Ivan Bunin

Ivan Bunin was born in Voronezh in 1870 into an old but declining family of the Russian nobility, proud of its descent from the poets Anna Bunina and Vasily Zhukovsky. He spent his childhood on family estates in the Oryol region, absorbing the folklore his mother taught him and a keen attentiveness to nature. His first poem was printed in 1887, and in his early career he was as much a poet and translator as a writer of prose.

Bunin’s reputation rests on prose of unusual density and precision, its texture sometimes called “Bunin brocade”. The Village (1910), a stark picture of rural Russia’s poverty and brutality, led Maxim Gorky to call him the best Russian writer of the day; Dry Valley (1912) traced the decay of a gentry family, and “The Gentleman from San Francisco” (1915), the story of a millionaire’s death on Capri, became his best-known work abroad. Fiercely opposed to the Bolsheviks, he recorded the revolutionary years in the diary Cursed Days and, in 1920, settled in France with Vera Muromtseva, dividing his time between Paris and Grasse.

Exile sharpened rather than silenced him: Mitya’s Love and the autobiographical novel The Life of Arseniev recalled a lost Russia with intense, elegiac clarity. In 1933 he became the first Russian writer to receive the Nobel Prize. He spent the Second World War in Grasse in hardship, sheltering others in his house during the occupation, and wrote the stories of love and memory collected in Dark Avenues. He never returned to Russia, and died in Paris in 1953.