Ivan Bunin (1870 - 1953) was a Russian writer, poet and translator, and in 1933 the first Russian author to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. [1] Working in the realist tradition of the nineteenth century, he produced precise, sensuous prose about the decline of the Russian gentry and peasantry, including The Village, The Gentleman from San Francisco and the late story cycle Dark Avenues. [2] He rejected the Bolshevik revolution and lived in exile in France from 1920.
Early life
Ivan Alekseyevich Bunin was born on 22 October 1870 in Voronezh into an impoverished noble family with a long lineage, and grew up on the family estate in Oryol province. [1] The decay of provincial gentry life he observed as a child became one of his central subjects. His formal schooling was interrupted for lack of money, and he was largely taught at home by his elder brother.
He published his first poems in his late teens and worked as a journalist and clerk. His translation of Longfellow's The Song of Hiawatha and his verse collections brought him the Pushkin Prize of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and he was elected an honorary member of the Academy in 1909. [3]
Prose of the Russian countryside
Bunin came to prominence as a prose writer with The Village in 1910, a bleak portrait of peasant life that broke with idealising traditions, and Dry Valley in 1911, on the disintegration of a gentry family. [2] Both drew on close observation of the provinces rather than on political programme, and he kept his distance from the modernist movements of the period, admiring Tolstoy and Chekhov, both of whom he knew.
His story The Gentleman from San Francisco (1915), about the sudden death of a wealthy American traveller aboard a liner, became his best-known shorter work and was widely translated. [1] He travelled extensively in Europe, the Middle East and Asia, and these journeys supplied material for essays and stories.
Revolution and exile
Bunin was fiercely opposed to the October Revolution of 1917, which he recorded in the diary published as Cursed Days. [3] He left Moscow for Odesa and in 1920 emigrated, settling in France, mainly in Grasse on the Riviera, where he became a central figure of the Russian literary emigration.
In exile he wrote the autobiographical novel The Life of Arseniev, generally regarded as his major work, and continued to produce short fiction. The Swedish Academy awarded him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1933 for the strict artistry with which he carried on the classical Russian tradition in prose. [2] He distributed much of the prize money to other émigré writers and to charitable causes and was left in financial difficulty again within a few years.
Later years
Bunin remained in France through the German occupation, refusing collaboration and sheltering Jewish acquaintances in his house at Grasse. [1] During and after the war he wrote the stories collected as Dark Avenues, a cycle on love and memory that is now among his most admired books, and a study of Chekhov left unfinished at his death.
He died in Paris on 8 November 1953 and is buried at the Russian cemetery of Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois. [3]
Legacy
Bunin's work was suppressed or published only selectively in the Soviet Union for decades before being restored to Russian readers in the later twentieth century. [2] He is regarded as the last major writer of the classical Russian realist line and as a model of prose style for later Russian authors. [1]
