A Poet of the Russian Landscape

The 150th anniversary of the birth of Ivan Bunin

Writer Ivan Bunin has been described as a jeweler of words, a painter of prose, a genius of Russian literature and the brightest representative of the Silver Age. Literary critics often compare the creative spirit of his works to the paintings of Viktor Vasnetsov and Mikhail Vrubel.

Childhood and youth 

Ivan Bunin was born on October 22, 1870, in Voronezh. The Bunins, impoverished landowners, belonged to a very ancient family, whose history dates back to the 15th century. Their family coat of arms was included in the General Armorial of the Noble Families of the Russian Empire. Among the poet’s ancestors is Vasily Zhukovsky, the founder of Russian romanticism in literature, the writer of elegies and ballads.

Ivan Bunin’s father, Alexey Bunin, fought in Crimea in his youth, then he lived in the family estate, spending time hunting, receiving guests, drinking, and playing cards. All this eventually brought the family to the brink of ruin. Household responsibilities were completely on the mother of the future poet Lyudmila Bunina, a meek, devout woman, five of her nine children died in infancy. Little Ivan was deeply worried about the death of his sister Varya. He considered it a terrible injustice and as a result, forever ceased to believe in the good God that his mother had always told him about.

Three years after the birth of Ivan, the family moved to the estate of his grandfather Butyrka in the Oryol province. Here, as the poet later noted in his biography, he spent his childhood “full of sad and peculiar poetry.” In this place, Ivan Bunin developed his perception of the world, a unique ability to see the beauty in everything. He reflected his childhood impressions in the autobiographical novel The Life of Arseniev, which he considered the main book of his life: “Where I was born, where I grew up, what did I see? No mountains, no rivers, no lakes, no forests — only shrubs in gullies, here and there coppices and only rarely a semblance of a forest <...> just fields, fields, an endless ocean of grain. This is not the south, not the steppe, where flocks of tens of thousands of heads graze <...> This is only the Sub-steppe, where the fields are wavy, where there are only the gullies and slopes, shallow meadows, most often stony, where the villages and <...> their inhabitants seem to be forgotten by God, — so they are unpretentious, primitively simple …”.

During the day little Ivan worked with the peasants in the fields, and in the evenings he listened to them telling their tales and legends. Bunin’s career began here, in Butyrka. The boy was very fond of reading, at home, under the guidance of a tutor, he studied languages, focusing on Latin. The first books read by the future writer were The Odyssey by Homer and a collection of English poetry. At the age of eight, Ivan composed his first poem, then — essays and stories. In his poetic manner, the young writer imitated Alexander Pushkin and Mikhail Lermontov.

In 1881, the Bunins moved to the Ozerki estate: “a large and rather prosperous village with three manor estates drowning in gardens, with several ponds and spacious pastures.” Ivan started studying at the Yeletsk men’s school. His first impressions of life in the county town and study were bleak: “The transition from a completely free life and my mother’s worries to the life in the city, with absurd austerity in the school and the hard life of those bourgeois and merchant houses where I had to live a freeloader. “

In the school, Ivan Bunin studied well, except for the exact sciences, everything was easy for him: one reading was enough for him to memorize a one-page poem. Gradually, however, his academic performance was falling and in the third grade the future poet was left behind to repeat it. Five years later, Bunin’s studies ended: after leaving home for the Christmas holidays, he decided not to return to the school and later studied under the guidance of his older brother Julius, whose focus was on the humanities. Julius Bunin wrote: “Not even a year has passed since he [Ivan] has grown mentally so much that I could talk with him almost as an equal on many topics”. With the help of his brother, the future poet prepared for the final exams, passed them, and received a certificate of maturity.

Entering the Literary World

The first serious literary experiments of Ivan Bunin date back to 1886. After finding out that one of his idols in poetry, Semyon Nadson, had died, Bunin sent several poems to the Rodina magazine, two of which were published at different times. Later, the writer recalled: “The morning, when I walked with this [May] issue from the post office <...>, picked dewy lilies in the forests and reread my poem every minute, I will never forget.”

In the fall of 1889, Ivan Bunin got a job at the editorial office of the newspaper Orlovsky Vestnik. He was not only an editor but also published his own works: short stories, literary criticism, notes. The first poetry collection of Bunin, “Poems”, in which he reflected on philosophical topics and described Russian nature, was also published here in Oryol. In the editorial office of Orlovsky Vestnik, the poet met Varvara Pashchenko, the daughter of a local doctor who worked in the newspaper as a proofreader. They had a passionate relationship that nevertheless did not lead to a marriage and overall did not last long, but made a tremendous impression on the young Bunin and later was reflected in the novel The Life of Arseniev.

Ivan Bunin traveled a lot, which allowed him to learn foreign languages. He began to translate a lot of poetry, in particular the poetic works of Francesco Petrarca, Lord Byron, the ancient Greek poet Alcaeus. Bunin received the prestigious Pushkin Prize of the Russian Academy of Sciences for the translation of Henry Longfellow’s poem “The Song of Hiawatha” and for his own collection of poetry “The Falling of the Leaves”.

However, despite this recognition, in the poetic circles Ivan Bunin was considered an “old-fashioned landscape painter.” In the late 1890s, “fashionable” poets like Valery Bryusov and Alexander Blok were in favor, while Bunin stayed aloof from the general poetic movements. The poet did not accept symbolism and reacted with great criticism towards the revolutionary events of 1905–1907, calling himself “a witness to the great and vile.”

In 1909, Ivan Bunin again received the Pushkin Prize for the third volume of his Collected Works and the translation of the mystery “Cain” by Lord Byron. What interesting is that Bunin shared this prize with his comrade and in some respect rival, the writer Alexander Kuprin, who was awarded for his short stories and the story “The Duel”. Soon Ivan Bunin received the title of honorary academician in the field of fine literature, and in 1912 he became an honorary member of the Society of Lovers of Russian Literature.

By 1915, Bunin was at the peak of his popularity: the stories “The Gentleman from San Francisco”, “The Grammar of Love”, “The Dreams of Chang”, and “Light Breathing” were published and very quickly became well-known. In 1917, the writer left revolutionary Petrograd first for Moscow and then for Odessa, where he wrote his diary “Cursed Days”, a fierce and powerful denunciation of both the revolution and Bolshevism. It is obvious that for a writer with such critical views of the new government it was dangerous to remain in the country. Bunin decides to emigrate.

Emigration and the Nobel Prize

In early 1920, Ivan Bunin together with his wife Vera Muromtseva, whom he met at one of the literary evenings back in 1906, sailed on a Greek steamer from Odessa to Constantinople, and from there — through Sofia and Belgrade — to Paris, which, because of a large number of Russian journalists and writers who lived there in exile, was called “the district of Russian literature.”

Being strictly against what was happening in the USSR, Ivan Bunin began to engage in social and political activities abroad, quickly becoming one of the key figures of the emigre opposition. He called for the fight against Bolshevism and because of that in his home country he was called the White Guard.

Abroad Ivan Bunin published his pre-revolutionary works, which were very warmly welcomed by readers. His new stories “Mitya’s love”, “God’s tree”, and “Sunstroke” were also published at that time.

In 1933, Bunin completed the most significant work of his emigration years — the novel The Life of Arseniev, which was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “for Bunin’s truthful artistic talent to recreate a true Russian character in fiction.”

The awarding of the Nobel prize to the writer became a grandiose event. Parisian newspapers were published with the headlines “Bunin — Nobel Laureate” and numerous portraits of him. Ivan Bunin wrote about this: “Along with all the usual things that happen every year around every Nobel laureate, to me, due to the unusualness of my position, that is, my belonging to the strange Russia, which is now scattered throughout the world, something happened that no other laureate in the world experienced: the decision of Stockholm has become for all this Russia, so humiliated and insulted in all its feelings, a truly national event … “.

The name of Ivan Bunin became world-­famous but his fame, however, was overshadowed by the fact that in his motherland his achievement was hushed and his works were not published. The funds received from the Swedish Academy did not make the poet, who was always in need of money, rich: “As soon as I received the prize,” wrote Bunin, “I had to give away about 120,000 francs. I don’t know how to handle money at all. Now, this is especially difficult. Do you know how many letters asking for help I received? Only in the shortest time, 2000 letters. “

The last years of Ivan Bunin’s life

The writer heard about World War II in Grasse in France. The Nobel Prize money ran out and Bunin with his wife lived practically from hand to mouth: “Fingers cracked from the cold, not to bathe, not to wash your feet, nauseating soups with white turnip <...> I was “rich” — now, by the will of fate, I suddenly became a beggar, like Job … “.

Even in this difficult situation, the poet did not stop working. In 1944, he completed the collection of short stories “Dark Avenues”, whose titular story was his favorite.

The terrible war managed to reconcile Bunin with the Bolshevism that he so hated. All grievances and misunderstandings became secondary. The main thing was to save the motherland from the fascist invaders. The poet actively followed the victories of the Soviet army on the front lines and celebrated, surprisingly for himself, the defeat of the Nazis at Stalingrad.

The Bunins found out about the victory over fascism in Paris. A year later they found out that Ivan’s citizenship of the USSR was restored. The writer even had an intention to return to his motherland. Ivan Bunin wrote: “But even here [abroad] a beggarly, painful, anxious existence awaits us. So, after all, one thing remains: home. This, as one can hear, is very much wanted and the mountains of gold in every sense are promised. But how do you make up your mind? I’ll wait and think … “. After the poet Anna Akhmatova and the writer Mikhail Zoshchenko were criticized in the USSR, Bunin changed his mind about returning to his motherland.

In the last few years of his life, Ivan Bunin was very sick and his wife, whom he idolized, was always near. The poet died in Paris on November 8, 1953. All major newspapers published obituaries and even in the Soviet newspaper “Pravda” there was a modest message: “The emigre writer Ivan Bunin died in Paris.” The writer was buried in the crypt of the “Russian” cemetery of Sainte-Genevieve-des-Bois.

The first version of Bunin’s Collected Works after the revolution, heavily abridged and censored, was published in the USSR only in 1956. It did not include his letters and philosophical diary “Cursed Days”, which had been the reason for silencing his works in his motherland. The complete works of Ivan Bunin were published only in the late 1980s after perestroika.

Irina Sheikhetova