym nebom, 1898); and in 1896 in Oryol, as a supplement to Orlovskii vestnik, his translation of The Song of Hiawatha by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, awarded a Pushkin Prize by the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1903. Bunin had taught himself English and, among other things, also translated Byron’s Cain and Tennyson’s ‘Godiva’ – which, together with Bunin’s 1903–07 collections of original poetry, received yet another Pushkin Prize in 1909.
Bunin became a member of the “Wednesday” literary circle, founded in 1898 by the author Nikolai Teleshov, with Zlatovratsky, Chekhov, Alexander Kuprin, Leonid Andreyev and other distinguished authors as its associates. The same year saw the foundation of the publishing cooperative Znanie (Knowledge) – closely linked to Maxim Gorky, whom Bunin met through Chekhov in 1899 – which produced the first five volumes of the first edition of Bunin’s collected works (1902–09). In this period, Bunin was invited to undertake several editorial commissions: in 1904–05, he oversaw publications of fiction and poetry in the Pravda (Truth) magazine, but left its editorial board because of his rift with the Social Democrats on it; in 1907, he was briefly involved in the editing of the Zemlia (Earth) anthologies; and in 1909, he worked as a literary editor on the magazine Severnoe siianie (Northern Lights). Meanwhile, his reputation had grown to such an extent that in autumn 1909 he was elected one of the twelve honorary members of the Russian Academy of Sciences in the belles-lettres category. In his capacity as an honorary academician, Bunin was asked to appraise fiction and poetry submitted for the Academy’s annual competitions, and his negative peer review of four books of poetry by the modernist Sergei Gorodetsky earned Bunin the Academy’s golden Pushkin medal for 1911. In 1912, Bunin became an honorary member of the Society of Lovers of Russian Literature (affiliated to Moscow University); he also acted as the Society’s sometime Deputy Chair and temporary Chair. On 27th–29th October 1912, the twenty-fifth anniversary of Bunin’s literary activity was celebrated at a number of special ceremonies in Moscow, and in 1915, his complete works in six volumes were issued by the publisher Adolf Marx.
Throughout these years of literary endeavour and success, Bunin always found time to travel widely. In autumn 1888 Yuli left Ozerki for the city of Kharkov in Ukraine to take up a job as a statistician. Early the next year, Bunin visited him there, and then went on to the Crimean peninsular to see the cities of Yalta and Sebastopol, thus making his first long-distance trip. From then on, Bunin tried to use every opportunity to travel, the further the better; a sedentary lifestyle had never been quite for him, especially in his younger years. His attempt to settle down in Odessa (a large port on the Black Sea) and marry, on 23rd September 1898, Anna Tsakni – the daughter of the publisher of the newspaper Iuzhnoe obozrenie (Southern Review), which Bunin wrote for – ended in a separation in early March 1900. Bunin and Tsakni had a son, Nikolai, who was born in August 1900 and died in January 1905 of complications caused by scarlet fever and measles.
This failed marriage led to a period of increased travel. In October and November 1900, Bunin went abroad for the first time, with his friend Vladimir Kurovsky, an artist and custodian of the Odessa Art Museum. They visited Germany, France, Austria and Switzerland. In April 1903, Bunin went to Istanbul, which led to a lifelong fascination with the city (afterwards, Bunin returned to it at least twelve more times). From late December 1903 to early February 1904, he travelled through France and Italy in the company of the playwright Sergei Naidyonov. Four months later, Bunin toured the Caucasus and in July 1905 he went to Finland (then part of the Russian Empire).
In November 1905 Bunin began a relationship with his future second wife, Vera Nikolayevna Muromtseva, a graduate of the Science Faculty of the Higher Courses for Women in Moscow and the niece of a State Duma chairman. They started living together soon afterwards, but married only in November 1922 in Paris (as Bunin’s divorce from Tsakni was finalized on 20th June 1922). She accompanied him on his travels, which were again frequent and far-ranging. In April and May 1907, Bunin and Muromtseva journeyed to Egypt, Syria and Palestine, via Turkey and Greece – a trip that few Russians at the time ever considered making (it was described in the Temple of the Sun cycle of stories, 1907–11). Then, in March and April 1909, Bunin and Muromtseva went to Italy (via Austria), spending much of their time on the Italian island of Capri, later described in Bunin’s story ‘The Gentleman from San Francisco’ (1915), and between March and May 1910, they went to Algiers and Tunisia – via Austria, Italy, France, Greece and Turkey – and paid a visit to the Sahara desert. Between December 1910 and April 1911, the couple returned to Egypt, and from there journeyed to Ceylon. They even contemplated going from Ceylon to Japan, but ran out of time and money. Bunin’s diary of the voyage along the Suez canal and across the Red Sea and the Indian ocean was published in 1925–26 under the title ‘The Waters Are Many’; in addition, Ceylon served as a background for his 1914 story ‘Brothers’, and one of its ancient capitals, Anuradhapura, was depicted in the 1924 story ‘The City of the King of Kings’.
Bunin’s journeys to remote exotic destinations assisted him in acquiring an enhanced awareness of Muslim, Jewish and Buddhist traditions, uncommon in a Russian intellectual with a strong Orthodox Christian background. Examples of this insight can be found for instance in his poems ‘Mohammed in Exile’ (1906), ‘Torah’ (1914) and the short stories ‘Gautami’ (1919) and ‘The Night of Renunciation’ (1921). Between November 1911 and March 1914, Bunin and Muromtseva returned to Italy several times (mostly to Capri), and visited Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Greece on their way from and to Russia. Bunin also went on a Black Sea voyage with his brother Yuli in summer 1913, stopping in Batumi, Trabzon, Istanbul and Constanta, and then proceeding to Bucharest, Iasi and Chisinau – Bunin later used a Bessarabian setting for his 1916 story ‘A Song about a Noble Brigand’. A year later, the brothers made a trip along the Volga river, from Saratov to Yaroslavl. They were in Samara when the news about the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo reached them.
After war was declared, Bunin spent three months doing little else besides reading newspapers in a state of shock. On 28th September 1914, the Russkoe slovo (Russian Word) periodical published his protest against German atrocities, written on behalf of Russian authors, actors and artists. In it, Bunin claimed that German soldiers were reminding mankind that “the ancient beast inside the human being is alive and strong, and even the nations that are leading the advance of civilization can easily give evil will a free rein and become like the half-naked hordes of their ancestors, who crushed the legacy of the classical world under their heavy feet fifteen centuries ago”. However, the war did not make Bunin a chauvinist ascribing good and evil qualities to particular nations; on the contrary, he believed that the epoch ushered in by the war might well be dominated by a killer of indeterminate (or any) nationality, capable of executing defenceless people for no reason and without remorse – this is illustrated by the character of Adam Sokolovich in his 1916 story ‘Loopy Ears’, openly polemical against Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and its repentant murderer Raskolnikov. The ensuing February and October 1917 revolutions confirmed Bunin’s worst fears, harboured at least since the 1905–07 Russian civil unrest, which he witnessed in Odessa (the Jewish pogroms in September and October 1905), Moscow (the December 1905 uprising) and in the countryside (where, in June 1906, peasants set on fire the estates of Bunin’s brother Yevgeny and cousin Sofia Pusheshnikova).
Bunin was in Moscow when the February 1917 revolution took place. Although a man of moderate left-wing persuasions and by no means a monarchist, Bunin dismissed the Provisional Government as a “travesty”. In early April 1917, he ended his long-term friendship with Gorky over his proximity to the Bolsheviks, whose coup d’état forced the Bunins out of Moscow. On 21st May 1918, they left for Odessa, which at the time belonged to the independent Ukrainian State, with Hetman Pavlo Skoropadsky as its head. They arrived on 3 rd June, via Orsha, Minsk, Gomel and Kiev, and remained in Odessa for almost twenty months, surviving the rule of the Ukrainian Directorate in November and December 1918, the French occupation from December 1918 to April 1919, the Bolshevik regime of April to August 1919 and the White (Volunteer) Army administration of August 1919 to early 1920. In his diary Cursed Days (Okaiannye dni, 1936), covering life in Bolshevik-controlled Moscow and Odessa, Bunin noted: “Our children and grandchildren won’t be able even to imagine the Russia that we once (only yesterday) lived in – Russia with all its might, complexity, wealth and happiness, which we neither appreciated nor understood”. In Odessa, Bunin contributed to local periodicals, such as Odesskie novosti (Odessa News), Odesskii listok (Odessa Sheet) and Nashe slovo (Our Word), as well as co-editing the newspaper Iuzhnoe slovo (Word of the South), set up by the Volunteer Army. On 26th January 1920, facing the danger of yet another Bolshevik takeover, Bunin (who had by now become an accomplished anti-Communist) and Muromtseva left Russia for good. Their journey to Istanbul on the Sparta steamship is described in the story ‘The End’ (1921).
The couple settled in France, arriving there on 28th March 1920, via Sofia and Belgrade. From 1923, a pattern was established, according to which the Bunins tended to spend the winter months in Paris, and spring, summer and autumn at various villas on the French Riviera, most frequently in the town of Grasse. Bunin’s royalties for translations into foreign languages and for publications in the Russian émigré press – e.g. the Parisian newspapers Poslednie novosti (The Latest News), Vozrozhdenie (Revival) and Rossiia i slavianstvo (Russia and the Slavic World) – augmented by a grant from the Czechoslovakian government (disbursed in 1924–28), allowed him not only to lead a modestly independent life, but also to take under his wing a number of young aspiring Russian authors, who were often invited to stay for lengthy periods of time under one roof with the Bunins. Of these authors, Galina Kuznetsova was Bunin’s lover between 1926 and 1934 (when she left him for the singer Margarita Stepun), and Leonid Zurov eventually inherited Bunin’s intellectual property rights and archive.
Bunin’s attitude to Russia differed from that of a typical émigré by avoiding cheap sentimentality and futile vindictiveness. In his story ‘Eternal Spring’ (1923), Bunin depicted pre-revolutionary Russia as a remote museum-like past, a return to which was neither possible nor desirable. Perhaps he was aided in this attitude by being something of a citizen of the world, who only feels at home when he is on the move. Even as a stateless person, Bunin managed to go abroad (e.g. to Wiesbaden from July to September 1921 and to London in February 1925), undeterred by significant visa problems. In his new poetry and fiction, Russian history and culture remained only one of many different themes. Still, his magnum opus, the loosely autobiographical novel Arsenyev’s Life (Zhizn’ Arsen’eva, written between 1927 and 1938 and first published in full in 1952), focused on a meticulous recreation of everyday existence in provincial Russia in the 1870s–90s.
In 1933, after years of vigorous campaigning behind the scenes, Bunin received the Nobel Prize for Literature, “for the strict artistry with which he has carried on the classical Russian traditions in prose writing” (the Swedish Academy’s decision of 9th November). He was the first Russian to achieve this distinction. In December that year, accompanied by both Muromtseva and Kuznetsova, he travelled to Stockholm to the award ceremony. A large proportion of the prize money, around 120,000 French francs, was given away by Bunin to various charitable causes in support of Russian émigré circles. In 1934–39, the Berlin-based Petropolis publishing house issued a revised edition of Bunin’s collected works in Russian, in twelve volumes. On publishing business, and to give a series of public readings (at which he excelled as a gifted orator), Bunin visited Brussels, London, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Italy, Yugoslavia, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia between 1935 and 1938. However, the life of a minor celebrity was not devoid of humiliating moments. Bunin was briefly detained by the German border guards in Lindau on 27th October 1936 for overstaying his visa (see the note “Russian Exile’s Protest: Alleged Brutality at German Customs” in The Times of 3rd November 1936).
From September 1939 until May 1945, the Bunins had to remain in Grasse uninterruptedly. In these years of isolation and despair, Bunin wrote his finest short stories, which comprised the 1946 Dark Avenues (Temnye allei) collection. Although living in poverty, he firmly declined invitations to contribute to the collaborationist press, and gave shelter to Jews (e.g. the essayist Alexander Bakhrakh and the pianist Alexander Lieberman) who were hiding from the Nazis. After the war, the Bunins returned to Paris. Bunin’s deteriorating health (he suffered from emphysema and underwent prostate surgery on 4th September 1950) and difficult financial circumstances (in 1949–51, he even accepted a monthly allowance of 10,000 francs from the millionaire and philanthropist Solomon Atran) did not present much opportunity for travel, although he allowed himself several stays in a Russian guesthouse in Juan-les-Pins between 1947 and 1949. The seventy-fifth and the eightieth anniversary of Bunin’s birth were used to collect donations for his financial support. He rejected Soviet attempts to lure him back to Russia (partly prompted by the friend and author Alexei Tolstoy’s letter to Stalin of 17th June 1941 about Bunin’s miserable existence in war-torn France), and stopped a collection of his works, in preparation by a state publishing house in Moscow, from publication, because he could not exercise control over its content. On the other hand, in late 1947 he left the Union of Russian Writers and Journalists in France (which he used to chair), after it had expelled those of its members who had taken Soviet passports in the aftermath of a 1946 Supreme Soviet decree returning citizenship rights to former subjects of the Russian Empire. As a result, he fell out with his old friend and sponsor Maria Tsetlina, whose late husband was an heir to the Wissotzky Tea company. Bunin’s controversial Memoirs (Vospominaniia, 1950), which pulled no punches in challenging the reputations of famous Russians such as Gorky and the futurist poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, was his last completed large-scale project. He died on 8th November 1953, of pneumonia, while working on a book called About Chekhov (O Chekhove), intended to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of his death. Its unfinished manuscript, edited by Muromtseva and Zurov, appeared posthumously, in 1955.
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