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Bunin began his literary career as a poet specializing in rather detached sketches of characters and locations, memorable for either their typicality or exoticism. His poetic style, earning him a reputation of “the only significant poet of the Symbolist age who was not a Symbolist” (Georgette Donchin in The Times Literary Supplement of 10th May 1957), owes a great deal to realistic landscape and portrait painting. Bunin found it impossible to separate his poetry from his prose, regularly publishing both under the same book cover. His trademark “unnarrative” (D.S. Mirsky) atmospheric prose often reads like poetry – such as the story ‘Antonov Apples’ (Antonovskie iabloki, 1900) – in which the smell of apples evokes a picture of the disappearing lifestyle of landowners in the south-west of Russia, accompanied by striking images of nature in the autumn. In a conversation with his nephew Nikolai Pusheshnikov, Bunin admitted that, for him, the key to a successful story was “finding the right sound. As soon as I have found it, the rest practically writes itself… But I never write what I want the way I want it. I don’t dare. I would prefer to avoid any form and ignore literary devices”. Thus, Bunin felt obliged to make certain concessions to conventional public taste, and framed his momentary observations of human types, moods, events and nature scenes into various traditional generic structures. Many of his short stories are in fact poems in prose, and the prose genre most befitting his idiosyncratic manner is perhaps that of a diary (often reworked for publication). Still, even his more substantial prose pieces, such as the 25,000-word novella ‘Dry Valley’ (Sukhodol, 1911) – about the decline of a gentry family, told from a female servant’s point of view – were called “poems” or “prose poems” by the critics, and it was Bunin’s “lyrical prose style [that] provided a welcome contrast with the rather colourless naturalism of the most influential group of novelists in Russia” (R.D. Charques in The Times Literary Supplement of 7th March 1935).
Bunin’s lyricism, however, does not translate into idealization of his favourite subject, rural Russia, but rather offsets its mercilessly truthful representation, frequently making it appear even bleaker than it would have been otherwise. His first large-size prose work, The Village (Derevnia, 1910), is a good example of this. It is a story of two ageing peasant brothers, Tikhon and Kuzma, an owner and a manager of an estate tellingly named Durnovka (derived from a Russian word for “bad” or “evil”). The hard-working Tikhon, preoccupied almost solely with material gain, and the dreamer Kuzma, an epigone poet without a stable occupation, epitomize two extremes of the Russian national character. Durnovka is not easy to manage, because its inhabitants – personified by the needy peasant Sery and his son Deniska – are lazy drunks, indulging in domestic violence and wanton unruliness, and living in conditions of “almost incredible ignorance, hate, poverty, dirt, cruelty, idleness, supineness” (Harold Hannyngton Child in The Times Literary Supplement of 25th October 1923). Neither of the brothers has anybody to bequeath Durnovka to, and they decide to sell it and to move to a nearby town. The Village – a symbol of Russia in its entirety, displaying Chekhov’s influence in its descriptions of the steppe and a cherry orchard – was not intended “as an indictment of the peasant class. No class depicted in the book has any redeeming feature, and the whole picture of prerevolutionary provincial life is painted in the blackest possible tones” (Georgette Donchin).
Bunin’s perception of the West hardly provides any alternative. The Tolstoyan theme of the uselessness of material wealth in the face of looming death, obvious in The Village, is developed further in ‘The Gentleman from San Francisco’, Bunin’s most famous short story, written with “the intensity of an apocalyptic vision of the horror and falsity of modern civilization” (John Middleton Murry in The Times Literary Supplement of 20th April 1922). In the story, Western civilization is symbolized by an ocean liner, suggestively called Atlantis, which conveys a holidaying American millionaire and his family from the United States to Europe, and shortly afterwards carries his corpse in the opposite direction (he dies suddenly of a heart attack). The stokers in the engine room are endlessly toiling to ensure that the well-to-do passengers upstairs can enjoy a life of exquisite luxury, and the unswerving progress of this sophisticated piece of machinery is supervised by a captain who looks like a heathen idol. It is hard not to become “fascinated by this grandiose vision of the magnificence, the immense technical accomplishment of the setting man has made for himself, and by this ruthless vision of the shrivelled, inhuman, unclean thing that cowers within it”, wrote The Times of 17th May 1922.
Bunin’s concept of the East does not offer much consolation either. Thus, denizens of the lost Paradise – the island of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) – succumb too easily to the fatal temptation of pursuing sensual pleasures, which should have been renounced in compliance with Buddhist teachings. For this, Bunin partly blames the corrupting influence of the exploitative West (see for example the young rickshaw man in ‘Brothers’, who commits suicide because his beloved becomes a rich Westerner’s concubine). However, his insufficiently profound knowledge of both Eastern and Western ways appears to let him down on more than one occasion and undermine the value of the didactic message of his tales. (“Was ever an American citizen on board a liner in the Mediterranean seen to wear a silk top hat, patent-leather shoes and spats? And if in Ceylon the English officers drive the rickshaw men till they ‘hear the death rattle in their throats’, then a great number of people must have conspired together to misrepresent to us the facts of life upon that island,” noted Cyril Bentham Falls in The Times Literary Supplement of 6th March 1924.) In this context, it is hardly surprising that John Middleton Murry said of Bunin: “If his West is a nightmare, his East is a dream – and we are left to wander uneasily between the two.” Besides, it has to be admitted that Bunin’s East, with its abject poverty, idolization of deities and oppressively hot summer nights, looks too much like Russia at times (see the 1916 story ‘The Compatriot’). This might be partly explained by Bunin’s conviction, acquired after travelling far and wide, that people are similar wherever one goes. The jobless, alcoholic sea captain in the story ‘Chang’s Dreams’ (Sny Changa, 1916) seems to express Bunin’s own pessimistic view of human nature when he says: “I’ve been across the entire globe. Life is the same everywhere!… People have neither God, nor conscience, nor any practical goal in life, nor love, nor friendship, nor honesty – not even simple pity”.
Yet, perhaps paradoxically, Bunin’s works continue to display his appreciation of every moment of his existence – no matter how dark – and his gratitude for being able to observe, remember and portray anything remarkable —even seemingly insignificant occurrences, which might never be repeated and are therefore uniquely precious. A selection of such moments, united by one life span, forms the basis of his longest work, the autobiographical novel Arsenyev’s Life (the first four parts of which were translated into English in 1933 as The Well of Days). In it, Bunin’s memory is cast back to the times of his childhood and youth, to follow the pattern established in Russia by Leo Tolstoy’s 1852–56 autobiographical trilogy Childhood, Boyhood, Youth. The first part tells Arsenyev’s story from his birth on a family estate to his first year at school in the nearest town; the second ends with his decision to leave the school while in his fifth year and remain on the estate; the third describes the loss of his virginity at the age of seventeen and an affair with a young married peasant woman; and the fourth his departure from the family estate for Kharkov, his travels through the south of Russia and, when in Oryol, his acquaintance with a woman called Lika (a character loosely modelled on Varvara Paschenko), who will soon become his lover and companion. The narrative pace is deliberately slow, bringing together what appears to be a series of brilliantly executed miniature paintings (Bunin himself compared his creative method to an old photographic album). Although Arsenyev’s life is not particularly eventful, the reader is amply compensated for the paucity of action by “the magical freshness and fullness of the feelings and emotions of youth [that] are blended throughout with a special poetical sense for landscape and great depth of passionate receptivity” (Edward Garnett in The Manchester Guardian of 7th April 1933). The fourth part concludes with the depiction of a funeral train at the Oryol railway station, carrying the body of the Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolayevich Sr, who died in the Crimea in 1891. His son, Nikolai Nikolayevich Jr, is portrayed coming off the train, but the next scene, as if in a cinematic “flash forward”, suddenly describes Nikolai Nikolayevich Jr himself lying in state in Antibes (Bunin visited his villa there shortly before the funeral). The death of this last undisputed heir to the Russian throne in 1929, quite out of place in a family chronicle set in the 1870s–90s, symbolizes the death of old Russia (to which Arsenyev’s Life serves as an epitaph), and also gives the reader an early indication of more tragedies to come, including Lika’s untimely demise in the fifth part of the novel (written much later and dealing, inter alia, with Arsenyev’s attempts to find his own voice as an author).
In a review of The Well of Days, dated 21st March 1933, a London Times critic claimed that the book was “shadowed by the sense of mortality which is almost always present in Ivan Bunin’s work”. It appears that in Arsenyev’s Life, Bunin feels nostalgic about the Russia of his youth not so much because the Bolsheviks have taken over the country and have changed it beyond recognition, but because his detailed memories of it, which he carries inside him, are bound to disappear when he dies.
It was this apprehension of mortality that Bunin tried to come to terms with in his next, non-fictional book The Liberation of Tolstoy (Osvobozhdenie Tolstogo, 1937). Bunin had held Tolstoy in the highest esteem long before they met in January 1894, owing a considerable debt of gratitude to him as an artist (for instance, ‘Chang’s Dreams’, told from a dog’s point of view, was undoubtedly inspired by Tolstoy’s ‘Kholstomer: The Story of a Horse’, and ‘The Gentleman from San Francisco’ by ‘The Death of Ivan Ilyich’). For Bunin, Tolstoy was in the same league as Buddha and King Solomon (see his 1925 story ‘The Night’, also known as ‘Cicadas’), and is portrayed by him as a religious teacher who offers people advice on how to cope with death. According to Bunin, Tolstoy teaches that death is a liberation from the constraints of time and space, a return to an eternity which is full of love. By making this claim, Bunin polemicizes against alternative views of Tolstoy, including those of the Italian author Delfino Cinelli, the Russian émigré author Mark Aldanov, the lawyer, politician and diplomat Vasily Maklakov (1869–1957) – and Lenin. Quotations from their works are interspersed with Bunin’s and others’ personal reminiscences of Tolstoy. The book as a whole is framed by the repetition of phrases (such as, “I lived with Leo Nikolayevich for forty-eight years and I still couldn’t understand what he was like”, a comment made by Tolstoy’s widow Sofia) and episodes (such as Tolstoy asking the zoologist Sergei Usov how long a person can survive if bitten by a mad dog), which function much as rhymes in a poem do, holding the structure together. Bunin’s understanding of Tolstoy seems to have been determined, first and foremost, by his own concern with mortality, which throws into sharper relief an admiration of all the things life can offer, including love in all its manifestations.
Already in his 1924 novella ‘Mitya’s Love’ (Mitina liubov’) – about a student who shoots himself because he cheated on his sweetheart, an aspiring actress, with a married peasant girl, while the actress, in an unrelated chain of events, left him for the headmaster of her drama school, a notorious womanizer – Bunin’s “two principal motifs, love and death, the two most wonderful and incomprehensible things in life, meet and intermingle, and are woven into a fabric of unforgettable beauty” (Gleb Struve in The Observer of 25th February 1934).
The interaction of these two motifs provided a common ground for most of his stories forming the cycle Dark Avenues (Temnye allei), written in 1937–45 and published, in different combinations, in the US in 1943 and in France in 1946. Bunin compared this book with Boccaccio’s Decameron, because it was created at the height of the Nazi plague “to escape to a different world, where there was no bloodshed and people were not burned alive” (Vera Bunina), but also presumably because it is a veritable encyclopaedia of heterosexual relationships, complete with fatal attractions, love at first sight, unforgettable one-night stands, lightning-fast seduction of under-age children and even rape. The book’s title refers to a popular garden feature on Russian estates – a setting for many of the stories – but also brings to mind the configuration of female genitalia. In his letter to the satirist Nadezhda Teffi of 23rd February 1944, Bunin stated, however, that the content of the stories “is not at all frivolous, but tragic… and all the stories in the book are only about love, about its ‘dark’ and, more often than not, gloomy and sinister avenues”.
The title story – about a chance encounter between two old lovers, an army officer and an ex-serf, who suddenly reveals that, many years after he left her, she still harbours deep feelings for him – explains that the expression “dark avenues” has been borrowed from an 1842 poem by Nikolai Ogaryov (1813–77) called ‘An Ordinary Tale’ (Obyknovennaia povest’), in praise of first love (although the two young lovers mentioned in it later go their separate ways). It is true that some stories in the collection may appear either ordinary, or perhaps romantically clichéd, if summarized in terms of their plot alone. There are also stories that would not be out of place in a soap opera. Examples include a wronged husband coming to the Caucasus to look for his wife, who eloped there with her lover, and killing himself when he does not find her (‘The Caucasus’); a Georgian man spending a night with a prostitute and killing her accidentally in a fit of passion (‘Miss Klara’); an artist’s daughter’s teenage infatuation with another artist, leading to her suicide (‘Galya Ganskaya’); and a woman returning to her old flame after a loveless marriage but dying shortly afterwards, when giving premature birth (‘Natalie’). There are also tales of an irresistible passion that bridges the social and the human-animal divides. In ‘Tanya’, an aristocrat and a servant girl find that their feelings for one another are very serious, only to be separated for ever by the Russian Revolution (this story has invited comparisons between Dark Avenues and Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence). In ‘Iron Coat’, a woman has had sexual intercourse with a bear (this story was apparently influenced by Prosper Mérimée’s ‘Lokis’, 1869).
Dark Avenues could have easily turned out both trite and shockingly lewd. However, Bunin’s mastery of language and characterization ensured that he successfully avoided the pitfalls of banality and vulgarity and struck a perfect balance between innocence and eroticism (irrespective of the criticism levelled at him that his upper- and middle-class female characters behave as if they were immoral members of the Young Communist League). As Robin Raleigh-King wrote of Dark Avenues in The Times Literary Supplement of 6th May 1949, Bunin “pinpoints the essential moments and details of a lifetime with such acid sharpness and such skill that for a moment the real world appears pallid by comparison… ‘In Paris’, the story of an elderly exile from Russia meeting a charming Russian woman in Paris, is an excellent example of the author’s power to infuse nobility, breadth of vision and eternal significance into what might have been an ordinary love affair.”
Not only does Dark Avenues offer a rare variety of types and situations, but every story in it is written in its own rhythm and style, ‘Pure Monday’ – about a woman torn between a man she loves and her urge to become a nun – being one of Bunin’s best. And, in the words of Robin Raleigh-King, “the dominant note of nearly all these stories is one of regret – regret that life recedes like a tide, regret that one must stand alone on the desolate beach, regret that a human being is only capable of living one full cycle before he dies.”
Bunin’s Memoirs, his last completed book, is a collection of reminiscences written in 1927–50 and structured as a musical composition, with the opening ‘Autobiographical Notes’ providing an overture of sorts to introduce various themes, which are elaborated upon in the ensuing sections on the musicians Sergei Rachmaninov and Fyodor Shalyapin, the artist Ilya Repin, the authors Jerome K. Jerome, Chekhov, Leo and Alexei Tolstoy, Alexander Kuprin, Prince Peter of Oldenburg and others. Bunin’s memoirs are decidedly literary, filled with quotations from fiction, poetry and literary criticism of diverse provenance, as well as occasional fragments from personal correspondence and reference sources. Some quotations function as leitmotifs, used more than once in the narration (such as those from Maximilian Voloshin’s 1906 poem ‘The Angel of Vengeance’ and Gorky’s 1906 essay ‘The City of the Yellow Devil’). Bunin’s characterization of people he knew is largely affected by his rather conservative aesthetics, in the tradition of classical Russian realism, exemplified by Leo Tolstoy and Chekhov (whose spiritual heir Bunin believed himself to be). His biased view of Gorky, Vladimir Mayakovsky and Alexander Blok “that makes him incapable of perceiving their merit as writers” (R.D. Charques in The Times Literary Supplement of 6th April 1951), stems from his conviction that it was their loss of touch with reality, manifested in their modernist writings, that brought them to the Bolshevik camp. The almost forgotten Alexander Ertel seems to embody Bunin’s ideal of a man, being both a gifted author and a successful estate manager (i.e. happily embracing a fantasy world and a businesslike attitude); a philanthropist who avoided the extremes of Tolstoyanism and revolutionism; and a self-made man who stayed away from the excesses of larger-than-life characters such as Kuprin and Shalyapin. Yet, as R.D. Charques points out, “the best pages in the book are those on Chekhov”, and it was to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Chekhov’s death that Bunin set to work on his new book About Chekhov, which remained unfinished.
The first section of About Chekhov, prepared for publication in 1955 by Vera Bunina and Zurov, consists of biographical information on Chekhov, Bunin’s memories of him (Bunin knew Chekhov’s family and was a regular guest in the Chekhov household) and a section on Chekhov’s romantic involvement with the author Lydia Avilova. Avilova’s letters to the Bunins, written when she was in Czechoslovakia in 1922–24, are also included in the book (just as reminiscences of Leo Tolstoy by the Bunins’ friend Ekaterina Lopatina became part of The Liberation of Tolstoy). The second section consists of quotations from Chekhov’s letters and Bunin’s marginalia on the studies of Chekhov’s art by the émigré scholar Pyotr Bitsilli and the Soviet critic Vladimir Ermilov, and on a collection of reminiscences about Chekhov with contributions from Teleshov, Gorky, Kuprin and others. In terms of an overarching concept, not much can be gleaned from this compilation of assorted fragments, but it is precisely the book’s fragmentary nature that encapsulates the spirit of Bunin’s persistent endeavour to capture fleeting impressions and images.
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