BUNIN, IVAN ALEXEYEVICH

(1870–1953), poet and a master of prose fiction; the first Russian to win the Nobel prize for literature (1933).

Ivan Alexeyevich Bunin was the scion of an ancient aristocratic family from the heartland of Old Russia, the fertile countryside south of Moscow that produced so many writers from the gentry, among them Turgenev and Tolstoy. Much of his early fiction depicts the decline of the class he was born into. The celebratory tone of "Antonov's Apples" (1900) makes it exceptional. However, it is purely commemorative, a song of praise for a way of life that has passed away. A lyric apprehension of nature is a central feature of Bunin's art. Without religious faith or political commitment, he finds sustenance in a pantheistic attitude or in aristocratic stoicism. The Village (1909–1910), a naturalistic portrait, is more typically grim. Its subject is the barbarity and backwardness of Russian provincial life. "Dry Valley" (1911) is one of the supreme masterpieces of modern fiction. In this haunting novella Bunin's lyrical reverie attains mythic and tragic resonance. Experience is filtered through layers of memory to evoke an image of the patriarchal estate of Old Russia as a landscape of violence and ruin.

Bunin fled Russia after the Revolution. He settled in Paris but traveled much. Separated from the Russian countryside he knows so intimately, he tends to become abstract—as in his exotic Eastern tales and much of his work in emigration. "Gentleman from San Francisco" is a masterpiece of his international style. A work of cold, jewel-like beauty, it may be read as a satire of bourgeois civilization or an allegory of the vanity of human ambition in the face of death—a favorite theme of Bunin's, especially in his later years.

bibliography

Poggioli, Renato. (1957). "The Art of Ivan Bunin." In The Phoenix and the Spider. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Woodward, James B. (1980). Ivan Bunin: A Study of His Fiction. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Milton Ehre