Bunin Ivan Alekseevich (1870 - 1953), Russian writer, honorary academician of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences (1909). In 1920 he emigrated. In the lyrics, the classic continued. traditions (collection "Listopad", 1901). In stories and short stories he showed (sometimes with a nostalgic mood) the impoverishment of noble estates ("Antonov apples, 1900), the cruel face of the village ("The Village", 1910, "Dry Valley", 1911), the disastrous oblivion of the moral foundations of life ("Mr. Francisco", 1915). A sharp rejection of the October Revolution in the diary book "Cursed Days" (1918, published in 1925). In the autobiographical novel "The Life of Arseniev" (1930) - a recreation of the past of Russia, the writer's childhood and youth. The tragedy of human existence in short stories about love ("Mitina's Love", 1925; book "Dark Alleys", 1943). Memoirs. Translated "The Song of Hiawatha" by G. Longfellow (1896). Nobel Prize winner (1933).
Big encyclopedic dictionary, M. - SPb., 1998
Born on October 10 (22 n.s.) in Voronezh in a noble family. Childhood years were spent in the family estate on the farm Butyrki, Oryol province, among the "sea of bread, herbs, flowers", "in the deepest field silence" under the supervision of a teacher and educator, "a strange man", who fascinated his student with painting, from which he "had quite a long insanity, ”otherwise giving little.
In 1881 he entered the Yelets Gymnasium, which he left four years later due to illness. He spent the next four years in the village of Ozerki, where he grew stronger and matured. His education ended in an unusual way. His older brother Julius, who graduated from the university and spent a year in prison on political affairs, was sent to Ozerki and went through the entire gymnasium course with his younger brother, studied languages with him, read the rudiments of philosophy, psychology, social and natural sciences. Both were especially passionate about literature.
In 1889, Bunin left the estate and was forced to look for work in order to secure a modest existence for himself (he worked as a proofreader, statistician, librarian, and collaborated in a newspaper). He often moved - he lived either in Orel, then in Kharkov, then in Poltava, then in Moscow. In 1891, his collection Poems was published, full of impressions from his native Oryol region.
In 1894, in Moscow, he met with L. Tolstoy, who kindly received the young Bunin, and the following year he became acquainted with A. Chekhov. In 1895, the story "To the End of the World" was published, which was well received by critics. Inspired by success, Bunin completely turns to literary creativity.
In 1898, a collection of poems Under the Open Air was published, and in 1901, the collection Falling Leaves, for which he was awarded the highest prize of the Academy of Sciences, the Pushkin Prize (1903). In 1899 he met M. Gorky, who attracted him to cooperate with the Znanie publishing house, where the best stories of that time appeared: Antonov Apples (1900), Pines and New Road (1901), Chernozem ( 1904). Gorky writes: "... if they say about him: this is the best stylist of our time - there will be no exaggeration." In 1909 Bunin became an honorary member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The story "The Village", published in 1910, brought its author wide readership. In 1911 - the story "Dry Valley" - a chronicle of the degeneration of the estate nobility. In subsequent years, a series of significant short stories and novellas appeared: "The Ancient Man", "Ignat", "Zakhar Vorobyov", "The Good Life", "The Gentleman from San Francisco".
Having met the October Revolution with hostility, the writer left Russia forever in 1920. Through the Crimea, and then through Constantinople, he emigrated to France and settled in Paris. Everything he wrote in exile concerned Russia, the Russian people, Russian nature: Mowers, Bast Shoes, Far, Mitina's Love, the cycle of short stories Dark Alleys, the novel Arseniev's Life, 1930, etc. In 1933 Bunin was awarded the Nobel Prize. He wrote books about L. Tolstoy (1937) and A. Chekhov (published in New York in 1955), the book Memoirs (published in Paris in 1950).
Bunin lived a long life, survived the invasion of fascism in Paris, rejoiced at the victory over him.
Ivan Alekseevich Bunin- an outstanding Russian writer, poet, honorary academician of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences (1909), winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1933.
Born in Voronezh, where he lived for the first three years of his life. Later the family moved to the estate near Yelets. Father - Alexey Nikolaevich Bunin, mother - Lyudmila Alexandrovna Bunina (née Chubarova). Until the age of 11, he was brought up at home, in 1881 he entered the Yelets district gymnasium, in 1885 he returned home and continued his education under the guidance of his older brother Julius. At the age of 17 he began to write poetry, in 1887 he made his debut in print. In 1889, he went to work as a proofreader for the local newspaper Orlovsky Vestnik. By this time, he had a long relationship with an employee of this newspaper, Varvara Pashchenko, with whom they, contrary to the wishes of their relatives, moved to Poltava (1892).
Collections "Poems" (Eagle, 1891), "Under the open sky" (1898), "Leaf fall" (1901; Pushkin Prize).
1895 - personally met Chekhov, before that they corresponded.
In the 1890s, he traveled on the steamboat "Chaika" ("bark with firewood") along the Dnieper and visited the grave of Taras Shevchenko, whom he loved and later translated a lot. A few years later, he wrote an essay "On the Seagull", which was published in the children's illustrated magazine "Vskhody" (1898, No. 21, November 1).
In 1899 he married Anna Nikolaevna Tsakni (Kakni), the daughter of a Greek revolutionary. The marriage was short-lived, the only child died at the age of 5 (1905). In 1906, Bunin enters into a civil marriage (officially formalized in 1922) with Vera Nikolaevna Muromtseva, the niece of S. A. Muromtsev, the first chairman of the First State Duma.
In the lyrics, Bunin continued the classical traditions (collection "Leaf Fall", 1901).
He showed in stories and novels (sometimes with a nostalgic mood)
* The impoverishment of noble estates ("Antonov apples", 1900)
* The cruel face of the village ("Village", 1910, "Dry Valley", 1911)
* The disastrous oblivion of the moral foundations of life ("The Gentleman from San Francisco", 1915).
* A sharp rejection of the October Revolution and the Bolshevik regime in the diary book "Cursed Days" (1918, published in 1925).
* In the autobiographical novel "The Life of Arseniev" (1930) - a recreation of the past of Russia, childhood and youth of the writer.
* The tragedy of human existence in short stories about love ("Mitya's Love", 1925; a collection of short stories "Dark Alleys", 1943).
* Translated the "Song of Hiawatha" by the American poet G. Longfellow. It was first published in the Orlovsky Vestnik newspaper in 1896. At the end of the same year, the newspaper's printing house published The Song of Hiawatha as a separate book.
Bunin was awarded the Pushkin Prize three times; in 1909 he was elected an academician in the category of fine literature, becoming the youngest academician of the Russian Academy.
In the summer of 1918, Bunin moved from Bolshevik Moscow to Odessa, occupied by German troops. With the approach in April 1919 to the city of the Red Army, he does not emigrate, but remains in Odessa. He welcomes the occupation of Odessa by the Volunteer Army in August 1919, personally thanks Denikin, who arrived in the city on October 7, and actively cooperates with the OSVAG (propaganda and information body) under the All-Russian Union of Socialist Youth. In February 1920, when the Bolsheviks approached, he left Russia. Emigrates to France.
In exile, he was active in social and political activities: he gave lectures, collaborated with Russian political parties and organizations (conservative and nationalist), and regularly published journalistic articles. He delivered a famous manifesto about the tasks of the Russian Diaspora in relation to Russia and Bolshevism: The Mission of the Russian Emigration.
Many and fruitfully engaged in literary activities, having already confirmed the title of a great Russian writer in exile and becoming one of the main figures of the Russian Diaspora.
Bunin creates his best things: Mitina's Love (1924), Sunstroke (1925), Cornet Elagin's Case (1925) and, finally, Arsenyev's Life (1927-1929, 1933). These works have become a new word in Bunin's work, and in Russian literature as a whole. And according to K. G. Paustovsky, "The Life of Arseniev" is not only the pinnacle work of Russian literature, but also "one of the most remarkable phenomena of world literature." Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1933.
According to the Chekhov publishing house, in the last months of his life, Bunin worked on a literary portrait of A.P. Chekhov, the work remained unfinished (in the book: Loopy Ears and Other Stories, New York, 1953). He died in his sleep at two o'clock in the morning from November 7 to 8, 1953 in Paris. He was buried in the Sainte-Genevieve-des-Bois cemetery. In 1929-1954. Bunin's works were not published in the USSR. Since 1955 - the most published writer of the "first wave" in the USSR (several collected works, many one-volume books). Some works (“Cursed Days”, etc.) were printed in the USSR only during perestroika.
Ivan Alekseevich Bunin (1870 - 1953) - famous writer and poet, the first Russian Nobel Prize winner in literature, academician of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences. He spent many years of his life in exile, becoming one of the main writers of the Russian diaspora. Read about the life and work of this outstanding writer in the article “I. A. Bunin - biography and facts.
Option 1
Short biography of Ivan Bunin
Ivan Alekseevich Bunin is an outstanding Russian writer and poet who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. The writer was born on October 22, 1870 in Voronezh into a noble noble family. Until the age of 11, he was brought up at home, and then was sent to study at the Yelets district gymnasium. Upon his return, he studied under the guidance of his older brother, loved to read world and domestic classics, and was also engaged in self-education. Bunin's first poems appeared in print when he was 17 years old.
At 19, he moved to Orel, where he worked as a proofreader for a local newspaper. In 1891, his collection "Poems" was published, and then "Under the open sky" and "", for which in 1903 he was awarded the first Pushkin Prize. In 1895, Ivan Alekseevich met with whom he repeatedly corresponded.
In 1899 the writer marries Anna Tsakni. However, this marriage was short-lived. Since 1906, he began to cohabit with Vera Muromtseva, with whom he later registered a civil marriage.
Bunin's works of the early 20th century were characterized by nostalgic moods. During this period, stories and novels "", "", "" appeared. In 1909 he was awarded the second Pushkin Prize.
He reacted negatively to the revolution that had begun in Russia and began to keep a diary called Cursed Days, which was partially lost. In the winter of 1920, he emigrated to France, where he was actively engaged in social and political activities. He not only regularly published his journalistic articles, but also gave lectures, collaborated with nationalist and political organizations.
In 1833, having received the Nobel Prize, Bunin became one of the main representatives of the Russian Diaspora. The best works of the writer were written during emigration. Among them, "b", "The Case of Cornet Elagin" and a cycle of stories "". He himself believed that his work belongs more to the generation of Tolstoy and Turgenev. Despite the fact that for a long time his works were not published in the USSR, after 1955 he was the most published émigré writer in the country.
Ivan Bunin died on November 8, 1953 at the age of 83. He was buried in Paris at the Sainte-Genevier-des-Bois cemetery.
Option 2
Bunin Ivan Alekseevich (1870 - 1953) - Russian writer. Born on October 10 in Voronezh in a noble family. Childhood years were spent in the family estate on the Butyrka farm in the Oryol province. Constant communication on the farm with courtyard people, with former serfs, enriched the writer. Here he first heard sad stories about the past, folk poetic tales. Bunin owes his first acquaintance with the richest Russian language to peasants and courtyards.
He worked as a proofreader, librarian, collaborated in the newspaper. He often moved - he lived either in Orel, then in Kharkov, then in Poltava, then in Moscow. Met with, met with Anton Chekhov. Published the story "To the End of the World". Inspired by success, Bunin completely turns to literary creativity. Among the works of Ivan Alekseevich Bunin are novels, novellas, short stories, poems, translations of works by the classics of world poetry.
Having met the October Revolution with hostility, the writer left Russia forever in 1920. He emigrated to France and settled in Paris. Everything he wrote in exile concerned Russia, Russian people, Russian nature.
Ivan Alekseevich Bunin died in Paris. Ivan Alekseevich Bunin was buried at the Russian cemetery of Saint-Genevieve-des-Bois, near Paris.
Option 3
Bunin Ivan Alekseevich(1870-1953), prose writer, poet, translator. He was the first Russian recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature. He spent many years of his life in exile, becoming one of the main writers of the Russian diaspora.
Born in Voronezh in the family of an impoverished nobleman. I could not graduate from high school due to lack of money. Having only 4 classes of the gymnasium, Bunin regretted all his life that he had not received a systematic education. However, this did not stop him from
receive the Pushkin Prize. The writer's older brother helped Ivan learn languages and sciences, going through the entire gymnasium course with him at home.
Bunin wrote his first poems at the age of 17, imitating Pushkin and whose work he admired. They were published in the collection "Poems".
Since 1889 he began to work. In the newspaper "Orlovsky Vestnik", with which Bunin collaborated, he met the proofreader Varvara Pashchenko, in 1891 he married her. They moved to Poltava and became statisticians in the provincial government. In 1891, the first collection of Bunin's poems was published. The family soon broke up. Bunin moved to Moscow. There he made literary acquaintances with Tolstoy, Chekhov,.
Bunin's second marriage, with Anna Tsakni, was also unsuccessful, in 1905 their son Kolya died. In 1906, Bunin met Vera Muromtseva, married, and lived with her until his death.
Bunin's work gains fame soon after the publication of the first poems. The following poems by Bunin were published in the collections Under the Open Air (1898), Falling Leaves (1901).
Acquaintance with the greatest writers leaves a significant imprint in the life and work of Bunin. Bunin's stories "Antonov apples", "Pines" are published. Bunin's prose was published in The Complete Works (1915).
The writer in 1909 becomes an honorary academician of the Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg. Bunin reacted rather sharply to the ideas of the revolution, and forever leaves Russia.
Bunin moved and traveled almost all his life: Europe, Asia, Africa. But he never stopped engaging in literary activities: "Mitya's Love" (1924), "Sunstroke" (1925), as well as the main novel in the writer's life - "" (1927-1929, 1933), which brings Bunin the Nobel Prize in 1933 year. In 1944, Ivan Alekseevich wrote the story "k".
Before his death, the writer was often ill, but at the same time he did not stop working and creating. In the last few months of his life, Bunin was busy working on a literary portrait of A.P. Chekhov, but the work remained unfinished
Bunin always dreamed of returning to Russia. Unfortunately, the writer never managed to do this before his death. Ivan Alekseevich Bunin died on November 8, 1953. He was buried in the Sainte-Genevieve-des-Bois cemetery in Paris.
Option 1
Chronological table of Bunin
Bunin's chronological table, presented on this page, will be an excellent assistant in studies both at school and at the university. She collected all the most important and basic dates of Bunin's life and work. Bunin's biography in the table is built by experienced philologists and linguists. The data presented in the table? are written concisely, which makes information digestible twice as fast.
Ivan Alekseevich Bunin left behind a great legacy, which is being studied to this day. You can learn about his creative path and the tragedies experienced from the table, which combines all the stages of the life of the great writer.
1881 - Ivan Bunin's parents send their son to the Yelets gymnasium.
1886 March- Ivan Bunin was expelled from the gymnasium. The reason was the lack of tuition fees, in addition, Bunin did not go to school from the holidays.
1887 - Ivan Alekseevich Bunin is published for the first time - his poems "The Village Beggar" and "Over the Grave of S. Ya. Nadson" are published in the patriotic newspaper "Rodina";
1889 - The young writer moves to Oryol, where he goes to work in the Orlovsky Bulletin.
1891 - Poems 1887 - 1891 are published in Orel.
1893–1894 - Ivan Bunin falls under the influence of L.N. Tolstoy, and so much so that the writer is going to become a cooper. Only with L.N. Tolstoy at a meeting in 1894. was able to persuade Ivan Alekseevich to abandon this idea.
1895 - The writer moves to St. Petersburg, and a little later to Moscow, where he begins to get acquainted with the capital's literary circle: A.P. Chekhov, V.Ya. Bryusov.
1896 – Ivan Bunin translates the poem “The Song of Hiawatha” by the American writer G. W. Longfellow. Later, the writer will improve this translation and reprint it several times.
1897 - A book of short stories "To the End of the World."
1898 - The writer publishes a collection of his poems "Under the open sky";
Ivan Bunin is getting married. Anna Nikolaevna Tsakni becomes his wife, who will give him a son, Kolya, a little later.
1899 - Bunin's marriage turns out to be fragile and falls apart.
1900 - The writer goes to Yalta, where he meets the founders of the Moscow Art Theater;
writes the story "Antonov apples".
1901 - A collection of poems "Leaf Fall" is published.
1903 - Bunin is awarded the Pushkin Prize for the translation of "The Song of Hiawatha" and for the collection "Falling Leaves".
1903–1904 – Travels in France, Italy and the Caucasus.
1905 - The only son of Ivan Bunin, Kolya, is dying.
1909 - Ivan Bunin receives the second Pushkin Prize for the book "Poems 1903 - 1906";
becomes an academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
1911 - The story "Dryland".
1917 – The writer lives in Moscow. He perceives the events of the February Revolution as the collapse of the state.
1918–1919 - "Cursed Days".
1924 - The Rose of Jericho.
1925 - "Mitya's love."
1927 - Sunstroke.
1929 - Bunin's book "Selected Poems" is published.
1927–1933 - Ivan Alekseevich Bunin is working on the novel "The Life of Arseniev."
1931 - God's tree.
1933 Ivan Bunin is awarded the Nobel Prize.
1950 - In the capital of France, Ivan Alekseevich publishes the book "Memoirs".
Option 2
1870 , October 10 (22) - was born in Voronezh in the old impoverished noble family of the Bunins. He spent his childhood on the Butyrka farm in the Oryol province.
1881 - enters the Yelets gymnasium, but, without completing four classes, continues his education under the guidance of his older brother Julius, an exiled Narodnaya Volya.
1887 - the first poems "The Village Beggar" and "Over the Grave of Nadson" are published in the patriotic newspaper "Motherland".
1889 - moves to Oryol, starts working as a proofreader, statistician, librarian, newspaper reporter.
1890 - Bunin, having studied English on his own, translates G. Longfellow's poem "The Song of Hiawatha".
1891 - in Orel, the collection “Poems of 1887–1891” is published.
1892
- Bunin, together with his common-law wife V.V. Pashchenko, moved to Poltava, where he served in the land municipal government. Bunin's articles, essays, stories appear in the local newspaper.
In 1892–94 Bunin's poems and stories begin to be published in the capital's magazines.
1893–1894 - Bunin is greatly influenced by Leo Tolstoy, who is perceived by him as a "demigod", the highest embodiment of artistic power and moral dignity; the apotheosis of this attitude would later be Bunin's religious-philosophical treatise "The Liberation of Tolstoy" (Paris, 1937).
1895 - Bunin leaves the service and leaves for St. Petersburg, then to Moscow, gets acquainted with N.K. Mikhailovsky, A.P. Chekhov, K.D. Balmont, V.Ya. Bryusov, V.G. Korolenko, A.I. Kuprin and others. Initially friendly relations with Balmont and Bryusov in the early 1900s. acquired a hostile character, and until the last years of his life, Bunin extremely sharply assessed the work and personality of these poets.
1897 - the release of Bunin's book "To the End of the World" and other stories.
1898 - poetry collection "Under the open sky".
1899 - Acquaintance with M. Gorky, who attracts Bunin to cooperate in the publishing house "Knowledge". Friendly relations with Gorky would continue until 1917, and then be interrupted due to Bunin's rejection of political orientation and the activities of the revolutionary-minded Gorky.
1900 - the appearance in the press of the story "Antonov apples". In the same year, Bunin made a trip to Berlin, Paris, Switzerland.
1901 - the collection "Leaf Fall" is published, which received the Pushkin Prize.
1904 Traveling in France and Italy.
1906 - acquaintance with V.N. Muromtseva (1881–1961), future wife and author of the book “The Life of Bunin”.
1907 travel to Egypt, Syria, Palestine. The result of trips to the East is a cycle of essays “Temple of the Sun” (1907–1911)
1909 - The Academy of Sciences elects Bunin an honorary academician. During a trip to Italy, Bunin visits Gorky, who then lived on about. Capri.
1910 - Bunin's first big thing comes out, which has become an event in literary and social life - the story "The Village".
1912
- the collection “Sukhodol. Tales and Stories".
In the future, other collections were published (“John Rydalets. Stories and Poems 1912-1913”, 1913; “The Cup of Life. Stories 1913-1914”, 1915; “The Gentleman from San Francisco. Works 1915-1916.” , 1916).
1917 - Bunin takes the October Revolution with hostility. Writes a pamphlet diary "Cursed Days".
1920 - Bunin emigrates to France. Here he is in 1927–33. working on the novel "The Life of Arseniev".
1925–1927
- Bunin maintains a regular political and literary column in the Vozrozhdenie newspaper.
In the second half of the 1920s, Bunin experienced his "last love". She became the poetess Galina Nikolaevna Kuznetsova.
1933
, November 9 - Bunin was awarded the Nobel Prize "for the truthful artistic talent with which he recreated a typical Russian character in fiction."
By the end of the 30s. Bunin increasingly feels the dramatic nature of the break with the Motherland, avoids direct political statements about the USSR. Fascism in Germany and Italy is sharply condemned by him.
World War II period- Bunin in Grasse, in the south of France. Victory meets with great joy.
post-war period Bunin is returning to Paris. He is no longer a staunch opponent of the Soviet regime, but he does not recognize the changes that have taken place in Russia either. In Paris, Ivan Alekseevich visits the Soviet ambassador and gives an interview to the Soviet Patriot newspaper.
In recent years, he has been living in great lack of money, starving. During these years, Bunin created a cycle of short stories "Dark Alleys" (New York, 1943, in full - Paris, 1946), published a book about Leo Tolstoy ("Liberation of Tolstoy", Paris, 1937), "Memoirs" (Paris, 1950), etc.
1953 November 8 - Ivan Alekseevich Bunin dies in Paris, becomes the first emigration writer, who in 1954 begins to be published again in his homeland.
Option 3
870 10 October. Born in Voronezh in the family of Alexei Nikolaevich and Lyudmila Aleksandrovna Bunin.
1881-1886 Studying at the Yelets Gymnasium.
1887 First publication - a poem “Over the grave of S.Ya. Nadson" in the magazine "Motherland".
1889 Moved to Orel; met V.V. Pashchenko, who became his wife (the family soon broke up).
1891 The first book “Poems. 1887-1891".
1894 Met with L.N. Tolstoy.
1895-1898 Moved to Petersburg. The collections “To the End of the World” and Other Stories”, “Under the Open Sky” were published. Married A.N. Tsakni, soon the family broke up.
1900 The story "Antonov apples" was published. 1902-1909 First collected works in five volumes. 1903 Award of the Pushkin Prize by the Russian Academy of Sciences for the collection of poems Falling Leaves (1901) and the translation of The Song of Hiawatha (1896) by G. Longfellow.
1906-1907 He married V.N. Muromtseva. Trip to Egypt, Syria, Palestine.
1911-1916 The collections Sukhodol, John Rydalets, Complete Works in six volumes were published.
1920 Emigrated to France. In exile, the books Rose of Jericho (1924), Sunstroke (1927), God's Tree (1931) were published; novel "The Life of Arseniev" (1927-1933).
1933 Nobel Prize awarded.
1939-1945 The stories that made up the book "Dark Alleys" were created.
1953 -> 8 November. I.A. Bunin died in Paris. He was buried in the Russian cemetery of Saint-Genevieve-des-Bois.
Option 1
Ivan Alekseevich Bunin was born on October 22 (October 10, old style) 1870 in Voronezh into a noble family. The childhood of the future writer passed on the Butyrka farm in the Yelets district of the Oryol province. in his works are traced by a clear line.
In 1881, Ivan Bunin entered the Yelets Gymnasium, but studied for only five years, as the family had no money. His older brother Julius (1857–1921) helped him master the gymnasium program.
Bunin wrote his first poem at the age of eight.
His first publication was the poem "Over Nadson's Grave", published in the Rodina newspaper in February 1887. During the year, several poems by Bunin appeared in the same publication, as well as the stories “Two Wanderers” and “Nefedka”.
In September 1888, Bunin's poems appeared in the Books of the Week, where the works of the writers Leo Tolstoy and Yakov Polonsky were published.
In the spring of 1889, the independent life of the writer began - Bunin, following his brother Julius, moved to Kharkov. Since autumn, he began to work in the newspaper Orlovsky Vestnik.
In 1891, his student book “Poems. 1887-1891". Then Ivan Bunin met Varvara Pashchenko, a newspaper proofreader, with whom they began to live in a civil marriage, without getting married, since Varvara's parents were against this marriage.
In 1892 they moved to Poltava, where brother Julius was in charge of the statistical bureau of the provincial zemstvo. Ivan Bunin entered the service of a zemstvo council librarian, and then a statistician in the provincial council. At various times he worked as a proofreader, statistician, librarian, newspaper reporter.
In April 1894, Bunin's first prose work appeared in print - the story "A Village Sketch" (the title was chosen by the publisher).
In January 1895, after the betrayal of his wife, Bunin left the service and moved first to St. Petersburg, and then to Moscow. In 1898, he married Anna Tsakni, a Greek woman, daughter of the revolutionary and emigrant Nikolai Tsakni. In 1900, the couple separated, and in 1905 their son Nikolai died.
In Moscow, the young writer met many famous poets and writers - Anton Chekhov, Valery Bryusov. After meeting Nikolai Teleshov, Bunin became a member of the literary circle "Wednesday". In the spring of 1899, in Yalta, he met Maxim Gorky, who later invited him to collaborate with the Znanie publishing house.
Literary fame came to Ivan Bunin in 1900 after the publication of the story “Antonov apples”.
In 1901, the symbolist publishing house "Scorpion" published a collection of poems "Falling Leaves". For this collection and for the translation of the poem “Song of Hiawatha” (1896) by the American romantic poet Henry Longfellow, Ivan Bunin was awarded the Pushkin Prize by the Russian Academy of Sciences.
In 1902, the Znanie publishing house published the first volume of the writer's works.
In 1906, Bunin met Vera Muromtseva, who came from a noble professorial Moscow family, who became his wife. The Bunin couple traveled a lot. In 1907, the young couple went on a trip to the countries of the East - Syria, Egypt, Palestine. In 1910 they visited Europe and then to Egypt and Ceylon. From the autumn of 1912 to the spring of 1913 they were in Turkey and Romania, from 1913 to 1914 - in Capri in Italy.
In the fall of 1909, the Academy of Sciences awarded Bunin the second Pushkin Prize and elected him an honorary academician in the category of fine literature.
In the works written after the first Russian revolution of 1905, the theme of the drama of Russian historical fate became dominant. The stories The Village (1910) and Sukhodol (1912) were a great success with readers.
In 1915-1916, collections of short stories by the writer "The Cup of Life" and "The Gentleman from San Francisco" were published. In the prose of these years, the writer's idea of the tragedy of the life of the world, of the doom and fratricidal nature of modern civilization is expanding.
Ivan Bunin was extremely hostile to the February and October revolutions of 1917 and perceived them as a catastrophe. The diary of events in the life of the country and the writer's thoughts at that time was the book of journalism "Cursed Days" (1918).
On May 21, 1918, he left Moscow for Odessa, and in February 1920 he emigrated first to the Balkans and then to France. In France, at first he lived in Paris, but from the summer of 1923 he moved to the Alpes-Maritimes and came to Paris only for some winter months.
Here he turned to the intimate, lyrical memories of his youth. The novel "The Life of Arseniev" (1930) closed the cycle of artistic autobiographies connected with the life of the Russian landed nobility. One of the central places in Bunin's later work was occupied by the theme of fatal love-passion, expressed in the works "Mitina's Love" (1925), "Sunstroke" (1927), the cycle of short stories "Dark Alleys" (1943).
In 1927-1930, Bunin turned to the short story genre (“Elephant”, “Calf's Head”, “Roosters”, etc.).
In 1933, he became the first Russian writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “for the truthful artistic talent with which he recreated in fictional prose the typical Russian character.”
In 1939, with the outbreak of World War II (1939-1945), the Bunins settled in the south of France, in Grasse, at the Villa Jeannette, and in 1945 they returned to Paris.
In the last years of his life, the writer stopped publishing his works. Many and seriously ill, wrote "Memoirs" (1950), worked on the book "About Chekhov", published posthumously in 1955 in New York.
In the "Literary Testament" he asked to print his works only in the latest author's edition, which formed the basis of his 12-volume collected works, published by the Berlin publishing house "Petropolis" in 1934-1939.
On November 8, 1953, Ivan Bunin died in Paris. He was buried in the Russian cemetery of Saint-Genevieve-des-Bois.
Option 2
Bunin was born on October 22, 1870 in Voronezh. He belonged to an ancient but impoverished family that gave Russia Vasily Zhukovsky, the illegitimate son of the landowner Afanasy Bunin. Ivan Bunin's father, Alexei Nikolaevich, fought in the Crimea in his youth, then he lived on his estate in the usual, many times described landlord life - hunting, welcoming guests, drinking and cards. His carelessness eventually brought the family to the brink of ruin.
All household chores lay on the shoulders of the mother, Lyudmila Alexandrovna Chubarova, a quiet, devout woman, five of whose nine children died in infancy. The death of his beloved sister Sasha seemed to little Vanya a terrible injustice, and he forever ceased to believe in the good God, whom both his mother and the church spoke about.
Three years after Vanya's birth, the family moved to Butyrka's grandfather's estate in the Oryol province. “Here, in the deepest field silence,” the writer later recalled about the beginning of his biography, “my childhood passed, full of sad and peculiar poetry.” His childhood impressions were reflected in the autobiographical novel "The Life of Arseniev", which Bunin himself considered his main book.
He noted that he acquired amazing sensitivity early: “My vision was such that I saw all seven stars in the Pleiades, heard the whistle of a marmot in the evening field a mile away, got drunk, smelling the smell of a lily of the valley or an old book.” Parents paid little attention to their son, and his tutor was his brother Julius, who graduated from the university, managed to participate in the revolutionary circles of the Chernoperedel, for which he spent a year in prison and was expelled from Moscow for three years.
In 1881, Bunin entered the Yelets Gymnasium. He studied average, and from the sixth grade he was expelled for non-payment - the family's affairs became very bad. The estate in Butyrki was sold, and the family moved to neighboring Ozerki, where Ivan had to finish the gymnasium course as an external student, under the guidance of his older brother. “Not even a year has passed,” said Julius, “how he grew so mentally that I could already talk with him almost as an equal on many topics.” In addition to studying languages, philosophy, psychology, social and natural sciences, Ivan, thanks to his brother, a writer and journalist, was especially interested in literature.
At the age of 16, Ivan Bunin began to "write poetry with particular zeal" and "wrote a lot of paper" before he decided to send the poem to the Rodina magazine in the capital. To his surprise, it was printed. He will always remember the delight with which he came from the post office with a fresh issue of the magazine, constantly rereading his poems. They were dedicated to the memory of the fashionable poet Nadson, who died of consumption.
Weak, frankly imitative verses did not stand out among hundreds of their kind. Many years passed before Bunin's true talent manifested itself in poetry. Until the end of his life, he himself considered himself primarily a poet and was very angry when friends said that his works were exquisite, but old-fashioned - "now nobody writes like that." He really avoided any newfangled trends, remaining true to the tradition of the XIX century
Early, barely visible dawn, The heart of sixteen years.
The drowsy haze of the garden With lime light of warmth.
Quiet and mysterious house With the ultimate cherished window.
A curtain in the window, and behind it the Sun of my universe.
This is a memory of the very first youthful love for Emilia Fekhner (the prototype of Ankhen in The Life of Arseniev), a young governess of the daughters of O.K. Tubbe, distiller of the landowner Bakhtiyarov. Tubba's stepdaughter, Nastya, was married in 1885 by the writer's brother Eugene. Young Bunin was so carried away by Emilia that Tubbe considered it good to send her back home.
Soon from Ozerki, having received the consent of his parents, the young poet also went into adulthood. At parting, the mother blessed her son, whom she considered “special from all her children”, with a generic icon depicting the meal of the Three Wanderers with Abraham. It was, as Bunin wrote in one of his diaries, "a shrine that connects me with a tender and reverent bond with my family, with the world where my cradle, my childhood." An 18-year-old young man left his home as an almost fully formed person, “with a well-known life baggage - knowledge of the real people, and not fictional, with knowledge of small-scale life, the village intelligentsia, with a very subtle sense of nature, almost a connoisseur of the Russian language, literature, with heart open to love.
He met love in Orel. 19-year-old Bunin settled there after long wanderings in the Crimea and southern Russia. Having settled down in the Orlovsky Vestnik newspaper, he became friends with the young daughter of a doctor, Varya Pashchenko - she worked as a proofreader in the same newspaper. With the money of their brother Julius, they rented an apartment in Poltava, where they lived in a civil marriage - Father Varya was against the wedding. Three years later, Dr. Pashchenko, seeing Bunin's boundless passion, nevertheless gave his permission for marriage, but Varya hid her father's letter. She preferred the poor writer to his wealthy friend Arseny Bibikov. “Ah, to hell with them,” Bunin wrote to his brother, “here, obviously, 200 acres of a country land played a role.”
Since 1895, Bunin left the service and, having moved to Moscow, devoted himself entirely to literature, earning money with poetry and short stories. His idol of those years was Leo Tolstoy, and he even went to the count to ask for advice on how to live. Gradually, he became a member of the editorial offices of literary magazines, met famous writers, even became friends with Chekhov and learned a lot from him. He was appreciated by both realists-populists and innovators-symbolists, but neither of them considered "their own".
He himself was more inclined towards realists and constantly visited the “environments” of the writer Teleshov, where Gorky, the Wanderer, Leonid Andreev visited. In summer - Yalta with Chekhov and Stanyukovich and Lustdorf near Odessa with writers Fedorov and Kuprin. “This beginning of my new life was the darkest spiritual time, internally the most dead time of all my youth, although outwardly I lived then very diversely, sociablely, in public, so as not to be alone with myself.”
In Lustdorf, Bunin, unexpectedly for everyone, even for himself, married 19-year-old Anna Tsakni. She was the daughter of an Odessa Greek publisher, the owner of the Southern Review newspaper, with which Bunin collaborated. They got married after a few days of dating. “At the end of June, he went to Lustdorf to Fedorov. Kuprin, Kartashevs, then Tsakni, who lived in a dacha at the 7th station. Suddenly made an offer in the evening,” Bunin wrote in his diary in 1898.
He was fascinated by her large black eyes and enigmatic silence. After the wedding, it turned out that Anya was very talkative. Together with her mother, she mercilessly scolded her husband for lack of money and frequent absences. Less than a year later, they broke up with Anna, two years later this "vaudeville" marriage broke up. Their son Nicholas, who was born to them, died of scarlet fever at the age of five. Unlike Varvara Pashchenko, Anna Tsakni left no traces in Bunin's work. Barbara can also be recognized in Lika from The Life of Arseniev, and in many heroines of Dark Alleys.
The first success in his creative biography came to Bunin in 1903. For the collection of poems Falling Leaves, he received the Pushkin Prize, the highest award of the Academy of Sciences.
Recognized by critics and his prose. The story "Antonov apples" secured the title of "singer of noble nests" for the writer, although he portrayed the life of the Russian village by no means benevolently and was not inferior in terms of "bitter truth" to Gorky himself. In 1906, at a literary evening with the writer Zaitsev, where Bunin read his poems, he met Vera Muromtseva, the niece of the chairman of the first State Duma. "A quiet young lady with Leonard's eyes" immediately attracted Bunin. Here is how Vera Nikolaevna told about their meeting:
“I stopped in thought: should I go home? Bunin appeared at the door. "How did you get here?" - he asked. I was angry, but calmly replied: "Just like you." - "But who are you?" -"Human". - "What do you do?" - “Chemistry. I study at the natural faculty of the Higher Women's Courses. “But where else can I see you?” “Only at our house. We accept on Saturdays. The rest of the days I'm very busy." After listening to talk about the dissolute life of people of art,
Vera Nikolaevna was frankly afraid of the writer. Nevertheless, she could not resist his persistent courtship and in the same 1906 she became “Madam Bunina”, although they were only able to officially register their marriage in July 1922 in France.
On their honeymoon, they went to the East for a long time - to Egypt, Palestine, Syria. We got in our wanderings to Ceylon itself. Travel routes were not planned in advance. Bunin was so happy with Vera Nikolaevna that he admitted that he would quit writing: “But my business is gone - I’m sure I won’t write anymore ... A poet should not be happy, he should live alone, and the better for him, the worse for writing. The better you are, the worse ... ”- he said to his wife. “In that case, I will try to be as bad as possible,” she joked.
Nevertheless, the next decade was the most fruitful in the writer's work. He was awarded another prize of the Academy of Sciences and was elected its honorary academician. “Just at the hour when a telegram arrived with congratulations to Ivan Alekseevich in connection with his election to the academician in the category of fine literature,” Vera Bunina said, “the Bibikovs dined with us. Bunin did not have a bad feeling for Arseny, they even, one might say, were friends. Bibikova got up from the table, was pale, but calm. A minute later, separately and dryly, she said: “Congratulations.”
After a "sharp foreign slap in the face," as he called his travels, Bunin was no longer afraid to "exaggerate." The First World War did not cause him a patriotic upsurge. He saw the weakness of the country, was afraid of its death. In 1916 he wrote many poems, including these:
Here the rye burns, the grain flows.
But who will reap, knit?
Here the smoke is burning, the alarm is buzzing.
But who dares to pour?
Here the demoniac army will rise, and like Mamai, all of Rus' will pass ...
But the world is empty - who will save? But there is no God - who should be punished?
Soon this prophecy was fulfilled. After the start of the revolution, Bunin and his family left the Oryol estate for Moscow, from where he watched with bitterness the death of everything that was dear to him. These observations were reflected in a diary published later under the title "Cursed Days". Bunin considered the culprits of the revolution not only the “possessed” Bolsheviks, but also the beautiful-hearted intelligentsia. “It was not the people who started the revolution, but you. The people did not care at all about everything we wanted, what we were unhappy with ...
Even helping the starving was somehow literary in our country, only out of a thirst to once again kick the government, to bring an extra dig under it. It is terrible to say, but it is true: if there were no national disasters, thousands of intellectuals would be downright miserable people: how then to sit, protest, what to shout and write about?
In May 1918, Bunin and his wife with difficulty got out of hungry Moscow to Odessa, where they survived the change of many authorities. In January 1920 they fled to Constantinople. In Russia, Bunin was no longer holding - his parents died, his brother Julius was dying, former friends became enemies or left the country even earlier. Leaving his homeland on the ship Sparta overloaded with refugees, Bunin felt like the last inhabitant of the sunken Atlantis.
In the autumn of 1920, Bunin arrived in Paris and immediately set to work. Ahead were 33 years of emigration, during which he created ten books of prose. Bunin's old friend Zaitsev wrote: “The exile even benefited him. It sharpened the sense of Russia, irrevocable, and thickened the previously strong juice of his poetry.
Europeans also learned about the phenomenon of new talent.
In 1921, a collection of short stories by Bunin, The Gentleman from San Francisco, was published in French. The Paris press was filled with responses: “a real Russian talent”, “bleeding, uneven, but courageous and truthful”, “one of the greatest Russian writers”. Thomas Mann and Romain Rolland, who in 1922 first nominated Bunin as a candidate for the Nobel Prize, were delighted with the stories. However, the tone in the culture of that time was set by the avant-garde, with which the writer did not want to have anything in common.
He never became a world celebrity, but the emigration read him avidly. Yes, and how could one not burst into nostalgic tears from such lines: “And a minute later, glasses and wine glasses appeared in front of us, bottles of multi-colored vodkas, pink salmon, swarthy-skinned balyk, blue with shells opened on ice fragments, an orange chester square, black shiny a lump of pressed caviar, a tub of champagne white and sweaty from the cold ... We started with peppercorns ... "
Past feasts seemed even more abundant in comparison with the poverty of the emigrants. Bunin published a lot, but his existence was far from idyllic. Reminiscent of his age, the Parisian winter dampness caused bouts of rheumatism. He and his wife decided to go south for the winter and in 1922 they rented a villa in the town of Grasse with the magnificent name "Belvedere". There, their guests were the leading emigration writers - Merezhkovsky, Gippius, Zaitsev, Khodasevich and Nina Berberova.
Mark Aldanov and Bunin's secretary, writer Andrei Tsvibak (Sedykh) lived here for a long time. Bunin willingly helped needy fellow countrymen from his poor means. In 1926, a young writer Galina Kuznetsova came to visit him from Paris. Soon a romance began between them. Thin, delicate, understanding everything, Vera Nikolaevna wanted to think that love experiences were necessary for her "Yan" for a new creative upsurge.
Soon the triangle in the Belvedere turned into a quadrangle - this happened when the writer Leonid Zurov, who settled in the Bunin house, began to look after Vera Nikolaevna. The complex ups and downs of their relationship became the subject of emigrant gossip, got into the pages of memoirs. Endless quarrels and reconciliations spoiled a lot of blood for all four, and Zurov was completely driven to madness. However, this "autumn romance", which lasted for 15 years, inspired all of Bunin's later work, including the novel "The Life of Arseniev" and the collection of love stories "Dark Alleys".
This would not have happened if Galina Kuznetsova had been an empty-headed beauty - she also became a real assistant for the writer. In her Grasse Diary, one can read: “I am happy that each chapter of his novel was previously, as it were, experienced by both of us in long conversations.” The novel ended unexpectedly - in 1942, Galina became interested in the opera singer Marga Stepun. Bunin could not find a place for himself, exclaiming: “How she poisoned my life - she still poisons me!”
In the midst of the novel, news came that Bunin had been awarded the Nobel Prize. The entire Russian emigration took it as their triumph. In Stockholm, Bunin was met by the king and queen, descendants of Alfred Nobel, dressed up society ladies. And he looked only at the deep white snow, which he had not seen since his departure from Russia, and dreamed of running through it like a boy ... At the ceremony, he said that for the first time in history the prize was awarded to an exile who did not stand behind his country. The country, through the mouths of its diplomats, persistently protested against the presentation of the award to the "White Guard".
The prize of that year was 150 thousand francs, but Bunin very quickly distributed them to the petitioners. During the war years, he hid in Grasse, where the Germans did not reach, several Jewish writers who were threatened with death. About that time he wrote: “We live badly, very badly. Well, we eat frozen potatoes. Or some water with something vile floating in it, some kind of carrot. It's called soup... We live in a commune. Six persons. And no one has a penny for the soul. Despite the hardships, Bunin rejected all the offers of the Germans to go to their service. Hatred of the Soviet regime was temporarily forgotten - like other emigrants, he closely followed the events at the front, moving the flags on the map of Europe that hung in his office.
In the autumn of 1944, France was liberated, and Bunin and his wife returned to Paris. On a wave of euphoria, he visited the Soviet embassy and said there that he was proud of his country's victory. The news spread that he drank to Stalin's health. Many Russian Parisians recoiled from him. But the visits of Soviet writers to him began, through which proposals to return to the USSR were transmitted. He was promised royal conditions, better than those that Alexei Tolstoy had. The writer answered one of the tempters: “I have nowhere to return. There are no more places or people that I knew.
The flirtation of the Soviet authorities with the writer ended after the release of his book "Dark Alleys" in New York. They saw almost pornography. He complained to Irina Odoevtseva: “I consider “Dark Alleys” to be the best thing I have written, and they, idiots, believe that I have dishonored my gray hair with them ... The Pharisees do not understand that this is a new word, a new approach to life. Life has put the dots - detractors have long been forgotten, and "Dark Alleys" remains one of the most lyrical books in Russian literature, a true encyclopedia of love.
In November 1952, Bunin wrote the last poem, and in May of the following year he made the last entry in his diary: “It is still amazing to the point of tetanus! After some, a very short time, I will not be - and the deeds and fates of everything, everything will be unknown to me! At two o'clock in the morning from November 7 to 8, 1953, Ivan Alekseevich Bunin died in a rented apartment in Paris in the presence of his wife and his last secretary Alexei Bakhrakh.
He worked until his last days - the manuscript of a book about Chekhov remained on the table. All the major newspapers carried obituaries, and even the Soviet Pravda published a short report: "The émigré writer Ivan Bunin died in Paris." He was buried in the Russian cemetery of Saint-Genevieve-des-Bois, and seven years later Vera Nikolaevna found her last shelter next to him. By that time, Bunin's works, after 40 years of oblivion, began to be published again in their homeland. His dream came true - compatriots were able to see and recognize the Russia he saved, which has long sunk into history.
Option 3
The first Russian Nobel laureate Ivan Alekseevich Bunin is called a jeweler of the word, a prose writer-painter, a genius of Russian literature and the brightest representative of the Silver Age. Literary critics agree that in Bunin's works there is a kinship with paintings, and in terms of attitude, the stories and novels of Ivan Alekseevich are similar to the canvases of Mikhail Vrubel.
Childhood and youth
Ivan Bunin's contemporaries argue that the writer felt "breed", innate aristocracy. There is nothing to be surprised: Ivan Alekseevich is a representative of the oldest noble family, rooted in the 15th century. The Bunin family coat of arms is included in the coat of arms of the noble families of the Russian Empire. Among the writer's ancestors is Vasily Zhukovsky, the founder of romanticism, the writer of ballads and poems.
Ivan Alekseevich was born in October 1870 in Voronezh, in the family of a poor nobleman and petty official Alexei Bunin, married to his cousin Lyudmila Chubarova, a meek but impressionable woman. She bore her husband nine children, of whom four survived.
The family moved to Voronezh 4 years before the birth of Ivan to educate their eldest sons Yuli and Evgeny. They settled in a rented apartment on Bolshaya Dvoryanskaya Street. When Ivan was four years old, his parents returned to the Butyrka family estate in the Oryol province. Bunin spent his childhood on the farm.
The love of reading was instilled in the boy by his tutor, a student of Moscow University, Nikolai Romashkov. At home, Ivan Bunin studied languages, focusing on Latin. The first books of the future writer that he read on his own were Homer's Odyssey and a collection of English poems.
In the summer of 1881, Ivan's father brought him to Yelets. The youngest son passed the exams and entered the 1st grade of the male gymnasium. Bunin liked to study, but this did not apply to the exact sciences. In a letter to his older brother, Vanya admitted that he considers the math exam "the most terrible." After 5 years, Ivan Bunin was expelled from the gymnasium in the middle of the school year. The 16-year-old boy came to his father's estate Ozerki for the Christmas holidays, but never returned to Yelets. For non-appearance at the gymnasium, the teachers' council expelled the guy. Ivan's elder brother Julius took up further education.
Literature
Ivan Bunin's creative biography began in Ozerki. In the estate, he continued to work on the novel “Passion” begun in Yelets, but the work did not reach the reader. But the poem of the young writer, written under the impression of the death of an idol - the poet Semyon Nadson - was published in the Rodina magazine.
In his father's estate, with the help of his brother, Ivan Bunin prepared for the final exams, passed them and received a matriculation certificate.
From the autumn of 1889 to the summer of 1892, Ivan Bunin worked in the journal Orlovsky Vestnik, where his stories, poems and literary criticism were published. In August 1892, Julius called his brother to Poltava, where he got Ivan a job as a librarian in the provincial government.
In January 1894, the writer visited Moscow, where he met with a congenial Leo Tolstoy. Like Lev Nikolaevich, Bunin criticizes urban civilization. In the stories "Antonov apples", "Epitaph" and "New road" nostalgic notes for the passing era are guessed, regret is felt for the degenerate nobility.
In 1897, Ivan Bunin published the book "To the End of the World" in St. Petersburg. A year earlier he had translated Henry Longfellow's poem The Song of Hiawatha. Bunin's translation included poems by Alcaeus, Saadi, Francesco Petrarch, Adam Mickiewicz, and George Byron.
In 1898, Ivan Alekseevich's poetry collection Under the Open Sky was published in Moscow, warmly received by literary critics and readers. Two years later, Bunin presented poetry lovers with a second book of poems - Falling Leaves, which strengthened the author's authority as a "poet of the Russian landscape." Petersburg Academy of Sciences in 1903 awards Ivan Bunin the first Pushkin Prize, followed by the second.
But in the poetic environment, Ivan Bunin earned a reputation as an "old-fashioned landscape painter." In the late 1890s, “fashionable” poets Valery Bryusov, who brought the “breath of city streets” to Russian lyrics, and Alexander Blok with his restless heroes became favorites. Maximilian Voloshin, in a review of Bunin's Poems, wrote that Ivan Alekseevich found himself aloof "from the general movement", but from the point of view of painting, his poetic "canvases" reached "the end points of perfection." Critics call the poems “I Remember a Long Winter Evening” and “Evening” as examples of perfection and adherence to the classics.
Ivan Bunin, the poet, does not accept symbolism and critically looks at the revolutionary events of 1905-1907, calling himself "a witness to the great and vile." In 1910, Ivan Alekseevich published the story "The Village", which marked the beginning of "a whole series of works that sharply depict the Russian soul." The continuation of the series is the story "Dry Valley" and the stories "Strength", "Good Life", "Prince in Princes", "Sand Shoes".
In 1915, Ivan Bunin was at the peak of his popularity. His famous stories "The Gentleman from San Francisco", "Grammar of Love", "Easy Breath" and "Chang's Dreams" are published. In 1917, the writer leaves revolutionary Petrograd, avoiding the "terrible proximity of the enemy." Bunin lived in Moscow for six months, from there in May 1918 he left for Odessa, where he wrote the diary "Cursed Days" - a furious denunciation of the revolution and the Bolshevik government.
It is dangerous for a writer who criticizes the new government so fiercely to remain in the country. In January 1920, Ivan Alekseevich leaves Russia. He leaves for Constantinople, and in March he ends up in Paris. A collection of short stories called "The Gentleman from San Francisco" was published here, which the public greets enthusiastically.
From the summer of 1923, Ivan Bunin lived at the Belvedere villa in ancient Grasse, where Sergei Rachmaninov visited him. During these years, the stories "Initial Love", "Numbers", "The Rose of Jericho" and "Mitina's Love" were published.
In 1930, Ivan Alekseevich wrote the story "The Shadow of a Bird" and completed the most significant work created in exile - the novel "The Life of Arseniev." The description of the hero's experiences is covered with sadness about the departed Russia, "who died before our eyes in such a magically short time."
In the late 1930s, Ivan Bunin moved to the Jeannette Villa, where he lived during the Second World War. The writer was worried about the fate of his homeland and joyfully met the news about the slightest victory of the Soviet troops. Bunin lived in poverty. He wrote about his predicament:
“I was rich - now, by the will of fate, I suddenly became poor ... I was famous all over the world - now no one in the world needs ... I really want to go home!”
The villa was dilapidated: the heating system did not function, there were interruptions in electricity and water supply. Ivan Alekseevich told his friends in letters about the "cave continuous hunger." In order to get at least a small amount, Bunin asked a friend who had left for America to publish the collection Dark Alleys on any terms. The book in Russian with a circulation of 600 copies was published in 1943, for which the writer received $300. The collection includes the story "Clean Monday". The last masterpiece of Ivan Bunin - the poem "Night" - was published in 1952.
Researchers of the prose writer's work have noticed that his novels and stories are cinematic. For the first time, a Hollywood producer spoke about the film adaptation of Ivan Bunin's works, expressing a desire to make a film based on the story "The Gentleman from San Francisco." But it ended with a conversation.
Ivan Bunin is rightfully famous not only in Russia, but all over the world. He left an indelible mark on the history of literature, and his works have been translated into many languages. To this day, Bunin is considered one of the pillars of classical Russian prose, although, it must be admitted, his poems and other poetic works are in no way inferior to his own stories and novels.
Interesting facts about Ivan Bunin.
Russian writer and poet, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature
Ivan Bunin
As a representative of an impoverished noble family, Bunin began an independent life early. In his youth he worked in newspapers, offices, traveled a lot. The first of Bunin's published works was the poem "Over the Grave of S. Ya. Nadson" (1887); the first poetry collection was published in 1891 in Orel. In 1903 he received the Pushkin Prize for the book Falling Leaves and the translation of The Song of Hiawatha; in 1909 he was repeatedly awarded this award for the 3rd and 4th volumes of the Collected Works. In 1909 he was elected an honorary academician in the category of belles-lettres of the Imperial St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences. From 1920 he lived in France. Author of the novel The Life of Arsenyev, the stories Sukhodol, The Village, Mitina's Love, the stories The Gentleman from San Francisco, Light Breathing, Antonov Apples, diary entries Cursed Days and other works. In 1933, Ivan Bunin won the Nobel Prize in Literature for "the rigorous skill with which he develops the traditions of Russian classical prose." He died in 1953 and is buried in the Sainte-Genevieve-des-Bois cemetery. Bunin's works were repeatedly filmed. The image of the writer is embodied in the film by Alexei Uchitel "The Diary of His Wife".
A representative of a noble family, which was rooted in the 15th century and had a coat of arms included in the "General Armorial of the Noble Families of the All-Russian Empire" (1797). Among the writer's relatives were the poetess Anna Bunina, the writer Vasily Zhukovsky and other figures of Russian culture and science. Great-great-grandfather of Ivan Alekseevich - Semyon Afanasyevich - served as secretary of the State patrimonial board. Great-grandfather - Dmitry Semyonovich - retired with the rank of titular adviser. Grandfather - Nikolai Dmitrievich - served for a short time in the Voronezh Chamber of the Civil Court, then was engaged in farming in those villages that he got after the property division.
The writer's father, landowner Alexei Nikolaevich Bunin (1827-1906), did not receive a good education: after graduating from the first grade of the Oryol gymnasium, he left school, and at the age of sixteen got a job in the office of the provincial noble assembly. As part of the Yelets militia squad, he participated in the Crimean campaign. Ivan Alekseevich recalled his father as a man who possessed remarkable physical strength, hot and generous at the same time: “His whole being was ... saturated with the feeling of his lordly origin.” Despite the dislike for learning that had taken root since adolescence, until old age he "read everything that came to hand with great willingness."
Returning home from a campaign in 1856, Alexei Nikolaevich married his cousin, Lyudmila Alexandrovna Chubarova (1835 (?) - 1910). Unlike her energetic, temperamental husband (who, according to the writer, “drank terribly at times, although he did not have ... a single typical feature of an alcoholic”), she was a meek, gentle, pious woman; it is possible that her impressionability was transferred to Ivan Alekseevich. In 1857, the firstborn appeared in the family - the son of Julius, in 1858 - the son of Eugene. In total, Lyudmila Alexandrovna gave birth to nine children, five of whom died in early childhood.
Ivan Alekseevich was born on October 10, 1870 in Voronezh, in house number 3 on Bolshaya Dvoryanskaya Street, which belonged to the provincial secretary Anna Germanovskaya, who rented out rooms to tenants. The Bunin family moved to the city from the village in 1867 to give a gymnasium education to their eldest sons Yuli and Evgeny. As the writer later recalled, his childhood memories were associated with Pushkin, whose poems in the house were read aloud by everyone - both parents and brothers. At the age of four, Bunin, together with his parents, moved to a family estate on the Butyrki farm in the Yelets district. Thanks to the tutor - a student of Moscow University Nikolai Osipovich Romashkov - the boy became addicted to reading; home education also included teaching languages (among which special attention was paid to Latin) and drawing. Among the first books read by Bunin on his own were Homer's Odyssey and a collection of English poetry.
In the summer of 1881, Alexei Nikolayevich brought his youngest son to the Yelets Men's Gymnasium. In a petition addressed to the director, the father wrote: “I wish to educate my son Ivan Bunin in the educational institution entrusted to you”; in an additional document, he promised to pay the fee for the “right to teach” in a timely manner and notify the boy of changes in the boy’s place of residence. After passing the entrance exams, Bunin was enrolled in the 1st grade. At first, Ivan Alekseevich, together with his friend Yegor Zakharov, lived in the house of the Yelets tradesman Byakin, who took 15 rubles a month from each of the tenants. Later, the high school student moved in with a certain cemetery sculptor, then changed housing twice more. In the training course, mathematics was the most difficult for Bunin - in one of the letters to his older brother, he mentioned that the exam in this subject was “the most terrible” for him.
Studying at the gymnasium ended for Ivan Alekseevich in the winter of 1886. Having gone on vacation to his parents, who moved to their Ozerki estate, he decided not to return to Yelets. In early spring, the teachers' council expelled Bunin from the gymnasium for not appearing "from the Christmas vacation." From that time on, Julius, exiled to Ozerki under police supervision, became his home teacher. The older brother, realizing that mathematics causes rejection in the younger, concentrated his main teaching efforts on the humanities.
Bunin's first literary experiments also belong to this period - he wrote poetry from his gymnasium years, and at the age of fifteen he composed the novel "Passion", which was not accepted by any edition. In the winter of 1887, having learned that one of his literary idols, the poet Semyon Nadson, had died, Ivan Alekseevich sent several poems to Rodina magazine. One of them, entitled "Over the Grave of S. Ya. Nadson," was published in the February issue. Another - "The Village Beggar" - appeared in the May issue. Later, the writer recalled: “The morning when I went with this number from the post office to Ozerki, tore dewy lilies of the valley through the forests and re-read my work every minute, I will never forget.”
In January 1889, the publisher of the Orlovsky Vestnik, Nadezhda Semyonova, offered Bunin to take the position of assistant editor in her newspaper. Before agreeing or refusing, Ivan Alekseevich decided to consult with Julius, who, having left Ozerki, moved to Kharkov. So in the life of the writer began a period of wandering. In Kharkov, Bunin settled with his brother, who helped him find a simple job in the zemstvo council. Having received a salary, Ivan Alekseevich went to the Crimea, visited Yalta, Sevastopol. He returned to the editorial office of the Oryol newspaper only in the autumn.
At that time, Varvara Pashchenko (1870-1918) worked as a proofreader in Orlovsky Vestnik, whom researchers call the first - "unmarried" - wife of the writer. She graduated from the seven classes of the Yelets women's gymnasium, then entered an additional course "for the special study of the Russian language." In a letter to his brother, Ivan Alekseevich said that at the first meeting, Varvara - "tall, with very beautiful features, in pince-nez" - seemed to him a very arrogant and emancipated girl; later he characterized her as an intelligent, interesting conversationalist.
The relationship between the lovers was difficult: Varvara's father refused to see Bunin as his future son-in-law, and he, in turn, was burdened by worldly disorder. The financial situation of his family at that time was precarious, the parents of Ivan Alekseevich, who sold the Butyrki and transferred the Ozerki to their son Evgeny, actually parted; according to Bunin's younger sister Maria, they sometimes "sat completely without bread." Ivan Alekseevich wrote to Julius that he constantly thinks about money: “I don’t have a penny, earn money, write something - I can’t, I don’t want to.”
In 1892, Ivan Alekseevich moved to Poltava, where, with the assistance of Julius, he got a job in the statistical department of the provincial government. Soon Barbara also arrived there. An attempt to create a family in a new place failed: Bunin devoted a lot of time to meetings with representatives of populist circles, communicated with Tolstoyans, and traveled. In November 1894, Pashchenko left Poltava, leaving a note: "I'm leaving, Vanya, don't remember me dashingly." Ivan Alekseevich endured the separation from his beloved so hard that his older brothers seriously feared for his life. Returning with them to Yelets, Bunin came to Varvara's house, but a relative of the girl who came out onto the porch said that no one knew her address. Pashchenko, who became the wife of the writer and actor Arseny Bibikov, died in 1918 from tuberculosis. According to researchers, the relationship with her is captured in Bunin's artistic autobiographies - in particular, in the novel "The Life of Arseniev".
People who knew the young Bunin characterized him as a person in whom there was a lot of "life force, thirst for life." Perhaps it was these qualities that helped the novice poet, the author of the only collection of poems at that time (issued in Orel in 1891 with a circulation of 1250 copies and sent free of charge to subscribers of the Oryol Messenger) rather quickly enter the literary circles of Russia at the end of the 19th century. In January 1895, Ivan Alekseevich, leaving the service in Poltava, came to St. Petersburg for the first time. In less than two weeks spent in the capital, he met critic Nikolai Mikhailovsky, publicist Sergei Krivenko, poet Konstantin Balmont, visited the editorial office of the Novoye Slovo magazine, met writer Dmitry Grigorovich in a bookstore (the seventy-two-year-old author of Anton Goremyka struck him with liveliness eyes and a raccoon coat to the toes), visited the house of Alexei Zhemchuzhnikov and received an invitation from him to dinner.
The series of meetings was continued in Moscow and other cities. Arriving at Tolstoy's house in Khamovniki, the young writer talked with the writer about Lev Nikolayevich's just-released story "The Master and the Worker." Later, he met Chekhov, who surprised Bunin with friendliness and simplicity: "I, then a young man who was not used to such a tone at the first meetings, took this simplicity for coldness." The first conversation with Valery Bryusov was remembered by the revolutionary maxims about art, loudly proclaimed by the symbolist poet: "Long live only the new and down with everything old!" Quite quickly, Bunin became close to Alexander Kuprin - they were the same age, together they began to enter the literary community and, according to Ivan Alekseevich, "wandered endlessly and sat on the cliffs over the pale lethargic sea."
In those years, Bunin became a member of the Sreda literary circle, whose members, gathering in the house of Nikolai Teleshov, read and discussed each other's works. The atmosphere at their meetings was informal, and each of the circle members had nicknames associated with the names of Moscow streets - for example, Maxim Gorky, who loved to talk about the life of tramps, was named Khitrovka; Leonid Andreev was called Vagankov for his commitment to the theme of death; Bunin for thinness and irony "got" Zhivoderka. The writer Boris Zaitsev, recalling Bunin's performances in the circle, wrote about the charm of Ivan Alekseevich and the ease with which he moved around the world. Nikolai Teleshov called Bunin a fidget - he did not know how to stay in one place for a long time, and letters from Ivan Alekseevich came either from Orel, then from Odessa, then from Yalta. Bunin knew that he had a reputation as a sociable person, eagerly reaching for new impressions, organically fitting into his bohemian-artistic time. He himself believed that inner loneliness was behind his desire to constantly be among people:
In 1898, Bunin met the editor of the publication "Southern Review" - Nikolai Tsakni from Odessa. His daughter - nineteen-year-old Anna - became the first official wife of Ivan Alekseevich. In a letter to Julius, talking about the upcoming marriage, Bunin reported that his chosen one was "beautiful, but the girl is amazingly pure and simple." In September of the same year, a wedding took place, after which the newlyweds went on a trip by boat. Despite entering the family of wealthy Greeks, the writer’s financial situation remained difficult - for example, in the summer of 1899, he turned to his older brother with a request to send at least ten rubles immediately, noting: “I won’t ask Tsakni, even if I die.” After two years of marriage, the couple broke up; their only son, Nikolai, died of scarlet fever in 1905. Subsequently, already living in France, Ivan Alekseevich admitted that he did not have “special love” for Anna Nikolaevna, although she was a very pleasant lady: “But this pleasantness consisted of this Lanzheron, big waves on the shore and also that every day for dinner there was an excellent trout with white wine, after which we often went to the opera with it.
Bunin did not hide his annoyance due to the poor attention of critics to his early works; in many of his letters there was the phrase "Praise, please, praise!". Lacking literary agents capable of organizing press reviews, he sent his books to friends and acquaintances, accompanying the mailing list with requests for reviews. Bunin's debut collection of poems, published in Orel, almost did not arouse interest in the literary environment - the reason was indicated by one of the authors of the journal "Observer" (1892, No. 3), who noted that "Mr. Bunin's verse is smooth and correct, but who writes in rough verses? In 1897, the writer's second book, To the End of the World and Other Stories, was published in St. Petersburg. At least twenty reviewers have already responded to it, but the general intonation was "benevolently condescending." In addition, two dozen reviews looked, according to Korney Chukovsky, “a microscopically small number” against the backdrop of the resonance caused by the release of any of the works of Maxim Gorky, Leonid Andreev and other “public favorites” of the turn of the century.
A certain recognition came to Bunin after the release of the poetry collection “Leaf Fall”, published by the symbolist publishing house “Scorpion” in 1901 and which, according to Vladislav Khodasevich, became “the first book to which he owes the beginning of his fame.” Somewhat earlier, in 1896, Bunin's translation of the "Song of Hiawatha" by Henry Longfellow appeared, which was very well received by the literary community. In the spring of 1901, Ivan Alekseevich asked Chekhov to submit Falling Leaves and The Song of Hiawatha for the Pushkin Prize. Chekhov complied with this request, having previously consulted with lawyer Anatoly Koni: “Please, teach me how to do this, to what address to send it. I myself once received an award, but I did not send my books.
In February 1903, it became known that the award commission had appointed Count Arseny Golenishchev-Kutuzov as a reviewer of Bunin's works. Almost immediately after this news, the writer Platon Krasnov published “The Literary Characteristics of Iv. Bunin" ("Literary Evenings" New World "", 1903, No. 2), in which he noted that the poems of the candidate for the prize are "extremely monotonous", and his poem "Falling Leaves" is "only a series of pictures of the forest in autumn." Comparing the poems of Ivan Alekseevich with the works of Tyutchev and Fet, Krasnov stated that, unlike them, the young poet does not know how to "captivate the reader with such a topic as descriptions of nature." Golenishchev-Kutuzov gave a different assessment of Bunin's work - in a review sent to the commission, he indicated that Ivan Alekseevich had "a beautiful, imaginative, his own language, not borrowed from anyone."
On October 18, 1903, the voting of the commission for the award of the Pushkin Prize took place (the chairman was literary historian Alexander Veselovsky). Bunin received eight electoral votes and three non-electoral ones. As a result, he was awarded half the prize (500 rubles), the second part went to the translator Pyotr Weinberg. The Pushkin Prize strengthened Bunin's reputation as a writer, but contributed little to the commercial success of his works. According to Korney Chukovsky, in the Moscow Metropol Hotel, where the Scorpion publishing house was located, unopened packs of the Leaf Fall collection lay for several years: “There were no buyers for it. Every time I came to the publishing house, I saw these dusty bundles that serve as furniture for visitors. As a result, Scorpio advertised a price reduction: “Ivan Bunin. "Leaf fall" instead of the ruble 60 kopecks.
In October 1906, Bunin, who lived very chaotically that autumn, "moving from guests to restaurants", once again arrived in Moscow and stayed in Gunst's furnished rooms. Among the events with his participation, a literary evening was planned in the apartment of the writer Boris Zaitsev. At the evening, which took place on November 4, twenty-five-year-old Vera Muromtseva, who was friends with the mistress of the house, was present. After reading poetry, Ivan Alekseevich met his future wife.
Vera Muromtseva (1881-1961) was the daughter of Nikolai Muromtsev, a member of the Moscow City Council, and the niece of Sergei Muromtsev, chairman of the First State Duma. Her father was distinguished by a very calm disposition, while her mother, according to Boris Zaitsev, resembled the heroine of Dostoevsky - "something like the general's wife Yepanchina." Vera Nikolaevna, a graduate of the Higher Women's Courses, studied chemistry, knew several European languages, and at the time of her acquaintance with Bunin was far from the literary-bohemian environment. Contemporaries described her as "a very beautiful girl with huge, light-transparent, as if crystal eyes."
Since Anna Tsakni did not give Bunin a divorce, the writer could not formalize his relationship with Muromtseva (they got married after leaving Russia, in 1922; Alexander Kuprin was the best man). The beginning of their life together was a trip abroad: in April-May 1907, Bunin and Vera Nikolaevna made a trip to the countries of the East. Nikolai Dmitrievich Teleshov gave them money for the voyage.
In those blessed days when the sun of my life stood at noon, when, in the flower of strength and hope, hand in hand with the one whom God judged to be my companion to the grave, I made my first long journey, the marriage journey, which was at the same time and pilgrimages to the holy land.
I. A. Bunin
The unsuccessful experience of cooperation with Scorpio forced Bunin to refuse further work with the symbolist publishing house; as Ivan Alekseevich himself wrote, at a certain moment he lost the desire to play Argonauts, demons, magicians with "new comrades." In 1902, he got another publisher - the St. Petersburg partnership "Knowledge". For eight years, it was engaged in the release of the collected works of the writer. The greatest resonance was caused by the release of the 3rd volume, which contained new poems by Bunin (1906, circulation 5205 copies, price 1 ruble).
In the autumn of 1906 (or in the winter of the next), the 3rd volume, together with the translation of Byron's Cain, was sent by Bunin to the Academy of Sciences for nomination for the next Pushkin Prize. Two years later, Kuprin's wife, Maria Karlovna, informed Ivan Alekseevich that the members of the commission had not received his books, and therefore Valery Bryusov was considered a likely contender for the award. The overlay may have occurred due to the fact that Pyotr Weinberg, who died in the summer of 1908, was appointed reviewer of Bunin's works; the books he had taken for study were lost. Bunin quickly reacted to the information received from Kuprina: he re-sent to the Academy of Sciences the 3rd and 4th volumes of his works, as well as a letter with the necessary explanations.
In February 1909, Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich, who became the new reviewer of Bunin's works, prepared a review of his writings. The report noted that the candidate for the award was not a novice author, but a poet who "overcame the hard work of presenting poetic thought with an equally poetic speech." At the same time, according to the reviewer, a realistic description of the inner experiences of his lyrical hero sometimes borders almost on cynicism - in particular, the poem "Loneliness" was discussed. A detailed analysis, which listed other “roughnesses” (vagueness of thought, unsuccessful comparisons, inaccuracies found when comparing the translated “Cain” with the original), ended with a verdict: Bunin’s works submitted to the commission do not deserve a prize, but they are quite worthy of an “honorary recall."
This review did not affect the voting results, and already in early May, Alexander Kuprin, who received information about the preliminary results of the competition, informed Bunin that they had both been awarded half the Pushkin Prize; the letter jokingly noted: "I'm not angry with you because you whistled half a thousand from me." Bunin, in response, assured his comrade that he was satisfied with the current situation: “I am glad ... that fate has connected my name with yours.” Relations between Kuprin and Bunin were friendly, but, nevertheless, there was always an element of light rivalry in them. They were different in character: Alexander Ivanovich forever retained the qualities of a “big child”, while Ivan Alekseevich, who became independent early, from his youthful years was distinguished by the maturity of his judgments. According to the memoirs of Maria Karlovna Kuprina, once during a dinner in their house, Bunin, proud of his ancestry, called her husband "a nobleman by mother". In response, Kuprin composed a parody of Ivan Alekseevich’s story “Antonov apples”, titled it “Pie with milk mushrooms”: “I am sitting at the window, chewing thoughtfully on a washcloth, and beautiful sadness shines in my eyes ...”.
In October, it was officially announced that the Pushkin Prize for 1909 was divided between Bunin and Kuprin; each of them received 500 rubles. Less than two weeks later, new news came from the Academy of Sciences - about the election of Bunin as an honorary academician in the category of fine literature. The corresponding idea was made back in the spring by the writer Konstantin Arsenyev, who, in a characterization sent to the Academy, indicated that Bunin's works are distinguished by "simplicity, sincerity, artistry of form." During the elections for honorary academicians, eight out of nine votes were cast for Ivan Alekseevich.
In the 1910s, Bunin and Muromtseva traveled a lot - they visited Egypt, Italy, Turkey, Romania, visited Ceylon and Palestine. Some of Ivan Alekseevich's works (for example, the story "Brothers") were written under the influence of travel impressions. During this period, the stories "The Gentleman from San Francisco" (1915), "Grammar of Love" (1915), "Easy Breath" (1916), "Chang's Dreams" (1916) were published that received many responses. Despite his creative successes, the mood of the writer was gloomy, as evidenced by his diary entries made in 1916: "Soul and mental dullness, weakness, literary sterility continues." According to Bunin, his fatigue was largely due to the First World War, which brought "great spiritual disappointment."
The writer met the October events in Moscow - together with Vera Nikolaevna, he lived in house number 26 on Povarskaya Street from the autumn of 1917 until the next spring. The diary that Ivan Alekseevich kept in the 1918-1920s became the basis for his book Cursed Days, which researchers called a significant document of a turning point. By categorically refusing to accept Soviet power, Bunin in his notes actually polemicized with Blok's poem "The Twelve" written in 1918. According to the literary critic Igor Sukhikh, in those days "Blok heard the music of the revolution, Bunin - the cacophony of rebellion."
On May 21, 1918, Ivan Alekseevich and Vera Nikolaevna left Moscow; Yuli Alekseevich Bunin and Maxim Gorky's wife, Ekaterina Peshkova, saw them off at Savelovsky Station. To Odessa, a city well known to the writer, the couple traveled in difficult ways: according to the memoirs of Muromtseva, together with other refugees, they traveled in an overcrowded ambulance to Minsk, then made transfers; one day, looking for a place to sleep, they ended up in a dubious den. Ivan Alekseevich and Vera Nikolaevna arrived in Odessa in the summer. At first they lived in a dacha behind the Bolshoy Fountain, later they moved to the mansion of the artist Yevgeny Bukovetsky, who offered them two rooms. In a letter sent to the critic Abram Dorman in the autumn of 1918, Bunin reported that he experienced "continuous pain, horror and rage when reading every newspaper."
Bunin lived in Odessa for almost a year and a half - he wrote articles for local publications, headed the literary department of the Yuzhnoye Slovo newspaper, and participated in the activities of the OSVAG agency founded by General Anton Denikin. In private conversations, he periodically mentioned his desire to join the Volunteer Army. In an interview given to the Odessky Listok newspaper (1918, No. 120), the writer spoke very sharply about the "terrible contrasts" of the era - the coincidence of Turgenev's centennial anniversary with the anniversary of the revolution. The prose writer Ivan Sokolov-Mikitov, who spoke with Bunin at that time, said that in Odessa Ivan Alekseevich was in an extremely depressed state.
On January 24, 1920, Bunin and Muromtseva boarded the small French steamship Sparta. After standing for two (according to some sources - three) days in the outer roadstead, the ship headed for Constantinople. As Vera Nikolaevna wrote in her diary, there were so many people on the ship that all decks, aisles and tables were used for the night; he and Bunin managed to take one cramped bed for two. On the sixth day the Sparta lost its way, on the seventh day it entered the Bosporus, on the ninth day it reached Tuzla. Then there were short stops in Bulgaria and Serbia. At the end of March 1920, the writer and his companion arrived in Paris.
Suddenly I woke up completely, suddenly it dawned on me: yes - so that's it - I'm in the Black Sea, I'm on someone else's ship, for some reason I'm sailing to Constantinople, Russia - the end, and everything, my whole former life is also the end, even even if a miracle happens and we do not perish in this evil and icy abyss!
I. A. Bunin
In the first years of his life in France, Bunin did little literary work. According to the assumption of the poet Gleb Struve, the writer's temporary "creative impoverishment" was due to his acute reaction to the political situation in Russia. Nevertheless, Ivan Alekseevich's books continued to be published - in the early 1920s, collections of his stories written back in the pre-revolutionary period were published in Paris, Berlin and Prague. A definite turning point occurred in 1924. On February 16, an event called "Mission of the Russian Emigration" was held in Paris, in which prose writers Ivan Shmelev, Dmitry Merezhkovsky, church historian Anton Kartashev and others took part. Bunin made a report in which he pointed out that the task of the Russian emigration is to reject the "Leninist commandments." Responding to the reproaches of those who believed that people who did not recognize the revolution “want the rivers to flow backwards,” the writer remarked: “No, it’s not like that, we don’t want the opposite, but only a different flow ... Russia! Who dares to teach me to love her?"
In the same 1924, Bunin's collection "The Rose of Jericho" was published in Berlin, which, along with pre-revolutionary works, included poems and stories written in France. A year later, the journal Sovremennye Zapiski (1925, No. 23-24) published Bunin's new story, Mitina's Love, which caused a large number of reviews in emigre publications. Then the stories "Sunstroke", "The Case of Cornet Elagin", "Ida" were written. In 1927, the writer began work on the novel The Life of Arseniev, in which he began to reproduce the impressions that had been preserved in his memory from childhood and adolescence. Literary critics noted that the social message inherent in Bunin was completely gone from the works created in the emigrant period - the writer completely immersed himself in that "pre-revolutionary world that could not be compared with the original."
In the winter months, the Bunins, as a rule, lived in a Parisian apartment located at 1 Jacques Offenbach Street. In the warm season, the family usually moved to the Alpes-Maritimes, to the Belvedere villa rented there in Grasse. In the mid-1920s, Galina Kuznetsova appeared in the life of the writer, whom researchers called his student and “Laura of Grasse”. Kuznetsova - the wife of officer D. M. Petrov - left Russia with her husband in 1920. In the spring of 1927, she broke up with Petrov and settled in Bunin's house in Grasse. Her book The Grasse Diary reproduces the almost idyllic atmosphere that prevailed in the villa: “In the morning I cut the roses ... I fill the jugs in the house with flowers.” These entries contrast with Muromtseva's diary confessions: “Today I am all alone. Maybe it's better - freer. But the anguish is terrible.” Kuznetsova lived in Grasse intermittently until 1942; in 1949 she moved to the USA.
In 1929, the writer Leonid Zurov, who later became the heir to the Bunin archive, joined the inhabitants of the Grasse villa. His acquaintance with Ivan Alekseevich happened by correspondence. Correspondence communication ended with an invitation to France; Bunin personally promised to take care of the visa and find money for the move. According to Kuznetsova, the young man appeared in the house with suitcases containing black bread, Antonov apples revered by Bunin, and linden honey. “When I.A. first came out to him, he stood up, stretched out in front of him, as if at a review.” Zurov's work as Ivan Alekseevich's secretary lasted several years, but his relationship with the Bunins persisted for decades.
Bunin's first nomination for the Nobel Prize in Literature took place shortly after the writer's arrival in France. At the origins of the Nobel "Russian project" was the prose writer Mark Aldanov, who wrote in 1922 in one of the questionnaires that in the emigrant environment the most authoritative figures are Bunin, Kuprin and Merezhkovsky; their joint candidacy for the award could raise the prestige of "exiled Russian literature." With a proposal for such a nomination, Aldanov turned to Romain Rolland. He replied that he was ready to support Bunin separately, but not in conjunction with Merezhkovsky. In addition, the French prose writer noted that if Gorky were among the contenders, he would give his preference to him. As a result, Rolland made changes to the list proposed by Aldanov: in a letter sent to the Nobel Foundation, he indicated three names - Bunin, Gorky and Balmont. The Nobel Committee had questions about each of the nominations, and the 1923 prize went to Irish poet William Yeats. In the future, emigrant writers did not abandon attempts to nominate Bunin. So, in 1930, Aldanov negotiated this with Thomas Mann. He first said that, respecting Ivan Alekseevich, it was difficult to make a choice between him and another Russian writer, Ivan Shmelev. Later, Mann admitted that since there is a representative of German literature on the list of candidates, he, as a German, is ready to vote for him.
Muromtseva was the first to know about the award of the Bunin Prize for 1933. According to her memoirs, on the morning of November 9, a telegram arrived at their Grasse villa from the Swedish translator Kalgren, who asked a question about Ivan Alekseevich's citizenship. The answer was sent to Sweden: "Russian exile". In the afternoon, Bunin and Galina Kuznetsova went to the cinema. During the session, Leonid Zurov appeared in the hall, asking the writer to stop watching and return home, - according to the secretary, Vera Nikolaevna received a phone call from Stockholm; despite the poor quality of the connection, she managed to make out the phrase: "Your husband is a Nobel Prize winner, we would like to talk to Monsieur Bunin!" Information about the award spread quickly - by the evening journalists and photojournalists arrived in Grasse. The writer Andrei Sedykh, who temporarily took over part of the secretarial duties, later said that on that day the Bunins had no money and nothing to pay for the work of couriers who constantly brought congratulatory telegrams.
The official text of the Swedish Academy stated that "The Nobel Prize in Literature ... is awarded to Ivan Bunin for the rigorous skill with which he develops the traditions of Russian classical prose." In the creative environment, the reaction to the award was ambiguous. So, if the composer Sergei Rachmaninov was among the first to send a telegram from New York with the words “Sincere congratulations”, then Marina Tsvetaeva expressed disagreement with the decision of the academy - the poetess noticed that Gorky or Merezhkovsky deserved the award to a much greater extent: “Gorky is an era, and Bunin - the end of an era.
The award ceremony took place on December 10, 1933 in the Stockholm Concert Hall. In the Nobel speech, on which the writer worked for a long time, Bunin noted that the prize was awarded for the first time to an exiled writer. The Nobel medal and the diploma of the laureate were presented to him by the King of Sweden Gustav V. The writer received a check for 170,331 Swedish kronor (715,000 francs). Ivan Alekseevich transferred part of the award to those in need. According to him, in the very first days after the news of the academy's decision, he received almost 2,000 letters from people in a difficult financial situation, so "I had to distribute about 120,000 francs."
At the beginning of World War II, the Bunins moved to the high-mountain villa Jeannette, located on the outskirts of Grasse, next to the Napoleonic road. There Ivan Alekseevich and Vera Nikolaevna lived almost without a break for about six years. In addition to them, friends and acquaintances of the family were constantly at the villa. The top floor was occupied by Galina Kuznetsova and her friend Margarita Stepun, the sister of the philosopher Fyodor Stepun. In 1940, Leonid Zurov returned to Grasse. American pianist Alexander Lieberman and his wife found temporary shelter in Bunin's house. According to Lieberman’s memoirs, in 1942, when he and his wife, having learned about the upcoming arrests of foreign Jews in Cannes, were looking for an “underground”, Ivan Alekseevich insisted on settling them in Jeannette: “So we did - and spent several alarming days." From 1940 to 1944, the writer Alexander Bakhrakh was in Bunin's house, who himself came to the villa with a request to give him asylum. Muromtseva arranged a baptismal ceremony for him in a small church, and Zurov, through a priest he knew, filled out the documents that, during his arrest on the street, saved Bakhrakh's life. Subsequently, Alexander Vasilyevich published the book “Bunin in a Dressing Gown”, in which, in particular, he mentioned that among the writer’s guests was Pushkin’s granddaughter, Elena Rosenmayer, brought by Ivan Alekseevich from Nice.
The artist Tatyana Loginova-Muravyova, who was in Grasse during the war years, said that Bunin constantly listened to English and Swiss news bulletins on the radio. Maps were hung in his office, on which the writer made notes with arrows. In his diaries, he almost daily recorded information about the movement of Soviet troops. From radio messages and letters, Ivan Alekseevich learned about the fate of his friends: “Balmont and Professor Olan died. Disappeared from the world and from my life Balmont! And I vividly see my acquaintance with him in Moscow, in the rooms of Madrid on Tverskaya ... A letter from Vera Zaitseva: Nilus has died.
During the war, Villa Jeannette lost its original respectability: the heating system ceased to function, there were difficulties with water and electricity supply, and the furniture was dilapidated. In letters to acquaintances, Bunin mentioned "cave solid famine." The Nobel Prize was spent, no new publications were expected; according to Zurov's memoirs, Bunin received offers to work in publications published in the occupied lands, but Ivan Alekseevich refused. In those days, he wrote: “I was rich - now, by the will of fate, I suddenly became poor ... I was famous all over the world - now no one in the world needs ... I really want to go home!” Trying to get at least a small fee, Ivan Alekseevich asked Andrei Sedykh, who left for the United States, to publish the book Dark Alleys, which included works written in 1937-1942. In the letter, Bunin noted that he agreed to any conditions. Andrey Sedykh, who created the Novaya Zemlya publishing house in New York specifically for this project, published Dark Alleys in Russian in 1943 with a circulation of 600 copies. Many problems arose with the English version of the book, and it was published after the war. For "Dark Alleys" Bunin was paid 300 dollars.
Bunin was a nobleman by birth, but his way of life - especially in his youth - turned out to be akin to Raznochinsky. Having left his parental home early (and not finding his own until the end of his life), he got used to relying only on himself. For many years, his haven was rented corners, furnished rooms, hotels - he lived either in Stolichnaya, or in Patchwork, or in the village, or in the apartments of friends. In private conversations, the writer admitted that from his youth he was tormented by "contradictory passions." The poetess Irina Odoevtseva suggested that both his unbridled disposition and the ability to perform heroic deeds were largely determined by his heredity: “He got nervousness ... not only from his alcoholic father, but also from his martyr mother.” People who communicated with Ivan Alekseevich paid attention to his unusually acute sense of smell, hearing and vision - he himself called his hypersensitivity "internal". According to Bunin, in his youth he easily distinguished stars that other people could see only with the help of powerful optical instruments; thanks to his excellent hearing, he could hear the sound of approaching horse bells a few miles from the house. His "mental vision and hearing" were just as sharpened.
Memoirists wrote about Bunin's "lordly posture", his innate elegance, his ability to hold himself freely and feel natural in any society. According to the remark of Kuprin's wife Maria Karlovna, her husband - even in the most fashionable suits - next to Ivan Alekseevich looked awkward and awkward. Tatyana Loginova-Muravyova, who looked at Bunin's appearance as an artist, drew attention to the mobility of all the features of his face; sometimes it seemed that even his eyes were able to change color depending on the mood: they could be green, gray, blue. The writer knew about his "many-sidedness", so he reluctantly agreed to the proposals of artists to work on his portraits.
Bunin considered morning to be the best time to work - as a rule, he sat down at his desk before breakfast. Both editors and colleagues knew about his strictness to the word and any punctuation mark - Kuprin, in a conversation with Ivan Alekseevich, once noted that he "sweat is visible in every line." According to the memoirs of Mark Vishnyak, an employee of the Parisian journal Sovremennye Zapiski, Bunin’s attitude to the construction of a phrase in the text sometimes reached “painful scrupulousness”; the publishing houses with which he collaborated, before submitting the manuscript for publication, he received urgent telegrams with requests to change the word or rearrange the comma. The writer explained his desire to immediately make the last revision as follows: “Tolstoy demanded from the Severny Vestnik one hundred proofs of The Master and the Worker ... And I ask only two!” The reform of Russian spelling, in which yat and erik disappeared from the alphabet, Ivan Alekseevich met very negatively - he argued that "the" forest "without" yati "loses all its resinous flavor."
The opinions of contemporaries about Bunin's character turned out to be contradictory. In some memories, he was presented as an easy, witty interlocutor, who, nevertheless, could not be called an open person. Others wrote that in the creative environment he was perceived as a sharp, quarrelsome, impolite writer. According to Irina Odoevtseva, sometimes he "could be very unpleasant without even noticing it." Ivan Alekseevich greatly helped those who needed support, but at the same time liked to have his students accompany him at events - such a public demonstration of the “retinue” sometimes irritated his colleagues, who called the writer’s followers “Bunin’s fortress ballet”.
According to Bunin, he never knew how to properly manage money, and the Nobel Prize, which, according to the calculations of friends, could provide the writer with a comfortable old age, was wasted very quickly. The Bunins did not purchase their own housing, did not set aside any sums "for a rainy day." Andrei Sedykh, who, together with Ivan Alekseevich, sorted out the mail that arrived in Grasse after receiving the award, recalled the letters that came from all over the world. When a certain sailor asked the writer to send him 50 francs, he responded to the request. Just as easily, he gave gifts to unfamiliar admirers, and Vera Nikolaevna distributed money to writers to publish books or pay for their studies. Writer Zinaida Shakhovskaya argued that the Bunin's open house attracted both unscrupulous publishers and lawyers with a dubious reputation. The impracticality of the family led to the fact that three years after receiving the award, Ivan Alekseevich wrote in his diary: “Agents who will always receive interest from me, return the Collected Works for free ... Not a penny of income from money ... And old age is ahead. Exit to circulation.
After the war, the Bunins returned to their Parisian apartment. In June 1946, the Soviet Union issued a decree "On the restoration of citizenship of the USSR subjects of the former Russian Empire, as well as persons who had lost Soviet citizenship, living in France." As Vera Nikolaevna wrote in those days, the publication of the document caused a lot of unrest in the emigrant environment, in some families there was a split: “Some wanted to go, others wanted to stay.” Bunin, answering a question from a Russkiye Novosti correspondent about his attitude to the decree, noted with restraint that he hoped that this “generous measure” would be extended to other countries where emigrants live, in particular, to Bulgaria and Yugoslavia. The USSR Ambassador to France, Alexander Bogomolov, held two meetings, at which, in addition to him, Konstantin Simonov and Ilya Ehrenburg, who arrived in Paris, spoke. In addition, the ambassador personally invited Bunin to breakfast; during the meeting, Ivan Alekseevich was invited to return to his homeland. According to Bogomolov, the writer thanked for the offer and promised to think about it. Here is what Konstantin Simonov recalls about this:
Speaking about returning, he said that, of course, he really wants to go, see, visit familiar places, but his age is embarrassing. Too late, too late... I am already old, and there are no friends left alive. Of the close friends, only Teleshov remained, and even he, I'm afraid, would not die until I arrive. I'm afraid to feel empty. (...) And I became attached to France, I got used to it very much, and it would be difficult for me to wean from it. But to take a passport and not go, to stay here with a Soviet passport - why take a passport if not to go? Since I’m not going, I’ll live the way I lived, it’s not about my documents, but about my feelings ...
Konstantin Simonov
The return did not take place, and Bunin, having an emigrant passport, until the last days remained a stateless person.
In the post-war period, ties with Soviet writers began to be restored. Konstantin Simonov, whom I met at one of the meetings, visited Bunin at home more than once. Judging by Muromtseva’s diaries, she was somewhat alarmed by the talk about Simonov’s well-being, and the message that he had secretaries and stenographers made her think about the problems of émigré writers: “Zaitsev does not have a [typewriter], Zurov has the minimum for a normal life, Yan [ Ivan Alekseevich] - the opportunity to go, treat bronchitis. At that time, Bunin was given some literary works published in the USSR - for example, he read and spoke very warmly about Alexander Tvardovsky's "Vasily Terkin" and the story "Korchma on Braginka" by Konstantin Paustovsky.
In 1947, Bunin, who was diagnosed with emphysema, went to the resort of Juan-les-Pins, located in the south of France, at the insistence of doctors. After undergoing treatment, he returned to Paris and managed to take part in an event organized by friends in his honor; in the autumn of the same 1947, his last performance before a large audience took place. Soon Ivan Alekseevich turned to Andrei Sedykh with a request for help: “I became very weak, I lay in bed for two months, I went bankrupt ... I went to the 79th year, and I am so poor that I don’t know at all what and how I will exist” . Sedykh managed to negotiate with the American philanthropist Frank Atran to transfer the writer a monthly pension of 10,000 francs. This money was sent to Bunin until 1952; after the death of Atran, payments ceased.
In October 1953, Ivan Alekseevich's health deteriorated sharply. Family friends who helped Vera Nikolaevna take care of the sick were almost constantly in the house, including Alexander Bakhrakh; Doctor Vladimir Zernov came every day. A few hours before his death, Bunin asked his wife to read Chekhov's letters to him aloud. As Zernov recalled, on November 8 he was called to the writer twice: the first time he performed the necessary medical procedures, and when he arrived again, Ivan Alekseevich was already dead. The cause of death, according to the doctor, was cardiac asthma and pulmonary sclerosis. Bunin was buried in the cemetery of Saint-Genevieve-des-Bois. The monument on the grave was made according to a drawing by the artist Alexandre Benois.
Bunin, who published several collections of poetry and received two Pushkin Prizes for them, had a long reputation in the literary community as an old-fashioned landscape painter. In the years of his youth, Russian poetry was looking for new forms for self-expression, and Bunin, an adherent of the classics, looked conservative against the background of Bryusov, who brought the “breath of city streets” into the lyrics, or early Blok with his unsettled heroes, penetrating into the very thick of life. As Maximilian Voloshin wrote in his review, responding to the Bunin collection "Poems" (1903-1906, the publishing house "Knowledge"), Ivan Alekseevich turned out to be aloof "from the general movement in the field of Russian verse." At the same time, according to Voloshin, from the point of view of painting, Bunin's poetic paintings reached "the end points of perfection."
In the lyrics of the young Bunin, one can feel the influence of Yakov Polonsky, Apollo Maykov, Alexei Zhemchuzhnikov and Afanasy Fet. Critic Konstantin Medvedsky, when analyzing the works of the Pushkin Prize winners for 1903, cited several quotes from Bunin's collection "Leaf Fall", in which the "Fet school" is found, - in particular, these are the lines: “The hollow water is raging, - / It makes noise both deafly and lingeringly. / Migratory herds of rooks / They shout both cheerfully and importantly ”. In addition, contemporaries of Ivan Alekseevich associated his poetic sketches with landscapes from the prose works of Turgenev and Chekhov. In the first decades of the 20th century, critics wished Bunin to quickly get rid of "rehashings" and enter an independent path in poetry.
The main theme in Bunin's early poems was nature with its seasons, "gray skies" and "forests on distant slopes." Later, the turn of philosophical reflections came, when graveyards and tombstones appeared among the elements of the landscape, and the lyrical hero turned to cosmic problems, began to look for answers to eternal questions: “And the shadow fades, and the moon moves, / Immersed in its pale light, as if in smoke, / And it seems that just about I will understand / The invisible - walking in the smoke”. Bunin has few poems about love, but the intimate experiences of his characters became a kind of prologue to the prose works of Ivan Alekseevich, written much later. For example, in his love lyrics there is that sensuality that is characteristic of the hero of "Mitya's Love" ( “I went to her at midnight. / She was sleeping - the moon was shining"), as well as the sadness that appears in the story "Easy breathing" ("A churchyard, a chapel above the crypt, / Wreaths, icon lamps, images / And in a frame intertwined with crepe - / Big clear eyes").
Bunin's debut as a prose writer took place in 1893, when his story "A Village Sketch" was published in the St. Petersburg magazine "Russian Wealth", which later received a different name - "Tanka". The editor of Russian Wealth, Nikolai Mikhailovsky, after reading the manuscript, wrote to the twenty-three-year-old author that in time he would “become a great writer.” In subsequent years, his stories Kastryuk, To the End of the World, Antonov Apples, A Little Romance and others were published in various publications. Critics showed a restrained interest in the work of the young Bunin, mentioned the "poetic colors" present in his prose, but for the time being, none of Ivan Alekseevich's works was perceived in the literary community as a great event. According to Korney Chukovsky, his early "semi-elegies, semi-novelas ... lacked iron and stone."
The turning point occurred after the release of the story "The Village". Bunin began working on it in 1909, read excerpts in literary circles, and the work was talked about long before the manuscript was submitted for publication. The newspaper Birzhevye Vedomosti (1909, No. 11348) wrote that Bunin's new work would probably "cause conversations and controversy from right and left." The first part of The Village was published in Sovremenny Mir in March 1910, and the first review appeared even before the issue was published - columnist for the Morning of Russia newspaper V. Baturinsky managed to get acquainted with the proofreading version in the editorial office and, ahead of his colleagues, prepared review, in which he called the story "an outstanding work of the current season." Both critics and writers were involved in the discussion about The Village: the author was accused of “losing a sense of artistic credibility” (G. Polonsky); he was accused of "being scared of his own studies and sketches" (Alexander Amfiteatrov); they wrote about the story as about “an outrageous, thoroughly false book” (A. Yablonovsky). Among those who supported Bunin was Zinaida Gippius, who noted in the journal "Russian Thought" (1911, No. 6) that the story "The Village" is strict, simple and harmonious: "... you simply believe it."
Despite the sharpness of individual assessments, The Village, as well as the story Sukhodol published after it (Bulletin of Europe, 1912, No. 4), secured Bunin's reputation as a sought-after prose writer - his works became much more willing to acquire magazines and newspapers, and " The A.F. Marx Association of Publishing and Printing offered the writer to conclude a contract for the release of the Complete Collection of his Works. The six-volume edition was published in 1915 in a very impressive circulation - 200,000 copies.
In the same year, Bunin's story "The Gentleman from San Francisco" appeared. According to Muromtseva, Ivan Alekseevich came up with the idea for the work during their journey on a steamer en route from Italy. Among the passengers, a discussion began about social inequality, and the writer invited his opponent to present their ship in a section: on the upper deck, people stroll and drink wine, and in the lower compartments they work: “Is this fair?” The story was generally well received by reviewers: for example, the literary historian Abram Derman (Russian Thought, 1916, No. 5) discovered in it some artistic techniques characteristic of Leo Tolstoy, for example, a trial by death, and the writer Elena Koltonovskaya, who had previously been in Bunin's prose has many flaws; after the release of The Gentleman from San Francisco, she called Ivan Alekseevich "the largest representative of the new literature." Alexander Izmailov appreciated this work more restrainedly, to whom the story about a wealthy 58-year-old American who went to the Old World for entertainment seemed too stretched - according to the critic, it could fit in the format of a small sketch.
One of the last works of art written by Bunin in the pre-revolutionary period was the story “Easy Breathing” (“Russian Word”, 1916, No. 83). The story about the high school student Olya Meshcherskaya, who was shot dead at the station by a Cossack officer, was invented by the writer while walking around the cemetery of the island of Capri, when he saw a portrait of a cheerful girl on one of the tombstones. The young heroine of the story is that special female type that Ivan Alekseevich has always been interested in - there is a mystery in her that subjugates men and makes them commit reckless acts. The same gallery of fatal female images, possessing a natural gift for captivating, includes the characters of Bunin's stories "Klasha" and "Aglaya", as well as the story "Mitina's Love" created already in exile.
In the story "Mitya's Love", first published in the Parisian magazine "Modern Notes" (1925, No. 13-14) and telling about the love of student Mitya for Katya, a student of a private theater school, there are autobiographical motifs. They do not relate to the plot, but to the depth of feelings experienced by the young hero, and make one recall the mental anguish of young Bunin, who lost Varvara Pashchenko. Her features - "inconstancy, unreliability of feelings" - are guessed in the image of Katya. As Muromtseva wrote, “Nowhere did Ivan Alekseevich reveal his love experiences, as in Mitya’s Love, carefully disguising them.” This story, stylistically reminiscent of a long prose poem, marks a new stage in Bunin's work:
Before Bunin, they did not write about love like that. Bunin's innovation lies in the fact that modern courage ("modernity", as they said then) in depicting the feelings of the characters is combined with classical clarity and perfection of verbal form. Mitya's experiences, endowed with extraordinary emotionality, able to feel the awakening of nature and himself with exorbitant sharpness, pain and bliss ... are undoubtedly autobiographical.
Anna Saakyants
The book "Dark Alleys" (1943-1946), on which the writer worked in the pre-war and war years, caused a mixed reaction among Bunin's colleagues and readers. If the poet Gleb Struve called the works included in the collection "the best stories about love-passion in Russian literature", then Mark Aldanov informed the author about the letters received by the editors of Novy Zhurnal, which published several short stories. According to Aldanov, the publication's subscribers were indignant at the excess of erotic scenes, and a certain scientist sent a letter asking: “Well, how can you? I have a wife." The collection, the name of which was suggested to the writer by the lines of Nikolai Ogaryov “All around the scarlet rose hips bloomed, / There were alleys of dark lindens,” included the stories “Rusya”, “Late hour”, “Cold autumn”, “Muse”, “Lady Clara”, “ Iron wool" and others.
The idea of the novel "The Life of Arseniev" - a book that influenced the decision of the Swedish Academy to award the Nobel Prize - came to Bunin in October 1920, on the eve of his fiftieth birthday. Somewhat later, in 1921, the writer made preliminary outlines in which he tried to outline the outline of a work about growing up and becoming a person. Initially, its titles varied: "The Book of My Life", "At the Source of Days", "Nameless Notes". The idea was formed for several years, and direct work began on June 27, 1927. Judging by the memoirs of Muromtseva, every time, completing the next part, Ivan Alekseevich intended to stop working - he argued that "human life cannot be written." As a result, Bunin created five parts and "brought" his hero Alexei Arseniev to the age of twenty.
Researchers have not come to a consensus regarding the genre of Bunin's novel. Literary critic Boris Averin, who studied the creative history of the work, noticed that the early author's manuscripts, which reflected the "course of memory", allow us to speak of "Arseniev's Life" as a memoir prose. At the same time, when making corrections, Ivan Alekseevich deliberately distanced himself from the heroes of the work - he changed the names and removed from the text those details in which episodes of his own biography would have been guessed. According to the literary critic Anna Saakyants, "The Life of Arseniev" united several genres - the book intertwined artistic biography, memoirs, lyrical and philosophical prose. Literary critic Igor Sukhikh wrote that the basis of the novel is "a poetic transformation of the past." Bunin himself urged not to take the story of Alexei Arseniev as the story of the author; he explained that Arseniev's Life is "an autobiography of a fictitious person."
The fifth part of the work, originally called "Lika", is called by the researchers the most important: it is in it that the hero grows up, experiencing the first acute feeling. The test of love gives birth to an artist and a poet in him. Assumptions that the prototype of Alexei Arsenyev's beloved Lika is Varvara Pashchenko have been repeatedly refuted by Muromtseva. According to her, the heroine combined the features of those women whom Bunin loved in different years. For example, outwardly the heroine of "Arseniev's Life" is more reminiscent of the writer's first wife, Anna Nikolaevna Tsakni; individual episodes reproduce the details of the relationship that developed between Bunin and Muromtseva herself. However, the feeling experienced by Alexei Arsenyev in relation to Lika largely coincides with the experiences of the young Bunin. The final lines of the novel (“Recently I saw her in a dream ...”) are close to the confession that sounded in one of Ivan Alekseevich’s letters after parting with Pashchenko: “I saw you today in a dream - you seemed to be lying, sleeping, dressed, on your right side” .
In The Life of Arseniev, Bunin did what, without realizing it, the young Arseniev dreamed about when he was thirsty to write and did not know what to write. Here is shown the simplest and most profound thing that can be shown in art: the direct vision of the world by the artist: not thinking about the visible, but the very process of seeing, the process of intelligent vision.
Vladislav Khodasevich
In the pre-revolutionary period, many of Bunin's contemporaries saw in him only a coldish everyday writer, recalling with nostalgia the disappearing noble nests. The appearance of his polemical notes, articles and essays on the October events allowed readers to see another Bunin - sarcastic and caustic, who perceived the revolution as a Russian revolt, and its participants as characters from the novel "Demons". According to the literary critic Oleg Mikhailov, many of Ivan Alekseevich's articles written at that time were akin to the monologues of Dostoevsky's characters. In the emigrant press of the 1920s, Bunin published publications in which, on the one hand, he insisted on refusing to compromise with the Bolsheviks, and on the other hand, he gave high marks to the leaders of the white movement. The writer knew General Denikin personally and spoke of him as a noble and easy-to-communicate person. Admiral Alexander Kolchak, according to Ivan Alekseevich, deserved a special place in history: "The time will come when his name will be inscribed in golden letters in the annals of the Russian land."
In 1925, the Parisian émigré newspaper Vozrozhdenie began publishing excerpts from Bunin's diaries, which were called Cursed Days. Researchers pay attention to the fact that the daily entries that Ivan Alekseevich kept in the 1918-1920s differ from the diaries presented in the book version. The writer prepared for printing not so much a calendar diary as a mosaic diary, which includes many scattered fragments. The first part of "Cursed Days" consists mainly of miniature sketches that recreate the general atmosphere in post-revolutionary Moscow: the writer fixes the texts of street posters, newspaper headlines, random remarks of passers-by. The image of the city is created due to the faces snatched from the crowd, flashing with kaleidoscopic speed, as in a momentary photograph. The second part, which tells about Odessa in 1919, is dominated by short stories and notes.
There was V. Kataev (young writer). The cynicism of today's young people is downright incredible. He said: “For a hundred thousand I will kill anyone. I want to eat well, I want to have a good hat, excellent shoes ... ”I went out with Kataev to take a walk, and suddenly for a minute I felt the charm of spring with my whole being, which this year (for the first time in my life) I didn’t feel at all.
I. A. Bunin. cursed days
From the second half of the 1920s, the political message began to gradually leave Bunin's journalism - the writer focused on literary critical articles and memoirs, published the book "The Liberation of Tolstoy" (1937), wrote essays on the Semyonov-Tyan-Shanskys and the poetess Anna Bunina, began to memoirs about Chekhov, which remained unfinished and were published by Muromtseva after the death of Ivan Alekseevich. The former polemic returned to Bunin while working on the book "Memoirs", published in 1950 - in it, according to researchers, the eighty-year-old writer demonstrated the temperament that was characteristic of him in the post-revolutionary period. As Andrei Sedykh, who visited Ivan Alekseevich in Paris in the summer of 1949, said, one day the owner of the house read to the guests excerpts from the Memoirs, which had not yet been completed. The writer Teffi and the poet Georgy Adamovich, who were present at the reading, experienced some confusion from the harsh assessments that Bunin gave to many of his contemporaries. Sedykh tried to soften the situation with the phrase: “You are a kind person, Ivan Alekseevich! Everyone was greeted."
Bunin, who left the gymnasium after the fourth grade, was constantly engaged in self-education. So, at the age of sixteen, he began to seriously study English, and in his mature years, for the sake of reading and translating the works of Adam Mickiewicz, he independently mastered Polish. The debut of Ivan Alekseevich as a translator took place in the second half of the 1880s. He himself later admitted that, having taken up the translation into Russian of Shakespeare's tragedy Hamlet, he "tormented himself over it with extraordinary and ever-increasing pleasure." At different periods of his life, Bunin turned as a translator to Byron's dramas, Tennyson's poems, Petrarch's sonnets, Heine's lyric works.
Bunin's translation of the poem "The Song of Hiawatha", first published in the Orlovsky Vestnik newspaper in 1896, was called "highly poetic" by critics. However, "Song ..." is not the only work of the American poet that interested Ivan Alekseevich. In 1901, his translation of Henry Longfellow's poem "The Psalm of Life" was published. Textual analysis carried out by linguists showed that Bunin used different techniques for two works. If when translating the text of the poem, which is based on the legends and traditions of the Indians, the translator tried to preserve the intonation of the original, then in the “Psalm of Life” he introduced his own poetic motifs: “The life of the great calls / We go to the great / To remain in the sands of time / A trace of our path." Linguists explain the difference in approaches by the “artistic nature” of the originals, which either set certain limits for the translator or allow them to go beyond them.
Bunin, whose creative style began to take shape at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, was far from the currents that arose at that time and considered himself free from the influence of any literary schools. Researchers have called him one of the most “hard-to-understand artists” because even when trying to define his creative method, a variety of options arose, including “realistic symbolism”, “extraordinary realism”, “hidden modernism”. The author of the monograph on Bunin, Yuri Maltsev, believed that Ivan Alekseevich was a prose writer who existed outside the usual cultural trends, and this gave philologist Tamara Nikonova reason to notice: in the legacy of Ivan Alekseevich there is no “single, explaining and unifying scheme or system”.
Textologists, studying Bunin's manuscripts, drew attention to the fact that he, as a rule, began work on the next work without preliminary plans. The writer did not draw diagrams showing the relationship of the characters, did not think over the sequence of chapters - he immediately reproduced the finished story, which he later polished and improved, achieving accurate intonation and maximum expressiveness. Sometimes his stories were born instantly (for example, Bunin wrote "Light Breath" with "delightful speed"); sometimes it took hours and even days to find the right word: “I start writing, I say the simplest phrase, but suddenly I remember that either Lermontov or Turgenev said something similar to this phrase. I turn the phrase in a different way, it turns out vulgarity. This complex work was already taking place at the time when the process of composing was launched, when in the mind of the author not only the story was formed, but also the sound, rhythm, melody of the story or story took shape.
Over the decades, Bunin's creative style has changed. His early stories, as if born from his own early poems, were lyrical and almost eventless. Such works as "Antonov's Apples", "Golden Bottom", "New Road" are elegiac, subtle and musical, and the narrator in them is a contemplative and observer, reminiscent of the hero of poetic works. In the first half of the 1910s, the plot basis of Bunin's works became somewhat more complicated, although the writer still did not strive for "external entertainment" or the fascination of the narrative - he came to the fore a man whose fate and attitude were revealed against the background of time, and for sometimes a few everyday episodes were enough for a writer to create a specific story. At that time, Gorky, assessing the rhythm and intonation of Ivan Alekseevich’s stories, said: “He began to write prose in such a way that if they say about him: this is the best stylist of our time, there will be no exaggeration.”
During the First World War, the subject of Bunin's works expanded - other countries, cultures and civilizations entered the sphere of his interests. Among his heroes are a Ceylon rickshaw (The Brothers) who is worried about the loss of his bride, an American millionaire dying in a hotel on Capri (The Gentleman from San Francisco), a young German scientist who dreams of writing his name in the history of science (Otto Matte"). During this period, social pathos appeared in Bunin's works, and their creation, according to the author, was accompanied by internal "journalistic monologues": "Woe to you, Babylon, strong city!" - these terrible words of the Apocalypse sounded relentlessly in my soul when I wrote The Brothers and conceived The Gentleman from San Francisco. In exile, social motives almost completely left Bunin’s work, the writer again returned to the desire to reveal the inner world of an individual, but from a different perspective, outside of a specific historical era with its fractures and upheavals: “Love, suffering, longing for the ideal remained” . According to the literary critic Olga Slivitskaya, the content of Bunin's prose at a certain moment began to fit into the model "Cosmos and the Soul of Man", when the heroes of one time or another were replaced by "man as part of the Universe."
Bunin's words are widely known: "There is no nature separate from us, every movement of air is the movement of our own life" ... These words formulate the most essential: the place of man in the universe. Just as an atom, an unimaginably small part of the solar system, repeats its entire structure in itself, so a person both opposes the Cosmos and includes it in himself.
Writer Ivan Nazhivin in the novel-pamphlet "Shallow!" (Harbin, 1935) compiled a list of claims addressed to Bunin. According to Nazhivin, the Nobel laureate did not create a single type or image that could go down in the history of Russian literature along with Natasha Rostova, Lisa Kalitina, Eugene Onegin, Taras Bulba, Raskolnikov, Khlestakov, Oblomov and other heroes. Bunin's characters are "cloudy spots, ghosts, words," Nazhivin argued. Literary critic Tatyana Marchenko, responding to his reproaches, noted that all the types and archetypes mentioned by Nazhivin were representatives of a certain time or social environment. Bunin - perhaps unconsciously - developed the same characters, but taking into account "untapped opportunities": "not Tatyana, separated from Onegin, but Tatyana, united with Buyanov or Ivan Petushkov, etc. to the infinity of artistic imagination."
Thus, the experiences of the hero of "Mitya's Love" correlate with the suffering of Goethe's Werther, who pulls the trigger because of a personal drama. But if Werther commits suicide because of "world sorrow", then Bunin's hero - because of "world happiness". He passes away with a "joyful sigh", because he is too tormented by earthly trials. Shortly before his death, Mitya hears night music from Charles Gounod's opera Faust, sees himself soaring above the world - and at that moment he feels an unusual lightness and freedom from suffering. One of the phrases uttered by the hero - “Oh, when will it all end!” - sounds like an antithesis in relation to the Faustian exclamation “Stop, a moment: you are beautiful!” At the same time, Ivan Alekseevich was also able to "stop the moment" - he did this in such stories as "Sunstroke" and "Ida". According to Yuri Maltsev, "„ moment“is the new unit of time that Bunin introduces into Russian prose.”
Another peculiar discovery of Bunin is the appearance in his prose of short, miniature-like sketches, which the literary critic Ivan Ilyin called " dreams", and Yuri Maltsev - "fragments". A significant part of them (including "The Calf's Head", "Cranes", "The Hunchback's Romance", "First Class") was presented in the book "Modern Notes" (Paris, 1931), where they look like episodes from a large, colorful, polyphonic work. Sometimes they are perceived as short everyday anecdotes, sometimes as travel notes, but in all cases, "fragments" are completed works.
In Bunin's poem "Giordano Bruno", written in 1906, there are lines that largely determine the author's attitude: "In my joy there is always longing, / In longing there is always a mysterious sweetness!" Such antinomy allowed the writer to create many contrasting combinations (in the dictionary of his epithets there are about 100,000 word usages), showing that directly opposite emotions, passions and experiences can simultaneously coexist in a person: “sadly cheerful songs”, “heart beat wildly joyfully” , "mockingly sad cuckoo", "mournfully joyful squeal", "mysteriously bright wilds", "sufferingly happy ecstasy", "sadly festive", "sultry cold wind", "happiness of guilt", "unhappy with happiness ”, “horror of delight”, “joyful anger”, “enthusiastically sobbed”.
One of the features of the mature Bunin's work was his ability to organize sudden endings in his works. For example, the beginning of the story "Rusya" (1940), which is the memoirs of a nameless hero who once worked as a tutor at a station near Podolsk, looks completely ordinary: a train stop, a lazy dialogue between a passenger and his wife, a conductor with a lantern. However, gradually signs of mysticism begin to emerge through the soporific intonation. The hero mentally goes into the past, and the same area "magically blooms." Then a girl-artist appears in his mind, whose real name is Marusya. The reduction is rooted either in Rus', or in mermaids, and the heroine herself, living among the swamps, is “picturesque, even icon-painting”. The forgotten love story of twenty years ago, which ended in a dramatic parting, turns into a stopped "beautiful moment" thanks to the stop of the train.
Literary critics paid attention to the picturesqueness of Bunin's prose. So, Oleg Mikhailov wrote that for some Bunin stories of the 1910s, Mikhail Nesterov could have been the best illustrator. The gallery of martyrs and righteous people created by the writer (among them the farmhand Averky from The Thin Grass, the crooked beggar Anisya from The Merry Yard, the sentimental servant Arseny from The Saints, the portly beauty Aglaya from the story of the same name) resembles the heroes of Nesterov’s canvas On Rus'. The soul of the people."
According to Tatyana Marchenko, there is also a certain relationship between the Bunin landscapes and the works of Viktor Vasnetsov, with whom the writer was personally acquainted. However, according to the inner worldview, the prose of Ivan Alekseevich is closer to the paintings of Mikhail Vrubel. For example, his work "Pan" (just like "Bogatyr", "Lilac", "Queen of the Volkhov") reflects the pagan element of the story "Rus" to a greater extent than Vasnetsov's "Alyonushka", Marchenko believes. Vasnetsov's painting, which depicts a girl sitting near a body of water overgrown with sedge, correlates well with the content of "Rus", while "Pan" allows "to look into the mysterious essence of things."
Speaking about the influences that are found in Bunin's prose, researchers most often name the names of Leo Tolstoy, Chekhov, Turgenev, Gogol. According to Oleg Mikhailov, Bunin's image of a person - with its multi-layered and inexhaustible nature - largely comes from Tolstoy's idea of \u200b\u200bthe "fluidity of character". Critic Alexander Izmailov wrote that Ivan Alekseevich is "one of many fascinated, enchanted, carried away by Chekhov." In Bunin's early plotless stories, critics heard either the intonations of Turgenev's poems in prose, or the author's voice from lyrical digressions in the poem Dead Souls. Bunin himself wrote that for all his love of Russian literature, he "never imitated anyone." When the literary critic Pyotr Bitsilli drew attention to some similarities between Mitya’s Love and Tolstoy’s The Devil, beginning with the words “And I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart,” Ivan Alekseevich answered : “Of course, without Tolstoy, without Turgenev, without Pushkin, we would not write the way we write ... And if we talk about the assimilation of Tolstoy, is that so?”
Critics and some of Bunin's colleagues argued that his later work contained so many hidden quotations, reminiscences and images borrowed from Russian classics that it was time to talk about "elementary epigonism." For example, Nina Berberova claimed that Ivan Alekseevich "created beauty in primitive forms, ready-made and already existing before him." Objecting to those who reproached the writer for “rehashing” and “revising traditions”, literary critic Yuri Lotman noted: “It is in this perspective that Bunin the innovator reveals himself, who wants to continue the great classical tradition in the era of modernism, but in order to rewrite this entire tradition. again."
For decades, Bunin's name was often mentioned - in different contexts - next to Gorky. In their relationship, researchers identify a number of key stages: a period of gradual rapprochement (the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries) was replaced by a time of very close communication (1900s), then followed by a break (1917) with complete rejection of each other's views, accompanied by public, sometimes very harsh ratings. The writers met in Yalta in 1899; according to Bunin's memoirs, Gorky, in a sentimental mood, at the first meeting said: "You are the last writer from the nobility, the culture that gave the world Pushkin and Tolstoy." A few days later, Ivan Alekseevich sent Gorky his book Under the Open Sky; began a correspondence that lasted about eighteen years.
The responses to Bunin's early works from Alexei Maksimovich were mostly benevolent. For example, after reading the story “Antonov apples”, Gorky wrote: “This is good. Here Ivan Bunin, like a young god, sang. Feeling growing sympathy for Alexei Maksimovich, Bunin dedicated his poem Falling Leaves to him. Gorky, in turn, invited the young writer to cooperate in the magazine "Life"; then the publishing house "Knowledge" headed by him began to release Bunin's collected works. Beginning in 1902, in newspaper news, the names of Gorky and Bunin often stood side by side: the writers were considered representatives of the same literary group; Ivan Alekseevich attended the premieres of performances staged based on the plays of Alexei Maksimovich.
In 1909, Bunin and Muromtseva set off to travel around Italy. On the island of Capri, the couple visited Gorky, who lived there, who, talking about this meeting in a letter addressed to Ekaterina Peshkova, noted that Ivan Alekseevich was still active and pleased him with "his serious attitude to literature and the word." Muromtseva, recalling the long dialogues at Villa Spinolla, noted that at that time Alexei Maksimovich and her husband "looked at many things differently, but still they truly loved the main thing."
The last meeting between Bunin and Gorky took place in April 1917 in Petrograd. According to the memoirs of Ivan Alekseevich, on the day of his departure from the capital, Alexei Maksimovich organized a large meeting at the Mikhailovsky Theater, at which he introduced special guests - Bunin and Fyodor Chaliapin. The audience in the hall seemed doubtful to Ivan Alekseevich (like Gorky's speech, addressed to the audience and beginning with the word "Comrades!"), But they parted quite amicably. In the first post-revolutionary days, Gorky arrived in Moscow and expressed a desire to meet with Bunin - he in response asked to convey through Ekaterina Peshkova that he considered "relationships with him forever ended."
Since then, Gorky has become an absentee opponent for Bunin: in the journalism of the 1920s, Ivan Alekseevich referred to him mainly as a "propagandist of the Soviet regime." Aleksey Maksimovich also remotely argued with his former friend: in a letter sent to his secretary Pyotr Kryuchkov, he noted that Bunin "has gone wildly furious." In another letter addressed to Konstantin Fedin, Gorky gave very harsh assessments of émigré writers: “B. Zaitsev mediocrely writes the lives of the saints. Shmelev is something unbearably hysterical. Kuprin does not write - he drinks. Bunin rewrites the Kreutzer Sonata under the title Mitina's Love. Aldanov also writes off L. Tolstoy.”
Bunin wrote several essays about A.P. Chekhov, included a separate chapter about Anton Pavlovich in his Memoirs, and planned to prepare a major work dedicated to him. According to Muromtseva, in the 1950s her husband managed to acquire the Complete Works of Chekhov, published by Goslitizdat, as well as the book in which his letters were published: “We re-read them ... On sleepless nights, Ivan Alekseevich ... made notes on scraps of paper, sometimes even on cigarette boxes - he recalled conversations with Chekhov. Their first meeting took place in Moscow in 1895, and the rapprochement began in 1899, when Bunin arrived in Yalta. Quite quickly, Ivan Alekseevich became his man in Chekhov's house - he stayed at his dacha in Autka even in those days when Anton Pavlovich was away. In his memoirs, Bunin admitted that he did not have such warm relations with any of his fellow writers as with Chekhov. Anton Pavlovich came up with a playful nickname for his comrade - “Mr. Marquis Bukishon” (sometimes just “Marquis”), and called himself “Autsky landowner”.
According to Nikolai Teleshov, who visited Chekhov before he left for Badenweiler, Anton Pavlovich already knew about his fatal illness. Saying goodbye, he asked the participants of the Wednesday literary circle to bow, and also to tell Bunin to “write and write”: “A great writer will come out of him. So tell him for me. Do not forget". Ivan Alekseevich, who was in the summer of 1904 in the village of Ognevka, learned about the death of Chekhov from the newspaper: “I opened it ... - and suddenly, as if an ice razor slashed through my heart.” A few days later he received a letter from Gorky - Alexei Maksimovich said that the writers were beginning to prepare for the release of memoirs of Chekhov, and asked Bunin to take part in this work. In November, after reading the manuscript sent by Ivan Alekseevich, Gorky noted that his essay on Anton Pavlovich was written very carefully.
The researchers tried to determine the degree of Chekhov's influence on Bunin's work. Thus, the writer Valery Geydeko drew attention to the poetic nature of the prose of both, the "rhythmic organization of speech" characteristic of both writers, as well as their attraction to impressionism. The literary critic Oleg Mikhailov, on the contrary, argued that the creative styles of Chekhov and Bunin are completely different - the writers have neither thematic nor stylistic kinship; the only thing that brings them together is the "direction of common searches." Chekhov himself, in one of his conversations with Bunin, noted that they “look like a greyhound to a hound”: “I could not steal a single word from you. You are sharper than me. You write over there: “the sea smelled of watermelon” ... This is wonderful, but I would not say that.
Bunin's relationship with Vladimir Nabokov is interpreted by researchers in different ways. If the literary critic Maxim Shraer sees in them the “poetics of rivalry”, then the philologist Olga Kirillina finds similarities at the level of the “nervous system and blood circulation”. Communication between the two writers for a long time was in absentia. At the end of 1920, Nabokov's father, Vladimir Dmitrievich, asked Ivan Alekseevich to evaluate his son's poem, published in the Berlin newspaper Rul'. Bunin responded by sending the Nabokovs not only a warm, encouraging letter, but also his book The Gentleman from San Francisco. Correspondence began, which in the spring of 1921 included the twenty-two-year-old Vladimir Nabokov, who published under the pseudonym "Vladimir Sirin." In his first letter, the aspiring poet called Bunin "the only writer who, in our blasphemous age, calmly serves the beautiful."
In 1926, Nabokov's first novel, Masha, was published, which, according to researchers, is Vladimir Vladimirovich's "most Buninian" work. On the copy donated to Bunin, the author wrote: “Do not judge me too harshly, I beg you. With all your heart, V. Nabokov.” Three years later, Nabokov, who published the collection The Return of Chorba, sent Bunin a book with a dedicatory inscription: "To the great master from a diligent student." Nabokov's story "Resentment" (1931) was dedicated to Ivan Alekseevich. Vladimir Vladimirovich reacted very positively to the award of the Nobel Prize to Bunin - in a telegram sent to Grasse, it was written: “I am so happy that you received it!” At the end of 1933, the first meeting of the two writers took place - Bunin arrived in Berlin for an event arranged in his honor by the publicist Joseph Gessen, and during the celebrations he met Nabokov personally.
Then the cooling period began. According to Olga Kirillina, Nabokov's dedicatory inscriptions are evidence of the changed relations - the former enthusiastic confessions have disappeared from them, the intonations have become different. After releasing the novel Invitation to Execution (1936), he wrote on the volume sent to Bunin: “To dear Ivan Alekseevich Bunin with the best regards from the author.” A complete break did not occur, although mutual irritation grew. Tension was created - among other things - because of the public attempts of the emigrant community to determine which of the writers holds the main place on the literary Olympus. For example, in the second half of the 1930s, Mark Aldanov urged Bunin to admit that the primacy had passed to Nabokov.
In his autobiographical book Other Shores (1954), Nabokov spoke about one of his meetings with Bunin, which took place in 1936 in a Parisian restaurant. Its initiator was Ivan Alekseevich. The dinner made a heavy impression on Nabokov: “Unfortunately, I can’t stand restaurants, vodka, snacks, music - and intimate conversations. Bunin was puzzled by my indifference to hazel grouse and my refusal to open my soul. By the end of dinner, we were already unbearably bored with each other. The same fragment - with some changes - Nabokov included in the second version of his memoirs - "Memory, speak." According to Maxim Shraer, this meeting demonstrated that the creative dialogues between the writers have ended, and as a human being they have completely moved away from each other.
Nevertheless, their literary rivalry continued, and the publication of the book "Dark Alleys" became, according to Schraer, Bunin's attempt to "equalize the score with Nabokov." In one of the letters sent shortly before the war to the American Slavist Elizaveta Malozemova, Ivan Alekseevich remarked: “If it weren’t for me, there would be no Sirin.” Around the same period, Nabokov, who was asked in a written interview to talk about the influence of Bunin on his work, said that he was not among the followers of Ivan Alekseevich. In 1951, an event dedicated to Bunin's eightieth birthday was being prepared in New York. Mark Aldanov invited Nabokov to read some work of the hero of the day at that evening. Nabokov responded with a written refusal:
As you know, I am not a big fan of I. A. I really appreciate his poetry, but prose… or memories in the alley… You say that he is 80 years old, that he is sick and poor. You are much kinder and more indulgent than me - but enter into my position: how am I supposed to say in front of a handful of more or less common acquaintances an anniversary, that is, completely golden, word about a person who is alien to me in all his warehouse, and about a prose writer whom I put below Turgenev?
Valentin Kataev, like Nabokov, was considered a writer who most accurately perceived the lessons of Bunin. Seventeen-year-old Kataev, who first heard about the poems of Ivan Alekseevich from the poet Alexander Fedorov, in 1914 he himself came to Bunin, who was at that time in Odessa. Subsequently, talking about his acquaintance with the writer in the book “The Grass of Oblivion”, Valentin Petrovich mentioned that he was confronted by “a forty-year-old gentleman, dry, bilious, dapper”, dressed in trousers made by a good tailor, and English yellow low shoes. Galina Kuznetsova noted in her diary entries that Bunin also remembered well the moment when a young man appeared in his house, who gave him a notebook with poems and directly said: “I am writing ... imitating you.”
The audience was short, but when two weeks later Kataev came to Ivan Alekseevich for an answer, the “first miracle” happened in his life: Bunin suggested that he find time for an additional conversation. From that moment, their communication began, which continued - intermittently - until 1920. In 1915, Kataev dedicated a poem to Bunin, "And the days flow in a dull succession." A year later, the newspaper "Southern Thought" published his short work, which contained the lines: " And at home - tea and voluntary captivity. / Sonnet, sketched in a notebook the day before, / So, rough ... Pensive Verlaine, / Singing Blok and lonely Bunin».
When in 1918 Bunin and Muromtseva, along with other refugees, reached Odessa, meetings became almost daily: Kataev brought new poems to the writer, and he worked hard on his manuscripts, made notes, made corrections, and gave advice, including on additional reading. “Initiation into disciples,” according to Valentin Petrovich, happened only after he heard the first praise from Bunin. Kataev became a member of the Odessa literary circle "Wednesday", at the meetings of which Ivan Alekseevich was invariably present. The conversations there were very free, and Bunin recorded them in his diary. According to the writer Sergei Shargunov, who compared Bunin's daily notes with the version that was prepared for the book "Cursed Days", Ivan Alekseevich deliberately removed some very sharp Kataev's remarks from the final edition - the writer did not want to "substitute the" literary godson "who remained in the Soviet Russia". While in France, Muromtseva sorted out the exported archives and among the numerous envelopes found a letter from Kataev "from the white front", dated October 1919. It began with the words: "Dear teacher Ivan Alekseevich."
Bunin, leaving Odessa on the Sparta steamer, before leaving could not say goodbye to his student: in the winter of 1920, he fell ill with typhus and ended up in the hospital, and later - as a former tsarist officer - in prison. They didn't meet again. At the same time, Ivan Alekseevich followed the work of Kataev - according to Muromtseva, having received the book “The Lonely Sail Turns White” (in which the author tried to “cross the plot of Pinkerton with the artistry of Bunin”), the writer read it aloud, with comments: “Well, who else can do that? ". In 1958, Kataev, together with his wife Esther Davydovna, visited Vera Nikolaevna in Paris. Muromtseva said that in the perception of her husband, Valentin Petrovich forever remained a young man, so Bunin could not imagine that his student had become a father: “To Ivan Alekseevich it seemed somehow incredible: the children of Valya Kataev!”
For at least half a century, Bunin was not only a teacher for Kataev, but also a kind of artistic idol, the personification of a certain artistic ideal ... "Writing well" for Kataev always meant "writing like Bunin." (Of course, not imitating Bunin, not copying him, not reproducing his manner, but, if possible, achieving the same stereoscopic volume and accuracy in his descriptions, revealing the ability to find the most accurate verbal expression for each of his visual reactions.)
Benedict Sarnov
Bunin made certain efforts to help some Russian writers move to France. Among them was Alexander Kuprin, a writer whose creative development took place in the same years as Ivan Alekseevich. Their relationship was by no means cloudless - as Muromtseva wrote, "it took Dostoevsky himself to understand everything." In 1920, having arrived in Paris, Kuprin settled in the same house where Bunin lived, and even on the same floor with him. Perhaps this neighborhood sometimes weighed on Ivan Alekseevich, who was accustomed to clearly planning his working day and was forced to observe the constant visits of guests who came to Kuprin. Nevertheless, having received the Nobel Prize, Bunin brought Alexander Ivanovich 5,000 francs. According to Kuprin's daughter Ksenia Alexandrovna, this money helped their family a lot, whose financial situation was difficult. The return of Kuprin to the USSR in 1937 caused a great resonance in the emigrant environment - opinions about his act were divided. Bunin, unlike some of his colleagues, refused to condemn the "old sick man." In his memoirs, he spoke of Kuprin as an artist who was characterized by "warm kindness to all living things."
On the recommendation of Bunin, in 1923, Boris Zaitsev, a prose writer, also moved to Paris, in whose Moscow house Ivan Alekseevich once met Muromtseva. For a long time, Zaitsev and Bunin communicated very closely, were considered literary like-minded people, and together participated in the activities of the French Writers' Union. When news came from Stockholm that Ivan Alekseevich had been awarded the Nobel Prize, Zaitsev was one of the first to inform the public about this, passing urgent news under the heading "Bunin crowned" to the Vozrozhdenie newspaper. A serious quarrel between writers occurred in 1947, when Ivan Alekseevich left the Writers' Union in protest against the exclusion from it of those who, in the post-war period, decided to take Soviet citizenship. Together with them, Leonid Zurov, Alexander Bahrakh, Georgy Adamovich, Vadim Andreev left the union. Zaitsev, as chairman of this organization, did not approve of Bunin's act. He tried to explain himself to him in writing, but the dialogues led to a final break.
Bunin also took measures to move the prose writer Ivan Shmelev. The rapprochement of writers took place in the post-revolutionary period, when they both collaborated with the Odessa newspaper Yuzhnoye Slovo. Leaving Russia, Bunin received a power of attorney from Shmelev to publish his books abroad. In 1923, Shmelev moved to France and for several months lived - at the insistence of Ivan Alekseevich - at his villa in Grasse; there he worked on the book Sun of the Dead. Their relationship was sometimes uneven, in many situations they acted as opponents. For example, in 1927, after the departure of Pyotr Struve from the Vozrozhdenie newspaper, Bunin refused to participate in the activities of this publication; Shmelev, on the other hand, believed that such an approach was beneficial to his opponents. In 1946, Ivan Sergeevich reacted extremely negatively to Bunin's agreement to meet with the Soviet ambassador Alexander Bogomolov. The difference in approaches to some life issues was also reflected in creativity: thus, arguing with Bunin's frankness when describing the hero's sensual experiences in Mitya's Love, Shmelev in his book Love Story (1927) demonstrated the rejection of "sinful passion". Bunin's book "Dark Alleys" Shmelev perceived as pornography.
In the pre-revolutionary period, Bunin did not communicate with the acmeist poet Georgy Adamovich. According to Adamovich, having once seen Ivan Alekseevich in the St. Petersburg artistic cafe "Halt of comedians", he did not make an attempt to get acquainted, because the founder of the school of acmeism, Nikolai Gumilyov, did not welcome "possible extraneous influences." In France, Adamovich, who was seriously engaged in literary criticism, devoted a number of works to Bunin; he did not always react approvingly to the reviews of Georgy Viktorovich. However, on a number of key issues, especially during the period of the post-war split in the emigrant environment, Bunin and Adamovich acted as like-minded people. After the death of Ivan Alekseevich, Georgy Viktorovich supported the writer's widow, advised Muromtseva during her work on the memoirs of Bunin, and defended her from opponents.
Bunin's acquaintance with the poet Vladislav Khodasevich took place in 1906, but until moving to France, their relationship was superficial. In exile, their rapprochement took place, Bunin invited Vladislav Felitsianovich to Grasse, in the second half of the 1920s, the writers corresponded. Some cooling occurred after in a review of the Bunin collection "Selected Poems", written in 1929, Khodasevich gave a high assessment to Ivan Alekseevich as a prose writer and very restrained - as a poet. Vladimir Nabokov, in one of his letters to his wife, spoke about a visit to the Paris cafe of Murat in 1936: “There I briefly saw Khodasevich, who turned very yellow; Bunin hates him." The researchers argued that, on the contrary, Ivan Alekseevich helped Vladislav Felitsianovich with money, they met at literary events, exchanged books.
The writer Nina Berberova in the book "My Italics" (1972) recalled Bunin as an extremely ambitious, wayward, capricious person. Their relationship began in 1927, when Khodasevich and his wife Berberova arrived at the Belvedere villa in Grasse. Judging by the diaries of Muromtseva, Nina Nikolaevna made a pleasant impression on the owners of the villa: “Simple, sweet, educated.” During the war years, Berberova, together with Boris Zaitsev, participated in the rescue of the Bunin archive, which was stored in the Turgenev library. In the post-war period, Bunin and Berberova, as literary critic Maxim Shraer noted, found themselves "in camps of Russian emigration hostile to each other." In her memoirs, Berberova wrote: “I try to avoid disintegration, and for Bunin it began on that day ... when S.K. Makovsky called for him to take him to the Soviet ambassador Bogomolov to drink for Stalin’s health.”
Bunin's archive turned out to be fragmented. In May 1918, Ivan Alekseevich, leaving Moscow with Muromtseva, handed over a significant part of his documents (previously stored in the Moscow branch of the Lyon Credit Bank) to his elder brother. With him to Odessa, and then to Paris, Bunin took only some materials, including letters and youthful diaries. Julius Alekseevich died in 1921. Bunin's pre-revolutionary manuscripts, photographs, drafts, magazine and newspaper publications with critics' reviews, books with dedicatory inscriptions that remained in his house were transferred to the translator Nikolai Pusheshnikov, whose mother was a cousin of Ivan Alekseevich. Pusheshnikov passed away in 1939. From the late 1940s, his family began to donate manuscripts and autographs to the Central State Archive of Literature and Art and other state repositories. In addition, some documents came from the Pusheshnikovs to private collections.
In France, a new archive of Bunin was formed, which remained after the death of the writer with his widow. During the years of the early “thaw”, Muromtseva agreed to send her husband’s materials in small batches to the Soviet Union - they arrived at the Central State Academic Literature Institute, the A. M. Gorky Institute of World Literature, the State Literary Museum and other institutions. After the death of Vera Nikolaevna in 1961, Leonid Zurov became the heir to the archive, who, in turn, bequeathed it to the teacher at the University of Edinburgh, Milica Green. In the early 1970s, she took dozens of boxes with scattered materials from Paris to Edinburgh and for several years was engaged in their inventory and systematization; the catalog alone, reproducing the list of documents she received, consisted of 393 pages. Under the editorship of Milica Green, the three-volume book "Mouths of the Bunins" (Frankfurt-on-Main, "Sowing", 1977-1982) was published, containing the diary entries of Ivan Alekseevich and Vera Nikolaevna. Milica Green, who died in 1998, donated Bunin's archive to Leeds University during her lifetime.
Bunin was under the scrutiny of Soviet censorship for decades. Two years after the writer's departure from Russia, the Main Directorate for Literature and Publishing (Glavlit) was established - a body that controlled all printed matter published in the USSR. The first circular issued by Glavlit prescribed a ban on "the import from abroad ... works that are definitely hostile to the Soviet regime." In 1923, the censorship department issued a secret bulletin containing a detailed review of books written by émigré writers. Bunin was also mentioned in the document. An employee of Glavlit, who prepared the certificate, noted that the pre-revolutionary works included in his collection “Scream” (Berlin, publishing house “Slovo”, 1921) cannot be allowed to print, because the author of “naturalistic stories” tried to “find a justification” in them revolutionary catastrophe.
In 1923, the poet Pyotr Oreshin prepared the almanac "The Village in Russian Poetry", in which he collected poems by Bunin, Balmont and other authors. The political editor of the State Publishing House, who reviewed the handwritten version of the book, instructed to withdraw from it all the works of émigré poets. The revision of the "Village ..." did not take place, the publication was never published. Some softening of ideological attitudes occurred during the NEP period, when publishing cooperatives managed to print several of Bunin's works, including The Gentleman from San Francisco and Chang's Dreams. The instructions of the censors were not always followed at that time. For example, Glavlit did not recommend Mitin's Love for publication, because "its author is a White Guard emigrant", but the story, written in Paris, was published in 1926 by the Leningrad publishing house "Priboy".
In the 1920s, the Glavpolitprosvet, established under the People's Commissariat of Education, took very strict measures against emigrant writers. This institution periodically audited libraries, ridding them of "counter-revolutionary literature." Bunin's name invariably appeared in the lists sent out by the State Political Education Committee and accompanied by the demand to "clear the funds". After 1928, his books were not published in the USSR for almost three decades. Anatoly Lunacharsky, People's Commissar for Education, spoke about the position of the Soviet authorities in relation to Ivan Alekseevich, who reported in the journal "Bulletin of Foreign Literature" (1928, No. 3) that Bunin is "a landowner ... who knows that his class is bulging out of life."
The gradual return of the works of Ivan Alekseevich to the Soviet reader began during the years of the "thaw" - for example, in 1956, a collection of his works was published in five volumes, which included novels and stories written both in pre-revolutionary Russia and in France. In 1961, the almanac Tarusa Pages was published in Kaluga, containing Paustovsky's essay Ivan Bunin. The release of the collection led to the dismissal of the editor-in-chief of the Kaluga book publishing house; the director of the enterprise was reprimanded "for the loss of vigilance." Nevertheless, in the following decades, a significant part of the writer's creative heritage (including the novel "The Life of Arseniev" and the book "Dark Alleys") became available to the Soviet reader. An exception was the Cursed Days diary, which was published only in the late 1980s in several magazines at once.
The researchers paid attention to the fact that Bunin's prose is cinematic - it is no coincidence that the concepts of "close-up" and "general plan" were used in relation to his stories. For the first time, the possibility of filming Bunin's work appeared in October 1933, when a Hollywood producer informed Ivan Alekseevich that he was ready to buy the story "The Gentleman from San Francisco" from him. The writer turned to Mark Aldanov for advice, he gave recommendations on drawing up a power of attorney and disposing of copyright. However, things did not go beyond a brief dialogue with a representative of the film company. Later, Bunin mentioned a possible film adaptation of his stories such as "On the Road" and "The Case of Cornet Elagin", but these plans remained unfulfilled.
Soviet and Russian filmmakers began to turn to Bunin's work from the 1960s, but there were few successful adaptations, according to journalist V. Nureyev (Nezavisimaya Gazeta). Vasily Pichul, being a student at VGIK, shot in 1981 an educational short film "Mitya's Love". In 1989, the film "Non-urgent Spring" was released, based on the story of the same name, as well as the works "Rus", "Prince in Princes", "Flies", "Cranes", "Caucasus", the story "Sukhodol" and diary entries Bunin (directed by Vladimir Tolkachikov). In 1994, the melodrama "Dedication to Love" was filmed (directed by Lev Tsutsulkovsky); The film is based on the stories "Light Breath", "Cold Autumn" and "Rusya". A year later, director Boris Yashin presented the film "Meshchersky", based on Bunin's stories "Natalie", "Tanya", "In Paris".
A very notable event was the release in 2011 of the film "Sukhodol" (directed by Alexander Strelyanaya), based on the short story of the same name by Bunin. The picture received a number of awards at film festivals, and also received the attention of critics. Their opinions about the work of Alexandra Strelyanaya were divided: some called the tape "an ethnographic study, as if specially created for great aesthetic pleasure"; others regarded it as "a cumbersome pastiche". A lot of responses were caused by Nikita Mikhalkov's film "Sunstroke", filmed in 2014 based on the story of the same name and the book "Cursed Days". According to the publicist Leonid Radzikhovsky, Mikhalkov was not mistaken in deciding to combine a work about love with diary entries: “Bunin’s love stories (especially “Dark Alleys”, but also “Sunstroke”, written in 1925) are highlighted by this very Sun, this sunset fire who destroyed both the heroes and the "country that does not exist" and where they lived and "breathed easily"".
Bunin Ivan Alekseevich (1870-1953), prose writer, poet, translator.
Born October 22, 1870 in Voronezh in a well-born, but impoverished noble family. Bunin spent his childhood partly in Voronezh, partly on the hereditary estate near Yelets (now in the Lipetsk region).
Absorbing from his parents, from yard legends and songs, he early discovered artistic abilities and a rare impressionability. Having entered the Yelets gymnasium in 1881, Bunin was forced to leave it in 1886: there was not enough money to pay for education. The course of the gymnasium, and partly of the university, was held at home under the guidance of his older brother, Julius, a Narodnaya Volya member.
Bunin published his first collection of poems in 1891, and five years later he published a translation of the poem by the American romantic poet G. Longfellow "The Song of Hiawatha", which, together with the later poetry collection "Falling Leaves" (1901), brought him to 1903 Pushkin Prize of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences.
In 1909, Bunin received the second Pushkin Prize and was elected an honorary academician. At the end of the XIX century. he increasingly speaks with stories that at first look like picturesque sketches. Gradually, Bunin becomes more and more noticeable both as a poet and as a prose writer.
Wide recognition came to him with the publication of the story "The Village" (1910), which shows the contemporary rural life of the writer. The destruction of the patriarchal way of life and ancient foundations is depicted in the work with a rare harshness for those times. The end of the story, where the wedding is described as a funeral, takes on a symbolic sound. Following the "Village", on the basis of family legends, the story "Dry Valley" (1911) was written. Here, with majestic gloominess, the degeneration of the Russian nobility is depicted.
The writer himself lived with a premonition of an impending catastrophe. He felt the inevitability of a new historical break. This feeling is noticeable in the stories of the 10s. "John Rydalets" (1913), "Grammar of Love", "The Gentleman from San Francisco" (both 1915), "Light Breath" (1916), "Chang's Dreams" (1918).
Bunin met the revolutionary events with extreme rejection, capturing the "bloody madness" in his diary, later published in exile under the title "Cursed Days" (1918, published in 1925).
In January 1920, together with his wife Vera Nikolaevna Muromtseva, the writer sailed from Odessa to Constantinople. Since then, Bunin lived in France, mainly in Paris and Grasse. In exile they spoke of him as the first among modern Russian writers.
The story "Mitina's Love" (1925), the books of stories "Sunstroke" (1927) and "God's Tree" (1931) were perceived by contemporaries as living classics. In the 30s. short stories began to appear, where Bunin showed an exceptional ability to compress huge material into one or two pages, or even several lines.
In 1930, a novel with an obvious autobiographical “lining” was published in Paris - “The Life of Arseniev”. In 1933, Bunin was awarded the Nobel Prize. This is an event behind which, in essence, was the fact of recognition of the literature of emigration.
During the Second World War, Bunin lived in Grasse, eagerly followed military events, lived in poverty, hid Jews from the Gestapo in his house, rejoiced at the victories of the Soviet troops. In this he wrote stories about love (included in the book "Dark Alleys", 1943), which he himself considered the best of everything he created.
The post-war "warming" of the writer to the Soviet regime was short-lived, but it managed to quarrel him with many old friends. Bunin spent his last years in poverty, working on a book about his literary teacher A.P. Chekhov.
In October 1953, Ivan Alekseevich's health deteriorated sharply, and on November 8 the writer died. The cause of death, according to Dr. V. Zernov, who observed the patient in recent weeks, was cardiac asthma and pulmonary sclerosis. Bunin was buried in the Sainte-Genevieve-des-Bois cemetery. The monument on the grave was made according to a drawing by the artist Alexandre Benois.
