Detailed biography of Bunin. “Russia lived in him, he was Russia

Portrait of Ivan Bunin. Leonard Turzhansky. 1905

♦ Ivan Alekseevich Bunin was born into an old noble family in the city of Voronezh, where he lived the first few years of his life. Later the family moved to the Ozerki estate (now Lipetsk region). At the age of 11 he entered the Yeletsk district gymnasium, but at the age of 16 he was forced to stop studying. The reason for this was the ruin of the family. The reason for which, by the way, was the excessive spending of his father, who managed to leave both himself and his wife penniless. As a result, Bunin continued his education on his own, although his older brother Yuli, who graduated from the university with flying colors, went through the entire gymnasium course with Vanya. They studied languages, psychology, philosophy, social and natural sciences. It was Julius who had a great influence on the formation of Bunin’s tastes and views. He read a lot, studied foreign languages, and showed talent as a writer at an early age. However, he was forced to work for several years as a proofreader at Orlovsky Vestnik in order to feed his family.

♦ Ivan and his sister Masha spent a lot of time as children with shepherds, who taught them to eat different herbs. But one day they almost paid with their lives. One of the shepherds suggested trying henbane. The nanny, having learned about this, hardly gave the children fresh milk, which saved their lives.

♦ At the age of 17, Ivan Alekseevich wrote his first poems, in which he imitated the works of Lermontov and Pushkin. They say that Pushkin was generally an idol for Bunin

♦ Anton Pavlovich Chekhov played a big role in Bunin’s life and career. When they met, Chekhov was already an accomplished writer and managed to direct Bunin’s creative fervor along the right path. They corresponded for many years and thanks to Chekhov, Bunin was able to meet and join the world of creative personalities - writers, artists, musicians.

♦ Bunin did not leave an heir to the world. In 1900, Bunin and Tsakni had their first and only son, who, unfortunately, died at the age of 5 from meningitis.

♦ Bunin’s favorite pastime in his youth and until his last years was to determine the face and entire appearance of a person by the back of his head, legs and arms.

♦ Ivan Bunin collected a collection of pharmaceutical bottles and boxes, which filled several suitcases to the brim.

♦ It is known that Bunin refused to sit at the table if he was the thirteenth person in a row.

♦ Ivan Alekseevich admitted: “Do you have any least favorite letters? I can't stand the letter "f". And they almost named me Philip.”

♦ Bunin was always in good physical shape, had good flexibility: he was an excellent horseman, and danced “solo” at parties, plunging his friends into amazement.

♦ Ivan Alekseevich had rich facial expressions and extraordinary acting talent. Stanislavsky invited him to the art theater and offered him the role of Hamlet.

♦ A strict order always reigned in Bunin’s house. He was often ill, sometimes imaginary, but everything obeyed his moods.

♦ An interesting fact from Bunin’s life is the fact that he did not live most of his life in Russia. Regarding the October Revolution, Bunin wrote the following: “This sight was sheer horror for anyone who had not lost the image and likeness of God...”. This event forced him to emigrate to Paris. There Bunin led an active social and political life, gave lectures, and collaborated with Russian political organizations. It was in Paris that such outstanding works as “The Life of Arsenyev”, “Mitya’s Love”, “Sunstroke” and others were written. In the post-war years, Bunin had a more benevolent attitude towards the Soviet Union, but could not come to terms with the power of the Bolsheviks and, as a result, remained in exile.

♦ It must be admitted that in pre-revolutionary Russia Bunin received the widest recognition from both critics and readers. He occupies a strong place on the literary Olympus and can easily indulge in what he has dreamed of all his life - travel. The writer traveled to many countries in Europe and Asia throughout his life.

♦ During the Second World War, Bunin refused any contacts with the Nazis - he moved in 1939 to Grasse (the Alps-Maritimes), where he spent virtually the entire war. In 1945, he and his family returned to Paris, although he often said that he wanted to return to his homeland, but, despite the fact that after the war the USSR government allowed people like him to return, the writer never returned.

♦ In the last years of his life, Bunin was sick a lot, but continued to work actively and be creative. He died in his sleep from November 7 to 8, 1953 in Paris, where he was buried. The last entry in I. Bunin’s diary reads: “This is still amazing to the point of tetanus! In some, very short time, I will be gone - and the affairs and fates of everything, everything will be unknown to me!”

♦ Ivan Alekseevich Bunin became the first emigrant writer to be published in the USSR (already in the 50s). Although some of his works, for example the diary “Cursed Days,” were published only after perestroika.

Nobel Prize

♦ Bunin was first nominated for the Nobel Prize back in 1922 (he was nominated by Romain Rolland), but in 1923 the prize was awarded to the Irish poet Yeats. In subsequent years, Russian emigrant writers more than once renewed their efforts to nominate Bunin for the prize, which was awarded to him in 1933.

♦ The official statement of the Nobel Committee stated: “By the decision of the Swedish Academy of November 10, 1933, the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Ivan Bunin for the strict artistic talent with which he recreated a typically Russian character in literary prose.” In his speech when presenting the prize, the representative of the Swedish Academy, Per Hallström, highly appreciating Bunin’s poetic gift, particularly focused on his ability to describe real life with unusual expressiveness and accuracy. In his response speech, Bunin noted the courage of the Swedish Academy in honoring the emigrant writer. It is worth saying that during the presentation of the awards for 1933, the Academy hall was decorated, against the rules, only with Swedish flags - because of Ivan Bunin - a “stateless person”. As the writer himself believed, he received the prize for “The Life of Arsenyev,” his best work. World fame fell upon him suddenly, and just as unexpectedly he felt like an international celebrity. Photographs of the writer were in every newspaper and in bookstore windows. Even random passersby, seeing the Russian writer, looked at him and whispered. Somewhat confused by this fuss, Bunin grumbled: "How the famous tenor is greeted...". Being awarded the Nobel Prize was a huge event for the writer. Recognition came, and with it material security. Bunin distributed a significant amount of the monetary reward received to those in need. For this purpose, a special commission was even created to distribute funds. Subsequently, Bunin recalled that after receiving the prize, he received about 2,000 letters asking for help, in response to which he distributed about 120,000 francs.

♦ Bolshevik Russia did not ignore this award either. On November 29, 1933, a note appeared in Literaturnaya Gazeta “I. Bunin is a Nobel laureate”: “According to the latest reports, the Nobel Prize in Literature for 1933 was awarded to the White Guard emigrant I. Bunin. The White Guard Olympus nominated and in every possible way defended the candidacy of the seasoned wolf of the counter-revolution, Bunin, whose work, especially of recent times, replete with motifs of death, decay, doom in the context of a catastrophic world crisis, obviously fell into the court of the Swedish academic elders.”

And Bunin himself liked to remember the episode that happened during the writer’s visit to the Merezhkovskys immediately after Bunin was awarded the Nobel Prize. The artist burst into the room X, and, not noticing Bunin, exclaimed at the top of his voice: "We survived! Shame! Shame! They gave Bunin the Nobel Prize!" After that, he saw Bunin and, without changing his facial expression, cried out: "Ivan Alekseevich! Dear! Congratulations, congratulations from the bottom of my heart! Happy for you, for all of us! For Russia! Forgive me for not having time to personally come to witness..."

Bunin and his women

♦ Bunin was an ardent and passionate man. While working at a newspaper, he met Varvara Pashchenko (“I was struck down, to my great misfortune, by long love”, as Bunin later wrote), with whom he began a whirlwind romance. True, it didn’t come to a wedding - the girl’s parents did not want to marry her off to a poor writer. Therefore, the young people lived unmarried. The relationship, which Ivan Bunin considered happy, collapsed when Varvara left him and married Arseny Bibikov, a friend of the writer. The theme of loneliness and betrayal is firmly established in the poet’s work - 20 years later he will write:

I wanted to shout after:

“Come back, I have become close to you!”

But for a woman there is no past:

She fell out of love and became a stranger to her.

Well! I’ll light the fireplace and drink...

It would be nice to buy a dog.

After Varvara's betrayal, Bunin returned to Russia. Here he was expected to meet and become acquainted with many writers: Chekhov, Bryusov, Sologub, Balmont. In 1898, two important events occur at once: the writer marries a Greek woman Anne Tsakni (daughter of a famous revolutionary populist), and a collection of his poems “Under the Open Air” is also published.

You, like the stars, are pure and beautiful...

I catch the joy of life in everything -

In the starry sky, in flowers, in aromas...

But I love you more tenderly.

I'm happy only with you alone,

And no one will replace you:

You are the only one who knows and loves me,

And one understands why!

However, this marriage did not last long: after a year and a half, the couple divorced.

In 1906 Bunin met Vera Nikolaevna Muromtseva - the writer’s faithful companion until the end of his life. Together the couple travels around the world. Vera Nikolaevna did not stop repeating until the end of her days that when she saw Ivan Alekseevich, who was then always called Yan at home, she fell in love with him at first sight. His wife brought comfort into his unsettled life and surrounded him with the most tender care. And from 1920, when Bunin and Vera Nikolaevna sailed from Constantinople, their long emigration began in Paris and in the south of France in the town of Graas near Cannes. Bunin experienced severe financial difficulties, or rather, they were experienced by his wife, who took household affairs into her own hands and sometimes complained that she did not even have ink for her husband. The meager fees from publications in emigrant magazines were barely enough for a more than modest life. By the way, after receiving the Nobel Prize, the first thing Bunin did was buy his wife new shoes, because he could no longer look at what his beloved woman was wearing and wearing.

However, Bunin’s love stories do not end there either. I will dwell in more detail on his 4th great love - Galina Kuznetsova . The following is a complete quote from the article. It's 1926. The Bunins have been living in Graas at the Belvedere Villa for several years. Ivan Alekseevich is a distinguished swimmer, he goes to the sea every day and does large demonstration swims. His wife does not like “water procedures” and does not keep him company. On the beach, an acquaintance approaches Bunin and introduces him to a young girl, Galina Kuznetsova, a budding poetess. As happened more than once with Bunin, he instantly felt an intense attraction to his new acquaintance. Although at that moment he could hardly imagine what place she would take in his future life. Both later recalled that he immediately asked if she was married. It turned out that yes, and she is vacationing here with her husband. Now Ivan Alekseevich spent whole days with Galina. Bunin and Kuznetsova

A few days later, Galina had a sharp explanation with her husband, which meant an actual breakup, and he left for Paris. It’s not hard to guess what state Vera Nikolaevna was in. “She went crazy and complained to everyone she knew about Ivan Alekseevich’s betrayal,” writes poetess Odoevtseva. “But then I.A. managed to convince her that he and Galina had only a platonic relationship. She believed, and believed until her death...” Kuznetsova and Bunin with his wife

Vera Nikolaevna really wasn’t pretending: she believed because she wanted to believe. Idolizing her genius, she did not let thoughts come close to her that would force her to make difficult decisions, for example, to leave the writer. It ended with Galina being invited to live with the Bunins and become “a member of their family.” Galina Kuznetsova (standing), Ivan and Vera Bunin. 1933

The participants in this triangle decided not to record the intimate details of the three of them for history. One can only guess what and how happened at the Belvedere villa, as well as read in the minor comments of the house guests. According to some evidence, the atmosphere in the house, despite external decency, was sometimes very tense.

Galina accompanied Bunin to Stockholm to receive the Nobel Prize along with Vera Nikolaevna. On the way back, she caught a cold, and they decided that it was better for her to stay for a while in Dresden, in the house of Bunin’s old friend, the philosopher Fyodor Stepun, who often visited Grasse. When Kuznetsova returned to the writer’s villa a week later, something subtly changed. Ivan Alekseevich discovered that Galina began to spend much less time with him, and more and more often he found her writing long letters to Stepun’s sister Magda. In the end, Galina got Magda an invitation from the Bunin couple to visit Graas, and Magda came. Bunin made fun of his “girlfriends”: Galina and Magda almost never parted, they went down to the table together, walked together, retired together in their “little room”, allocated at their request by Vera Nikolaevna. All this lasted until Bunin suddenly saw the light, as did everyone around him, regarding the true relationship between Galina and Magda. And then he felt terribly disgusted, disgusted and sad. Not only did the woman he loved cheat on him, but to cheat with another woman - this unnatural situation simply infuriated Bunin. They loudly sorted things out with Kuznetsova, not embarrassed by either the completely confused Vera Nikolaevna or the arrogantly calm Magda. The reaction of the writer’s wife to what was happening in her house is remarkable in itself. At first, Vera Nikolaevna breathed a sigh of relief - well, finally this life of three that was tormenting her would end, and Galina Kuznetsova would leave the hospitable home of the Bunins. But seeing how her beloved husband was suffering, she rushed to persuade Galina to stay so that Bunin would not worry. However, neither Galina was going to change anything in her relationship with Magda, nor Bunin could no longer tolerate the phantasmagoric “adultery” happening before his eyes. Galina left the writer’s home and heart, leaving him with a spiritual wound, but not the first one.

However, no novels (and Galina Kuznetsova, of course, was not the writer’s only hobby) changed Bunin’s attitude towards his wife, without whom he could not imagine his life. This is how family friend G. Adamovich said about it: “...for her endless loyalty, he was infinitely grateful to her and valued her beyond all measure...Ivan Alekseevich in everyday communication was not an easy person and, of course, he himself was aware of this. But the more deeply he felt everything he owed to his wife. I think that if in his presence someone had hurt or offended Vera Nikolaevna, he, with his great passion, would have killed this person - not only as his enemy, but also as a slanderer, as a moral monster, unable to distinguish good from evil, light from darkness."

How did Ivan Alekseevich Bunin die?

1. Silently...
2. He died from time to time, in his sleep. Absolutely no pain.
3. The last years of the writer passed in poverty. Ivan Alekseevich Bunin died in Paris. On the night of November 7-8, 1953, two hours after midnight, Bunin died: he died quietly and calmly, in his sleep. On his bed lay L. N. Tolstoy’s novel “Resurrection.” Ivan Alekseevich Bunin was buried in the Russian cemetery of Saint-Genevieve-des-Bois, near Paris.
4. Bunin loved life with all its carnal (in the high sense) delights. Writer Boris Zaitsev recalls how in the 30s in Grasse, while relaxing by the sea, Bunin “rolled up his shirt sleeves completely.

   - Here it is, the hand. Do you see? The skin is clean, no veins. And it will rot, my brother, it will rot... It's nothing you can do. And he looks at his hand with regret. Longing in the gaze. It’s a pity for him, but there is no humility, it’s not in his character. He grabs a pebble and throws it into the sea - this pebble deftly glides across the surface, but is launched in protest. Reply to someone. “I can’t accept that I’ll become dust, I can’t! I can’t fit it.” He really didn’t accept from within: he knew with his head what would happen to this hand, but he didn’t accept with his soul.”

   On May 2, 1953, Bunin made the last entry in his diary: “This is still amazing to the point of tetanus! In a very short time I will be gone - and the affairs and fates of everything, everything will be unknown to me! . And I just stupidly, with my mind, try to be amazed, to be afraid! “.

   Six months passed and Bunin was gone. He died quietly and calmly, in his sleep. This happened on the night of November 7-8, 1953, two hours after midnight. On his bed lay a tattered volume of Tolstoy’s novel “Resurrection.”

   Source: Chronicles of Charon.

5. with news
6. Ivan Alekseevich Bunin reacted extremely hostilely to the February and October revolutions of 1917 and perceived them as a disaster. On May 21, 1918, Bunin left Moscow for Odessa, and in February 1920 he emigrated first to the Balkans and then to France. In France, for the first time he lived in Paris; in the summer of 1923 he moved to the Alpes-Maritimes and came to Paris only for some winter months. In emigration, relations with prominent Russian emigrants were difficult for the Bunins, especially since Bunin himself did not have a sociable character. In 1933, Ivan Alekseevich Bunin, the first Russian writer, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. The official Soviet press explained the decision of the Nobel Committee as the machinations of imperialism. In 1939, after the outbreak of World War II, the Bunins settled in the south of France, in Grasse, at the Villa Jeannette, where they spent the entire war. Bunin refused any forms of cooperation with the Nazi occupiers and tried to constantly monitor events in Russia. In 1945 the Bunins returned to Paris. Ivan Alekseevich Bunin repeatedly expressed his desire to return to Russia; in 1946 he called the decree of the Soviet government “On the restoration of USSR citizenship to subjects of the former Russian Empire...” a “magnanimous measure,” but Zhdanov’s decree on the magazines “Zvezda” and “Leningrad” (1946), trampled A. Akhmatova and M. Zoshchenko, led to Bunin forever abandoning his intention to return to his homeland. The last years of the writer passed in poverty. Ivan Alekseevich Bunin died in Paris. On the night of November 7-8, 1953, two hours after midnight, Bunin died: he died quietly and calmly, in his sleep. On his bed lay L. N. Tolstoy’s novel “Resurrection.” Ivan Alekseevich Bunin was buried in the Russian cemetery of Saint-Genevieve-des-Bois, near Paris.
7. tell us in more detail why Bunin was buried 3 months later, after his death is it connected with the unsewn place in which he lived???
8. I really feel sorry for him
   but here they say the truth, he died at night
9. Bunin lived a long life, 1870-1953, survived the invasion of fascism in Paris, rejoiced at the victory over it.

Russian writer and poet, Nobel Prize winner in literature

Ivan Bunin

short biography

As a representative of an impoverished noble family, Bunin began an independent life early. In his youth, he worked in newspapers, offices, and traveled a lot. The first of Bunin’s published works was the poem “Over the grave of S. Ya. Nadson” (1887); The first collection of poetry 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 again awarded this award for the 3rd and 4th volumes of the Collected Works. In 1909 he was elected honorary academician in the category of belles-lettres of the Imperial St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences. Since 1920 he lived in France. Author of the novel “The Life of Arsenyev”, the stories “Sukhodol”, “The Village”, “Mitya’s Love”, the stories “The Gentleman from San Francisco”, “Easy Breathing”, “Antonov Apples”, the diary entries “Cursed Days” and other works. In 1933, Ivan Bunin won the Nobel Prize in Literature for "the rigorous mastery with which he develops the traditions of Russian classical prose." He died in 1953 and is buried in the Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois cemetery. Bunin's works have been filmed several times. The image of the writer is embodied in the film by Alexei Uchitel “The Diary of His Wife.”

Origin, family

A representative of a noble family, which dates back to the 15th century and had a coat of arms included in the “General Arms of Arms 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. Ivan Alekseevich’s great-great-grandfather, Semyon Afanasyevich, served as secretary of the State Patrimonial Collegium. Great-grandfather - Dmitry Semyonovich - retired with the rank of titular adviser. Grandfather - Nikolai Dmitrievich - served for a short time in the Voronezh Chamber of 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 his studies, and at the age of sixteen he 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, ardent and generous at the same time: “His whole being was... imbued with the feeling of his lordly origin.” Despite the dislike of studying that had taken root since his adolescence, until his old age he “read everything that came to hand with great eagerness.”

Returning home from a campaign in 1856, Alexey Nikolaevich married his cousin Lyudmila Aleksandrovna Chubarova (1835(?) - 1910). Unlike her energetic, temperamental husband (who, according to the writer, “at times drank terribly, although he did not have ... a single typical trait of an alcoholic”), she was a meek, soft, pious woman; it is possible that her impressionability was transferred to Ivan Alekseevich. In 1857, the first-born son Julius appeared in the family, and in 1858, son Evgeniy. In total, Lyudmila Alexandrovna gave birth to nine children, five of whom died in early childhood.

Childhood and youth

Ivan Alekseevich was born on October 10, 1870 in Voronezh, in house No. 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 their eldest sons Yuli and Evgeniy a high school education. As the writer later recalled, his childhood memories were associated with Pushkin, whose poems were read aloud by everyone in the house - both parents and brothers. At the age of four, Bunin and his parents moved to the family estate in the Butyrki village of Yeletsk district. Thanks to his tutor, Moscow University student 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 Bunin read on his own were Homer's Odyssey and a collection of English poetry.

In the summer of 1881, Alexey Nikolaevich brought his youngest son to the Yeletsk boys' 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 promptly pay the fee for the “right to study” and notify about changes in the boy’s place of residence. After passing the entrance exams, Bunin was enrolled in 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 curriculum, mathematics was the hardest for Bunin - in one of his 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 had moved to their Ozerki estate, he decided not to return to Yelets. At the beginning of spring, the teachers' council expelled Bunin from the gymnasium for failure to appear “from Christmas leave.” From that time on, Julius became his home teacher, exiled to Ozerki under police supervision. The older brother, realizing that the younger brother was disgusted by mathematics, concentrated his main teaching efforts on the humanities.

Bunin’s first literary experiments date back to this period - he wrote poetry from his high school years, and at the age of fifteen he composed the novel “Passion,” which was not accepted by any editor. 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 the 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. The writer later recalled: “I will never forget the morning when I walked with this number from the post office to Ozerki, picked dewy lilies of the valley through the forests and re-read my work every minute.”

"Orlovsky Bulletin". Wanderings

In January 1889, the publisher of the Orlovsky Vestnik, Nadezhda Semyonova, invited Bunin to take the position of assistant editor in her newspaper. Before giving consent or refusing, Ivan Alekseevich decided to consult with Julius, who, having left Ozerki, moved to Kharkov. Thus began a period of wanderings in the writer’s life. In Kharkov, Bunin settled with his brother, who helped him find an easy job in the zemstvo government. Having received his salary, Ivan Alekseevich went to Crimea and visited Yalta and Sevastopol. He returned to the editorial office of the Oryol newspaper only in the fall.

At that time, Varvara Pashchenko (1870-1918), whom researchers call the writer’s first “unmarried” wife, worked as a proofreader at Orlovsky Vestnik. She graduated from seven classes of the Yelets girls’ gymnasium, then entered an additional course “for the special study of the Russian language.” In a letter to his brother, Ivan Alekseevich said that when he first met Varvara - “tall, with very beautiful features, wearing pince-nez” - he seemed to be a very arrogant and emancipated girl; he later described 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 everyday disorder. The financial situation of his family at that time was precarious; Ivan Alekseevich’s parents, who sold Butyrki and transferred Ozerki to their son Evgeniy, actually separated; according to Bunin’s younger sister Maria, they sometimes “sat completely without bread.” Ivan Alekseevich wrote to Yulia that he constantly thinks about money: “I don’t have a penny, I can’t earn money, I can’t write something, I don’t want to.”

In 1892, Ivan Alekseevich moved to Poltava, where, with the assistance of Yuli, he got a job in the statistical department of the provincial government. Soon Varvara arrived there too. An attempt to start 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 ill.” Ivan Alekseevich suffered 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 Arsenyev.”

Entering the literary environment. First marriage

People who knew young Bunin described him as a person in whom there was a lot of “strength of life, thirst for life.” Perhaps it was these qualities that helped the aspiring poet, the author of the only collection of poetry at that time (published in Orel in 1891 in a circulation of 1,250 copies and sent free of charge to subscribers of the Orlovsky Vestnik), to quickly enter the literary circles of Russia at the end of the 19th century. In January 1895, Ivan Alekseevich, leaving his service in Poltava, came to St. Petersburg for the first time. In less than two weeks spent in the capital, he met the critic Nikolai Mikhailovsky, the publicist Sergei Krivenko, the poet Konstantin Balmont, visited the editorial office of the magazine “New Word”, met the writer Dmitry Grigorovich in a bookstore (the seventy-two-year-old author of “Anton the Miserable” amazed him with his liveliness look and a raccoon coat down to his toes), visited Alexei Zhemchuzhnikov’s house 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-published story “The Master and the Worker.” Later, he met Chekhov, who surprised Bunin with his friendliness and simplicity: “I, then still a young man, not accustomed to such a tone at the first meetings, took this simplicity for coldness.” The first conversation with Valery Bryusov was remembered for 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 cliffs above the pale lethargic sea.”

In those years, Bunin became a member of the literary circle “Sreda”, 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 topic of death; Bunin “got” the Zhivoderka for its thinness and irony. 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 restless - he did not know how to stay in one place for a long time, and letters from Ivan Alekseevich came from Orel, then from Odessa, then from Yalta. Bunin knew that he had a reputation as a sociable person, greedily reaching out for new experiences, organically fitting into his bohemian-artistic time. He himself believed that behind his desire to constantly be among people was an internal loneliness:

In 1898, Bunin met the editor of the Southern Review publication, Odessa resident Nikolai Tsakni. His daughter, nineteen-year-old Anna, became the first official wife of Ivan Alekseevich. In a letter to Julius, talking about his upcoming marriage, Bunin said that his chosen one was “a beauty, but an amazingly pure and simple girl.” In September of the same year, the wedding took place, after which the newlyweds went on a trip by boat. Despite joining a family of wealthy Greeks, the writer’s financial situation remained difficult - so, in the summer of 1899, he turned to his older brother with a request to send “immediately at least ten rubles,” noting: “I won’t ask Tsakni, even if I die.” After two years of marriage, the couple separated; 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 Langeron, big waves on the shore and also the fact that Every day we had excellent trout with white wine for dinner, after which we often went to the opera with it.”

First confession. Pushkin Prize (1903)

Bunin did not hide his annoyance at the poor attention of critics to his early works; Many of his letters contained the phrase “Praise, please, praise!” Without literary agents capable of organizing reviews in the press, he sent his books to friends and acquaintances, accompanying the mailing with requests to write reviews. Bunin’s debut collection of poems, published in Orel, aroused almost no interest in the literary community - the reason was outlined by one of the authors of the Observer magazine (1892, No. 3), who noted that “Mr. Bunin’s verse is smooth and correct, but who would 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 “compassionate and condescending.” In addition, two dozen reviews looked, according to Korney Chukovsky, a “microscopically small number” against the backdrop of the resonance that was 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 “Falling Leaves,” published by the symbolist publishing house “Scorpion” in 1901 and which, as Vladislav Khodasevich noted, became “the first book to which he owes the beginning of his fame.” Somewhat earlier - in 1896 - Bunin's translation of Henry Longfellow's "Song of Hiawatha" appeared, which was very favorably 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 a prize, but I didn’t send my books.”

In February 1903, it became known that the commission for awarding the prize had appointed Count Arseny Golenishchev-Kutuzov as a reviewer of Bunin's works. Almost immediately after this news, writer Platon Krasnov published “Literary Characteristics of Ivan. Bunin" (“Literary evenings of the “New World””, 1903, No. 2), in which he noted that the poems of the candidate for the prize are distinguished by “extreme monotony”, 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 “capture 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 has a “beautiful, imaginative, not borrowed from anyone, his own language.”

On October 18, 1903, the commission voting to award the Pushkin Prize took place (the chairman was literary historian Alexander Veselovsky). Bunin received eight electoral votes and three non-elective votes. 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 did little to promote 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 collection “Leaf Fall” lay for several years: “There were no buyers for it. Every time I came to the publishing house, I saw these dusty bundles that served as furniture for visitors.” As a result, Scorpio announced a price reduction: “Ivan Bunin. “Leaf fall” instead of a ruble 60 kopecks.”

Second marriage

In October 1906, Bunin, who lived very chaotically that fall, “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. The evening, held on November 4, was attended by twenty-five-year-old Vera Muromtseva, who was friends with the hostess of the house. 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 the Chairman of the First State Duma, Sergei Muromtsev. Her father had a very calm disposition, while her mother, according to Boris Zaitsev, resembled Dostoevsky’s heroine - “something like General Epanchina.” 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 toured 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 bloom of strength and hope, hand in hand with the one whom God had destined to be my companion to the grave, I made my first long journey, a marriage journey that was at the same time and pilgrimage to the holy land.

I. A. Bunin

Pushkin Prize (1909)

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 with “new comrades at Argonauts, demons, and magicians.” In 1902, he got another publisher - the St. Petersburg partnership "Knowledge". For eight years it has been publishing 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 fall of 1906 (or the winter of the following year), the 3rd volume, together with a 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 overlap 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 took for study were lost. Bunin quickly responded to the information received from Kuprina: he re-sent the 3rd and 4th volumes of his works to the Academy of Sciences, 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 works. The report noted that the candidate for the prize was not a novice author, but a poet who “won the menial task of presenting poetic thought in equally poetic speech.” At the same time, as the reviewer notes, the realistic description of the internal experiences of his lyrical hero sometimes borders almost on cynicism - in particular, we were talking about the poem “Loneliness”. A detailed analysis, which listed other “roughnesses” (vagueness of thought, unsuccessful comparisons, inaccuracies discovered 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 are quite worthy of an “honorary review."

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 for whistling 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.” The relationship between Kuprin and Bunin was friendly, but, nevertheless, there was always an element of slight rivalry. They were different in character: Alexander Ivanovich forever retained the qualities of a “big child”, while Ivan Alekseevich, who became independent early, was distinguished by his maturity of judgment from his youth. According to the memoirs of Maria Karlovna Kuprina, one day during dinner in their house, Bunin, proud of his pedigree, called her husband “a nobleman after his mother.” In response, Kuprin composed a parody of Ivan Alekseevich’s story “Antonov Apples,” entitled “Pie with Mushrooms”: “I’m sitting by the window, thoughtfully chewing a washcloth, and a 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 arrived from the Academy of Sciences - about the election of Bunin as an honorary academician in the category of fine literature. The corresponding presentation was made back in the spring by the writer Konstantin Arsenyev, who, in a description sent to the Academy, indicated that Bunin’s works are distinguished by “simplicity, sincerity, artistry of form.” During the elections to honorary academicians, eight out of nine votes were given for Ivan Alekseevich.

"Cursed Days"

In the 1910s, Bunin and Muromtseva traveled a lot - they visited Egypt, Italy, Turkey, Romania, 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 Master from San Francisco” (1915), “The Grammar of Love” (1915), “Easy Breathing” (1916), and “Chang’s Dreams” (1916) that received many responses were published. Despite his creative successes, the writer’s mood was gloomy, as evidenced by his diary entries made in 1916: “Mental and mental dullness, weakness, literary sterility continue.” 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 No. 26 on Povarskaya Street from the autumn of 1917 until the following 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. Having categorically refused to accept Soviet power, Bunin in his notes actually polemicized with Blok’s poem “The Twelve,” written in 1918. According to literary critic Igor Sukhikh, in those days “Blok heard the music of revolution, Bunin heard the cacophony of rebellion.”

On May 21, 1918, Ivan Alekseevich and Vera Nikolaevna left Moscow; at the Savelovsky station they were seen off by Yuli Alekseevich Bunin and Maxim Gorky’s wife, Ekaterina Peshkova. The couple traveled to Odessa, a city well known to the writer, in difficult ways: according to Muromtseva’s recollections, together with other refugees they traveled in a crowded ambulance car to Minsk, then made transfers; One day, while looking for a place to stay for the night, we 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 Big Fountain, later they moved to Knyazheskaya Street to the mansion of the artist Evgeniy Bukovetsky, who offered them two rooms. In a letter sent to critic Abram Dorman in the fall of 1918, Bunin reported that he experienced “constant pain, horror and rage while 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 Yuzhnoe 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 newspaper “Odessa Listok” (1918, No. 120), the writer spoke very sharply about the “terrible contrasts” of the era - the coincidence of Turgenev’s centenary with the anniversary of the revolution. Prose writer Ivan Sokolov-Mikitov, who communicated 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 the decks, passages and tables were used for sleeping; he and Bunin managed to occupy one cramped sleeping place for two. On the sixth day Sparta lost its way, on the seventh it entered the Bosporus, and on the ninth 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 completely woke up, suddenly it dawned on me: yes - so this is it - I’m in the Black Sea, I’m on someone else’s ship, for some reason I’m sailing to Constantinople, Russia - it’s the end, and everything, my whole old life is also the end, even if a miracle happens and we do not die in this evil and icy abyss!

I. A. Bunin

In Paris and Grasse

In the first years of his life in France, Bunin was little involved in literary activities. According to the assumption of the poet Gleb Struve, the writer’s temporary “creative impoverishment” was associated with 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 in the pre-revolutionary era were published in Paris, Berlin and Prague. A certain turning point occurred in 1924. On February 16, an event called “Mission of Russian Emigration” took place in Paris, in which prose writers Ivan Shmelev, Dmitry Merezhkovsky, church historian Anton Kartashev and others took part. Bunin delivered a report in which he indicated that the task of the Russian emigration was 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 backward,” the writer noted: “No, not like that, we don’t want a reverse flow, but only a different flow... Russia! Who dares to teach me love for her?

Also in 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 magazine “Modern Notes” (1925, No. 23-24) published Bunin’s new story “Mitya’s Love,” which attracted a large number of reviews in emigrant 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 Arsenyev,” in which he began to reproduce impressions preserved in his memory from childhood and adolescence. Literary scholars have noted that from the works created during the emigrant period, the social message inherent in Bunin was completely gone - the writer was completely immersed in that “pre-revolutionary world, which was impossible to compare with the original.”

In the winter months, the Bunins, as a rule, lived in a Parisian apartment located at 1 rue Jacques Offenbach. In the warm season, the family usually moved to the Alpes-Maritimes, to the rented villa “Belvedere” in Grasse. In the mid-1920s, Galina Kuznetsova appeared in the writer’s life, whom researchers called his student and “Grasse’s Laura.” 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. The book she wrote, “The Grasse Diary,” reproduces the almost idyllic atmosphere that reigned in the villa: “In the mornings I cut roses... I fill the jugs in the house with flowers.” These entries contrast with Muromtseva’s diary confessions: “Today I am completely alone. Maybe it's better - freer. But the melancholy 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 occurred through correspondence. Correspondence communication ended with an invitation to France; Bunin personally promised to arrange for a visa and find money for the move. According to Kuznetsova, a young man appeared at the house with suitcases containing black bread, Antonov apples revered by Bunin, and linden honey. “When I.A. came out to him for the first time, he stood up and stretched out in front of him, as if at a show.” Zurov's work as Ivan Alekseevich's secretary lasted several years, but his relationship with the Bunins continued for decades.

Nobel Prize

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 one of his questionnaires in 1922 that the most authoritative figures among the emigrants were Bunin, Kuprin and Merezhkovsky; their joint nomination for the award could raise the prestige of “exiled Russian literature.” Aldanov approached Romain Rolland with a proposal for such a nomination. 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 had been among the contenders, he would have given 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 candidates, and the prize for 1923 was given to the Irish poet William Yates. Subsequently, emigrant writers did not abandon attempts to nominate Bunin. So, in 1930, Aldanov negotiated with Thomas Mann about this. He first said that, respecting Ivan Alekseevich, it was difficult to make a choice between him and another Russian writer - Ivan Shmelev. Mann later admitted that since there was a representative of German literature on the list of candidates, he, as a German, was ready to vote for him.

Muromtseva was the first to learn about Bunin’s award for 1933. According to her memoirs, on the morning of November 9, a telegram came to them at the 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 interrupt the viewing and return home - according to the secretary, Vera Nikolaevna received a phone call from Stockholm; despite the poor connection quality, she was able to make out the phrase: “Your husband is a Nobel Prize laureate, 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 on some of the secretarial duties, later said that on that day the Bunins had no money and had nothing to pay for the work of the 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 community, the reaction to the award was mixed. 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 academy’s decision - the poetess noted that Gorky or Merezhkovsky were much more deserving of the award: “Gorky is the era, and Bunin is the end of an era.”

The award ceremony took place on December 10, 1933 at the Stockholm Concert Hall. In his Nobel speech, on which the writer worked for a long time, Bunin noted that the prize was awarded to an exiled writer for the first time. The Nobel medal and laureate's diploma were presented to him by King Gustav V of Sweden. The writer received a check for 170,331 Swedish krona (715,000 francs). Ivan Alekseevich donated part of the prize 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 difficult financial situations, so “I had to give out about 120,000 francs.”

During the Second World War

At the beginning of World War II, the Bunins moved to the high-mountain villa “Zhannette,” located on the outskirts of Grasse, next to the Napoleonic Road. Ivan Alekseevich and Vera Nikolaevna lived there almost continuously for about six years. Besides them, friends and family acquaintances were always in 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 impending arrests of foreign Jews in Cannes, were looking for an “underground,” Ivan Alekseevich insisted on their settling in “Jeannette”: “So we did - and spent several anxious days with him.” days." From 1940 to 1944, the writer Alexander Bakhrakh was in Bunin’s house, who himself came to the villa asking for asylum. Muromtseva arranged a baptismal ceremony for him in a small church, and Zurov, through a priest he knew, drew up documents that saved Bakhrakh’s life during his arrest on the street. Subsequently, Alexander Vasilyevich published the book “Bunin in a Robe,” 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 visited Grasse during the war, said that Bunin constantly listened to English and Swiss news reports on the radio. In his office there were maps, on which the writer made notes with arrows. In his diaries, he recorded almost daily 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. Balmont disappeared from the world and from my life! And I vividly see meeting him in Moscow, in the Madrid rooms on Tverskaya... Letter from Vera Zaitseva: Nilus has died.”

During the war, Villa Jeannette lost its original respectability: the heating system stopped functioning, difficulties arose with water and electricity supply, and the furniture became dilapidated. In letters to acquaintances, Bunin mentioned “constant famine in the caves.” The Nobel Prize was spent, no new publications were expected; according to Zurov’s recollections, 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 throughout the world - now no one in the world needs me... I really want to go home!” Trying to get at least a small fee, Ivan Alekseevich asked Andrei Sedykh, who had 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. Andrei 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. There were many problems with the English version of the book, and it was published after the war. For “Dark Alleys,” Bunin was paid $300.

Appearance, character, lifestyle

Bunin was a nobleman by birth, but his lifestyle - especially in his youth - turned out to be akin to that of commoners. Having left his parents' home early (and not having found his own for the rest of his life), he got used to relying only on himself. For many years, his refuge was rented corners, furnished rooms, hotels - he lived either in “Stolichnaya”, sometimes in “Loskutnaya”, sometimes in the village, sometimes in apartments with friends. In private conversations, the writer admitted that from his youth he was tormented by “contradictory passions.” The poet Irina Odoevtseva suggested that both his unbridled temper and the ability for heroic deeds were largely determined by his heredity: “he received 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 “gut”. According to Bunin, in his youth he easily distinguished stars that other people could only see with the help of powerful optical instruments; Thanks to his excellent hearing, he could hear the sound of approaching horse bells several miles from home. His “spiritual vision and hearing” were just as sharp.

Memoirists wrote about Bunin’s “lordly bearing,” his innate elegance, ability to hold himself freely and feel natural in any society. According to Kuprin's wife Maria Karlovna, her husband - even in the most fashionable suits - looked awkward and awkward next to Ivan Alekseevich. Tatyana Loginova-Muravyova, who looked closely at Bunin’s appearance as an artist, paid attention to the mobility of all his facial features; sometimes it seemed that even his eyes were able to change color depending on his mood: they could be green, gray, blue. The writer knew about his “many faces,” so he reluctantly agreed to artists’ offers to work on his portraits.

Bunin considered the best time to work in the morning - as a rule, he sat down at his desk before breakfast. Both editors and colleagues knew about his strictness with words and any punctuation mark - Kuprin, in a conversation with Ivan Alekseevich, once noted that he “sweat is visible in every line.” According to the recollections of Mark Vishnyak, an employee of the Parisian magazine “Modern Notes”, Bunin’s attitude towards the construction of phrases in the text sometimes reached the point of “morbid scrupulousness”; The publishing houses with which he collaborated received urgent telegrams from him before submitting the manuscript for printing, asking him to change a word or move a comma. The writer explained his desire to immediately make the final correction as follows: “Tolstoy demanded from Severny Vestnik one hundred proofs of Master and Worker... And I ask for only two!” Ivan Alekseevich met the reform of Russian spelling, in which yat and erik disappeared from the alphabet, very negatively - he argued that “a ‘forest’ without ‘yat’ loses all its resinous aroma.”

The opinions of contemporaries about Bunin's character turned out to be contradictory. In some memoirs he was presented as an easy, witty interlocutor, who, however, could not be called an open person. Others wrote that in the creative community he was perceived as a harsh, quarrelsome, discourteous writer. According to Irina Odoevtseva, sometimes he “could be very unpleasant without even noticing it.” Ivan Alekseevich significantly helped those who needed support, but at the same time he loved for his students to accompany him at events - such a public demonstration of his “retinue” sometimes irritated his colleagues, who called the writer’s followers “Bunin’s serf ballet.”

According to Bunin, he never knew how to manage money correctly, and the Nobel Prize, which, according to friends, could provide the writer with a comfortable old age, was wasted very quickly. The Bunins did not purchase their own housing and did not set aside any amounts “for a rainy day.” Andrei Sedykh, who together with Ivan Alekseevich sorted the mail that arrived in Grasse after receiving the prize, recalled letters coming 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 fans, and Vera Nikolaevna gave writers money to publish books or pay for their studies. The writer Zinaida Shakhovskaya argued that the Bunins' open house attracted both unscrupulous publishers and lawyers with dubious reputations. The impracticality of the family led to the fact that three years after receiving the prize, Ivan Alekseevich wrote in his diary: “Agents who will forever receive interest from me, giving away the Collected Works for free... Not a penny of income from the money... And old age lies ahead. Going into circulation."

Last years. Death

After the war, the Bunins returned to their Parisian apartment. In June 1946, the Soviet Union issued a decree “On the restoration of USSR citizenship to subjects of the former Russian Empire, as well as persons who have 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 community; a split occurred in some families: “Some wanted to go, others wanted to stay.” Bunin, answering a question from a Russian News correspondent about his attitude to the decree, restrainedly noted that he hoped that this “magnanimous 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 Erenburg, who arrived in Paris, spoke. In addition, the ambassador personally invited Bunin to breakfast; During the meeting, Ivan Alekseevich was asked to return to his homeland. According to Bogomolov, the writer thanked him for the offer and promised to think about it. Here's what Konstantin Simonov remembers about it:

Having talked about returning, he said that, of course, he really wanted to go, see, visit familiar places, but his age bothered him. It's late, it's late... I'm already old, and there are no friends left alive. Of my close friends, only Teleshov remained, and even he, I’m afraid, might not die by the time I get there. I'm afraid to feel empty. (...) But I became attached to France, I got very used to it, and it would be difficult for me to wean myself from it. But take a passport and not go, stay here with a Soviet passport - why take a passport if not 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, remained a stateless person until his last days.

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 conversations about Simonov’s well-being, and the message about the presence of secretaries and stenographers made her think about the problems of emigrant writers: “Zaitsev does not have a [typewriter], Zurov does not have the minimum for a normal life, Yan [ Ivan Alekseevich] - the opportunity to go and treat bronchitis.” At that time, Bunin was given some literary works published in the USSR - for example, he read and spoke very warmly about “Vasily Tyorkin” by Alexander Tvardovsky and the story “The Tavern on Braginka” by Konstantin Paustovsky.

In 1947, Bunin, who was diagnosed with pulmonary emphysema, at the insistence of doctors, went to the resort of Juan-les-Pins, located in the south of France. After undergoing treatment, he returned to Paris and managed to take part in an event organized by friends in his honor; in the fall of the same 1947, his last performance took place in front of a large audience. Soon, Ivan Alekseevich turned to Andrei Sedykh with a request for help: “I became very weak, I lay in bed for two months, I was completely ruined... I am now 79 years old, and I am so poor that I have absolutely no idea how or 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 Atran's death, payments ceased.

In October 1953, Ivan Alekseevich’s health condition deteriorated sharply. Family friends were almost always in the house, helping Vera Nikolaevna care for the sick person, including Alexander Bakhrakh; Doctor Vladimir Zernov came every day. A few hours before his death, Bunin asked his wife to read Chekhov’s letters aloud to him. As Zernov recalled, on November 8 he was called to the writer twice: the first time he carried out 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 at the Saint-Genevieve-des-Bois cemetery. The monument on the grave was made according to a drawing by the artist Alexandre Benois.

Creation

Poetry

Bunin, who published several collections of poetry and received two Pushkin Prizes for them, has long had a reputation in the literary community as an old-fashioned landscape painter. In his youth, Russian poetry was looking for new forms for self-expression, and the classicist Bunin looked conservative compared to Bryusov, who brought “the breath of city streets” into his lyrics, or the early Blok with his unsettled heroes, penetrating into the very thick of life. As Maximilian Voloshin, who responded to Bunin’s collection “Poems” (1903-1906, publishing house “Znanie”), wrote in his review, Ivan Alekseevich found himself on the sidelines “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 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 Pushkin Prize laureates for 1903, cited several quotes from Bunin’s collection “Leaf Fall”, in which the “Fet school” is revealed - in particular, we are talking about the following lines: “The hollow water is raging, - / The noise is both dull and drawn-out. / Migrating flocks of rooks / They scream both cheerfully and importantly.”. In addition, Ivan Alekseevich’s contemporaries associated his poetic sketches with landscapes from the prose works of Turgenev and Chekhov. In the first decades of the 20th century, critics wanted Bunin to quickly get rid of “rehashes” 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 came the turn of philosophical reflections, when graveyards and gravestones appeared among the elements of the landscape, and the lyrical hero turned to cosmic problems and began to look for answers to eternal questions: “And the shadow fades, and the moon moves, / Is immersed in its pale light, as if in smoke, / And it seems that I’m about to 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 entered her at midnight. / She was sleeping - the moon was shining”), as well as the sadness that appears in the story “Easy Breathing” (“The graveyard, the chapel above the crypt, / Wreaths, lamps, images / And in a frame intertwined with crepe - / Big clear eyes”).

Stories and novellas

Bunin’s debut as a prose writer took place in 1893, when his story “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 over time he “will become a great writer.” In subsequent years, his stories “Castryuk”, “To the End of the World”, “Antonov Apples”, “Little Romance” and others were published in various publications. Critics showed restrained interest in the work of young Bunin and mentioned the “poetic colors” present in his prose, but for the time being, none of Ivan Alekseevich’s works were perceived in the literary community as a major event. As Korney Chukovsky noted, his early “half-elegies, half-novels... 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 people started talking about the work long before the manuscript went to press. The newspaper "Birzhevye Vedomosti" (1909, No. 11348) wrote that Bunin's new work is likely to "cause conversations and controversy on the right and left." The first part of “The Village” was published in the “Modern World” in March 1910, and the first review appeared even before the publication of the issue - the columnist of the newspaper “Morning of Russia” V. Baturinsky managed to get acquainted with the proofreading version in the editorial office and, ahead of his colleagues, prepared a review in which he called the story “an outstanding work of the current season.” Both critics and writers joined the discussion about “The Village”: the author was accused of “loss of a sense of artistic verisimilitude” (G. Polonsky); he was accused of “being afraid of his own studies and sketches” (Alexander Amphiteatrov); they wrote about the story as “an outrageous, completely false book” (A. Yablonovsky). Among those who supported Bunin was Zinaida Gippius, who noted in the magazine “Russian Thought” (1911, No. 6) that the story “The Village” is strict, simple and harmonious: “... you simply believe it.”

Despite the harshness of some 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 - magazines and newspapers began to acquire his works much more willingly, and “ The A. F. Marx Publishing and Printing Association invited the writer to enter into a contract for the publication of his Complete Works. The six-volume book was published in 1915 with a very impressive circulation of 200,000 copies.

In the same year, Bunin's story "Mr. from San Francisco" appeared. According to Muromtseva, the idea for the work arose from Ivan Alekseevich during their trip on a ship coming from Italy. A discussion began among the passengers about social inequality, and the writer invited his opponent to imagine their ship in cross-section: on the upper deck people walk and drink wine, and in the lower compartments they work: “Is this fair?” The story was generally well received by reviewers: thus, the literary historian Abram Derman (“Russian Thought”, 1916, No. 5) discovered in it some artistic techniques characteristic of Leo Tolstoy, for example, the test of 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 new literature.” Alexander Izmailov assessed this work more restrainedly, to whom the story about a rich 58-year-old American who went to the Old World for entertainment seemed too drawn out - according to the critic, it could fit into the format of a small sketch.

One of the last works of fiction written by Bunin in the pre-revolutionary period was the story “Easy Breathing” (“Russian Word”, 1916, No. 83). The story about high school student Olya Meshcherskaya, shot at a train station by a Cossack officer, was invented by the writer while walking through the cemetery on the island of Capri, when he saw a portrait of a cheerful girl on one of the tombstones. The young heroine of the story represents that special female type that has always been interesting to Ivan Alekseevich - she has a mystery that subjugates men and forces them to commit reckless acts. The same gallery of fatal female images with a natural gift of enchanting includes characters from Bunin’s stories “Klasha” and “Aglaya,” as well as the story “Mitya’s Love,” created in emigration.

The story “Mitya’s Love,” first published in the Parisian magazine “Modern Notes” (1925, No. 13-14) and telling about the love of a student Mitya for a student of a private theater school Katya, contains autobiographical motives. They relate not to the plot, but to the depth of feelings experienced by the young hero, and make us remember the mental torment of young Bunin, who lost Varvara Pashchenko. Her features - “inconstancy, unreliability of feelings” - are discernible in the image of Katya. As Muromtseva wrote, “nowhere did Ivan Alekseevich reveal his love experiences as in “Mitya’s Love,” having carefully camouflaged them.” This story, stylistically reminiscent of a large prose poem, marks a new stage in Bunin’s work:

Before Bunin, they didn’t 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. The experiences of Mitya, endowed with super-ordinary emotionality, capable of feeling with exorbitant acuteness, pain and bliss the awakening of nature and himself... are undoubtedly autobiographical.

Anna Sahakyants

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 and passion in Russian literature,” then Mark Aldanov informed the author about letters received by the editors of the New Journal, which published several short stories. According to Aldanov, the publication’s subscribers were outraged by the excess of erotic scenes, and a certain scientist sent a letter with the question: “Well, how is it possible? I have a wife." The collection, the name of which was suggested to the writer by Nikolai Ogarev’s lines “The scarlet rose hips were blooming all around, / There were dark linden alleys,” included the stories “Russia”, “Late Hour”, “Cold Autumn”, “Muse”, “Young Lady Clara”, “ Iron wool" and others.

"The Life of Arsenyev"

The idea for the novel “The Life of Arsenyev” - a book that influenced the decision of the Swedish Academy to award the Nobel Prize - appeared to Bunin in October 1920, on the eve of his fiftieth anniversary. Somewhat later, in 1921, the writer made preliminary outlines in which he tried to outline the outline of the 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 took several years to form, and actual work began on June 27, 1927. Judging by Muromtseva’s memoirs, every time, completing the next part, Ivan Alekseevich intended to stop working - he argued that “a human life cannot be written.” As a result, Bunin created five parts and “brought” his hero Alexei Arsenyev 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, noted that the author’s early manuscripts, which reflected the “course of memory,” allow us to speak of “The Life of Arsenyev” as memoir prose. At the same time, when making edits, Ivan Alekseevich consciously 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 could be guessed. According to literary critic Anna Saakyants, “The Life of Arsenyev” united several genres - the book intertwined artistic biography, memoirs, and lyrical and philosophical prose. Literary critic Igor Sukhikh wrote that the basis of the novel is “a poetic transformation of the past.” Bunin himself urgently asked not to perceive the story of Alexei Arsenyev as the story of the author; he explained that “The Life of Arsenyev” is “an autobiography of a fictional person.”

The fifth part of the work, originally called “Lika,” is called by researchers the most important: it is in it that the hero grows up and experiences his 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 combines the features of those women whom Bunin loved over the years. For example, outwardly the heroine of “The Life of Arsenyev” more closely resembles 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 (“I recently saw her in a dream...”) are close to the confession that sounded in one of Ivan Alekseevich’s letters after breaking up with Pashchenko: “I saw you today in a dream - it was as if you were lying, sleeping, dressed, on your right side.” .

In “The Life of Arsenyev” Bunin did what, without realizing it, young Arsenyev dreamed of when he longed 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 artist’s direct vision of the world: not thinking about what is visible, but the very process of seeing, the process of intelligent vision.

Vladislav Khodasevich

Journalism, diaries, memoirs

In the pre-revolutionary period, many of Bunin’s contemporaries saw in him only a coldish writer of everyday life, nostalgically recalling the disappearing nests of the nobility. The appearance of his polemical notes, articles and essays on the October events allowed readers to see another Bunin - caustic and caustic, who perceived the revolution as a Russian rebellion, and its participants - as characters from the novel “Demons”. According to 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, 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, called “Cursed Days.” Researchers point out that the daily notes that Ivan Alekseevich kept in the 1918-1920s differ from the diaries presented in the book version. The writer prepared for publication not so much a calendar diary as a mosaic diary, including 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 records the texts of street posters, newspaper headlines, and random remarks from passers-by. The image of the city is created through faces snatched from the crowd, flashing with kaleidoscopic speed, as in an instant photograph. The second part, which tells about Odessa in 1919, is dominated by short stories and notes.

There was V. Kataev (a young writer). The cynicism of today's young people is simply incredible. He said: “I’ll kill anyone for a hundred thousand.” 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 with my whole being the charm of spring, which I did not feel at all this year (for the first time in my life).

I. A. Bunin. Damn 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 about 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 era. As Andrei Sedykh, who visited Ivan Alekseevich in Paris in the summer of 1949, said, one day the owner of the house read excerpts from the still unfinished “Memoirs” to the guests. 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 treated kindly."

Translations

Bunin, who left the gymnasium after the fourth grade, was constantly engaged in self-education. Thus, 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. Ivan Alekseevich's debut as a translator took place in the second half of the 1880s. He himself later admitted that, having taken on the task of translating Shakespeare’s tragedy “Hamlet” into Russian, “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, and Heine's lyrical works.

Bunin's translation of the poem "The Song of Hiawatha", first published in the newspaper "Orlovsky Vestnik" 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 "A Psalm of Life" was published. Textual analysis carried out by linguists showed that Bunin used different techniques for the two works. If, when transcribing the text of the poem, which is based on the legends and traditions of the Indians, the translator sought to preserve the intonation of the original, then in the “Psalm of Life” he introduced his own poetic motives: “The life of the great calls / We are called to go to the great, / So that we remain in the sands of time / The trace of our path." Linguists explain the difference in approaches by the “artistic nature” of the originals, which either set a certain framework for the translator or allow him to go beyond it.

Originality of creativity. Innovation. Influences

Bunin, whose creative style began to take shape at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, was far from the trends 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", and "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 the philologist Tamara Nikonova a reason to note: in the legacy of Ivan Alekseevich there is no “single, all-explaining and unifying scheme or system.”

Work system

Textual critics, studying Bunin's manuscripts, noticed that he, as a rule, began work on the next work without preliminary plans. The writer did not draw diagrams showing the relationships of the characters, did not think through the order of the chapters - he immediately reproduced the finished story, which he later polished and improved, achieving precise intonation and maximum expressiveness. Sometimes his stories were born instantly (for example, “Easy Breathing” Bunin wrote with “delightful speed”); sometimes it took hours and even days to find the right word: “I start writing, say the simplest phrase, but suddenly I remember that either Lermontov or Turgenev said something similar to this phrase. I turn the phrase around and it turns out vulgar.” This complex work took place already at a time when the process of composing was launched, when in the author’s mind not only a story had taken shape, but also the sound, rhythm, and melody of a story or story had taken shape.

Creative evolution

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 Apples”, “Bonanza”, “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 captivating narration - a person came to the fore, whose fate and worldview were revealed against the background of time, and for Sometimes a few everyday episodes were enough for the 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 themes of Bunin's works expanded - his sphere of interests included other countries, cultures and civilizations. Among his heroes are a Ceylon rickshaw driver who is worried about the loss of his bride (“Brothers”), an American millionaire dying in a hotel in 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 “Brothers” and conceived “The Gentleman from San Francisco.” In emigration, social motives almost completely disappeared from Bunin’s work, the writer again returned to the desire to reveal the inner world of an individual, but from a different perspective, without reference to a specific historical era with its fractures and upheavals: “What remains is love, suffering, longing for the ideal” . According to literary critic Olga Slivitskaya, the content of Bunin’s prose at a certain moment began to fit into the model “Space 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 thing: the place of man in the universe. Just as an atom, an unimaginably small part of the solar system, repeats its entire structure, so a person both confronts the Cosmos and includes it within himself.

Elements of innovation

Writer Ivan Nazhivin in the novel-pamphlet “Slightly Respected!” (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 on a par with Natasha Rostova, Liza Kalitina, Evgeny 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 these 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” are correlated 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 commits suicide because of “world happiness.” He passes away with a “happy 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 unusual lightness and freedom from suffering. One of the phrases uttered by the hero - “Oh, when will all this end!” - sounds like an antithesis to the Faustian exclamation “Stop, moment: you are beautiful!” At the same time, Ivan Alekseevich was also able to “stop a moment” - he did this in such stories as “Sunstroke” and “Ida”. According to Yuri Maltsev, “„ moment“—that 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 Romance of the Hunchback”, “First Class”) were presented in the book “Modern Notes” (Paris, 1931), where they look like episodes from a large, motley, polyphonic work. Sometimes they are perceived as short everyday anecdotes, sometimes as travel notes, but in all cases the “fragments” represent completed works.

In Bunin’s poem “Giordano Bruno”, written in 1906, there are lines that largely determine the author’s worldview: “In my joy there is always melancholy, / In melancholy there is always a mysterious sweetness!” Such antinomy allowed the writer to create many contrasting combinations (in his dictionary of epithets there are about 100,000 word usages), showing that directly opposite emotions, passions and experiences can coexist simultaneously in a person: “sad and cheerful songs”, “the heart beat wildly and joyfully” , “mockingly sad cuckoo”, “plaintively joyful squeal”, “mysteriously bright wilds”, “suffering-happy rapture”, “sad-festive”, “sultry-cold wind”, “happiness of guilt”, “unhappy with happiness ”, “horror of delight”, “joyful anger”, “crying enthusiastically”.

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, through the soporific intonation, signs of mysticism begin to appear. The hero mentally goes into the past, and the same area “magically blossoms.” Then a girl artist appears in his mind, whose real name is Marusya. The shortening has its roots either in Rus' or in mermaids, and the heroine herself, living among the swamps, is “picturesque, even iconographic.” A forgotten love story from twenty years ago, which ended in a dramatic breakup, turns into a stopped “beautiful moment” thanks to the train stopping.

Picturesque prose

Literary scholars paid attention to the picturesqueness of Bunin’s prose. Thus, Oleg Mikhailov wrote that for some of Bunin’s stories of the 1910s, Mikhail Nesterov could have been the best illustrator. The gallery of martyrs and righteous people created by the writer (among whom are the farm laborer Averky from “The Thin Grass,” the crooked beggar Anisya from “The Merry Court,” the sentimental servant Arseny from “The Saints,” the dignified beauty Aglaya from the story of the same name) is reminiscent of the gathered together heroes of Nesterov’s canvas “On Rus'. Soul of the people."

According to Tatyana Marchenko, there is also a certain kinship between Bunin’s landscapes and the works of Viktor Vasnetsov, with whom the writer was personally acquainted. However, in terms of his inner worldview, Ivan Alekseevich’s prose is closer to the paintings of Mikhail Vrubel. For example, his work “Pan” (as well as “Bogatyr”, “Lilac”, “Queen Volkhova”) reflects the pagan element of the story “Rusya” to a greater extent than Vasnetsov’s “Alyonushka”, Marchenko believes. Vasnetsov’s painting, which depicts a girl sitting near a pond overgrown with sedge, correlates well with the content of “Rus,” while “Pan” allows “a glimpse into the mysterious essence of things.”

Influences

When talking 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 man - with its multi-layeredness and inexhaustibility - largely comes from Tolstoy's idea of ​​​​"fluidity of character." Critic Alexander Izmailov wrote that Ivan Alekseevich is “one of many bewitched, 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 the lyrical digressions in the poem “Dead Souls.” Bunin himself wrote that for all his love for Russian literature, he “never imitated anyone.” When the literary critic Pyotr Bicilli drew attention to some similarities between “Mitya’s Love” and Tolstoy’s work “The Devil,” which begins 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 responded : “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 late work contained so many hidden quotes, reminiscences and images borrowed from Russian classics that it was time to talk about “elementary epigonism.” For example, Nina Berberova argued 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 is revealed, wanting to be the successor of the great classical tradition in the era of modernism, but in order to rewrite this entire tradition again."

Relations with contemporaries

Bunin and Gorky

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), followed by a break (1917) with complete rejection of each other’s views, accompanied by public, sometimes very harsh estimates. The writers met in Yalta in 1899; According to Bunin’s memoirs, Gorky, in a sentimental mood, said at the first meeting: “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 Air”; A correspondence began that lasted about eighteen years.

Responses to Bunin's early works from Alexei Maksimovich were mostly friendly. For example, after reading the story “Antonov Apples,” Gorky wrote: “This is good. Here Ivan Bunin, like a young god, sang.” Feeling a growing sympathy for Alexei Maksimovich, Bunin dedicated his poem “Falling Leaves” to him. Gorky, in turn, invited the young writer to collaborate in the magazine “Life”; then the publishing house “Znanie”, headed by him, began publishing Bunin’s collected works. Since 1902, in newspaper news, the names of Gorky and Bunin often appeared 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 went 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 words.” Muromtseva, recalling the long dialogues at Villa Spinola, noted that at that time Alexey 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, Alexey 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 dubious to Ivan Alekseevich (as did 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 responded by asking him to convey through Ekaterina Peshkova that he considered “the relationship with him to be over forever.”

From then on, Gorky became an absentee opponent for Bunin: in the journalism of the 1920s, Ivan Alekseevich mentioned him mainly as a “propagandist of Soviet power.” Alexey Maksimovich also remotely polemicized with his former friend: in a letter sent to his secretary Pyotr Kryuchkov, he noted that Bunin had “become wild.” In another letter addressed to Konstantin Fedin, Gorky gave very harsh assessments of emigrant writers: “B. Zaitsev mediocrely writes the lives of saints. Shmelev is something unbearably hysterical. Kuprin doesn't write - he drinks. Bunin rewrites the “Kreutzer Sonata” under the title “Mitya’s Love”. Aldanov also writes off L. Tolstoy.”

Bunin and Chekhov

Bunin wrote several essays about A.P. Chekhov, included a separate chapter about Anton Pavlovich in his “Memoirs” and planned to prepare a large work dedicated to him. According to Muromtseva’s recollections, in the 1950s, her husband managed to acquire the Complete Works of Chekhov, published by Goslitizdat, as well as a 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 - I remembered conversations with Chekhov.” Their first meeting took place in Moscow in 1895, and their rapprochement began in 1899, when Bunin arrived in Yalta. Quite quickly, Ivan Alekseevich became his own man in Chekhov’s house - he stayed at his dacha in Outka even on those days when Anton Pavlovich was away. In his memoirs, Bunin admitted that he did not have such a warm relationship with any of his fellow writers as with Chekhov. Anton Pavlovich came up with a humorous nickname for his friend - “Mr. Marquis Bukichon” (sometimes simply “Marquis”), and called himself “Autsky landowner”.

According to Nikolai Teleshov, who visited Chekhov before his departure to Badenweiler, Anton Pavlovich already knew about his fatal illness. Saying goodbye, he asked the participants of the Sreda literary circle to bow, and also to tell Bunin to “write and write”: “He will make a great writer. So tell him for me. Do not forget". Ivan Alekseevich, who was in the village of Ognevka in the summer of 1904, learned about Chekhov’s death from a newspaper: “I unfolded it ... - and suddenly it was like an icy razor slashed across my heart.” A few days later, he received a letter from Gorky - Alexey Maksimovich said that writers were beginning preparations for the release of memoirs about 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 about Anton Pavlovich was written very carefully.

Researchers tried to determine the degree of Chekhov's influence on Bunin's work. Thus, the writer Valery Geideko drew attention to the poetry of the prose of both, the “rhythmic organization of speech” characteristic of both writers, as well as their attraction to impressionism. 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 “are like a greyhound like a hound”: “I could not steal a single word from you. You are harsher than me. You write: “the sea smelled like watermelon”... It’s wonderful, but I wouldn’t say that.”

Bunin and Nabokov

Bunin's relationship with Vladimir Nabokov is interpreted by researchers in different ways. If literary critic Maxim Shrayer sees in them the “poetics of rivalry,” then philologist Olga Kirillina discovers similarities at the level of the “nervous system and blood circulation.” For a long time, communication between the two writers was by correspondence. 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. In response, Bunin sent the Nabokovs not only a warm, encouraging letter, but also his book “The Gentleman from San Francisco.” A correspondence ensued, which in the spring of 1921 included 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 “Mashenka” was published, which, according to researchers, is Vladimir Vladimirovich’s “most Buninsky” work. On the copy given to Bunin, the author wrote: “Don’t judge me too harshly, I beg you. Yours with all my soul, 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 “The Resentment” (1931) was dedicated to Ivan Alekseevich. Vladimir Vladimirovich reacted very positively to the awarding 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 organized in his honor by the publicist Joseph Hesse, 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 relationship - the previous enthusiastic confessions have disappeared from them, and the intonations have become different. Having released the novel “Invitation to Execution” (1936), he wrote on the volume sent to Bunin: “To dear Ivan Alekseevich Bunin, best greetings from the author.” A complete break did not occur, although mutual irritation grew. Tension was created, among other things, by public attempts by the emigrant community to determine which of the writers belonged to the main place on the literary Olympus. For example, in the second half of the 1930s, Mark Aldanov called on Bunin to admit that 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 Paris restaurant. Its initiator was Ivan Alekseevich. The dinner made a grave impression on Nabokov: “Unfortunately, I can’t stand restaurants, vodka, snacks, music, or intimate conversations. Bunin was puzzled by my indifference to hazel grouse and my refusal to open my soul. By the end of lunch we were already unbearably bored with each other.” Nabokov included the same fragment - with some changes - in the second version of his memoirs - “Memory, Speak.” According to Maxim Shrayer, this meeting demonstrated that the creative dialogues between the writers had ended, and in human terms they had 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 “even the score with Nabokov.” In one of the letters sent shortly before the war to the American Slavist Elizaveta Malozemova, Ivan Alekseevich noted: “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 Bunin’s influence 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 by the hero of the day at this 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 his 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 forgiving than me - but put yourself in my position: how can I say in front of a group of more or less common acquaintances an anniversary, that is, completely golden, word about a person who, in his entire make-up, is alien to me, and about the prose writer whom I am putting on below Turgenev?

Bunin and Kataev

Valentin Kataev, like Nabokov, was considered a writer who most accurately absorbed Bunin's lessons. Seventeen-year-old Kataev, who first heard about Ivan Alekseevich’s poems from the poet Alexander Fedorov, in 1914 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 before him appeared “a forty-year-old gentleman, dry, bilious, dapper,” dressed in trousers sewn by a good tailor and English yellow low shoes. Galina Kuznetsova noted in her diary entries that Bunin also well remembered the moment a young man appeared in his house, who gave him a notebook with poems and directly said: “I’m writing... I’m 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 invited him to find time for an additional conversation. From that moment their communication began, which continued - with interruptions - until 1920. In 1915, Kataev dedicated the poem “And the days flow by in a dull sequence” to Bunin. A year later, the newspaper Southern Thought published his short work, which contained the lines: “ And at home - tea and voluntary captivity. / A sonnet sketched in a notebook the day before, / So, in rough form... Pensive Verlaine, / Singing Blok and lonely Bunin».

When Bunin and Muromtseva, together with other refugees, reached Odessa in 1918, meetings became almost daily: Kataev brought new poems to the writer, and he worked a lot on his manuscripts, made notes, made edits, and gave advice, including on additional reading. “Initiation as a disciple,” according to Valentin Petrovich, occurred only after he heard the first praise from Bunin. Kataev became a member of the Odessa literary circle “Sreda”, 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 from the final edition some very sharp Kataev remarks - the writer did not want to “substitute the ‘literary godson’ who remained in the Soviet Russia." While in France, Muromtseva sorted through the exported archives and, among numerous envelopes, discovered 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 ship "Sparta", could not say goodbye to his student before leaving: in the winter of 1920, he fell ill with typhus and was taken to the hospital, and later - as a former tsarist officer - to prison. They never met again. At the same time, Ivan Alekseevich followed Kataev’s work - according to Muromtseva, having received the book “The Lonely Sail Whitens” (in which the author tried to “cross Pinkerton’s plot with Bunin’s artistry”), the writer read it aloud, with comments: “Well, who else can do that? " In 1958, Kataev and 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: “It seemed somehow incredible to Ivan Alekseevich: the children of Vali 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... “To write well” for Kataev always meant “to write like Bunin.” (Of course, without imitating Bunin, without copying him, without reproducing his style, 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.)

Benedikt Sarnov

Bunin and emigrant writers

Bunin made some 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 proximity sometimes burdened 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 greatly helped their family, whose financial situation was difficult. Kuprin's return to the USSR in 1937 caused a great resonance among the emigrants - opinions about his action were divided. Bunin, unlike some of his colleagues, refused to condemn the “old sick man.” In his memoirs, he talked about Kuprin as an artist who was characterized by “warm kindness towards all living things.”

On Bunin’s recommendation, Boris Zaitsev, a prose writer, in whose Moscow house Ivan Alekseevich once met Muromtseva, also moved to Paris in 1923. 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 notify the public about this, transmitting breaking news under the heading “Bunin crowned” to the newspaper Vozrozhdenie. A serious disagreement 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 accept Soviet citizenship. Together with them, Leonid Zurov, Alexander Bakhrakh, Georgy Adamovich, Vadim Andreev left the union. Zaitsev, as the chairman of this organization, did not approve of Bunin’s action. He tried to communicate with him in writing, but the dialogues led to a final break.

Bunin also took measures to relocate the prose writer Ivan Shmelev. The rapprochement of writers occurred in the post-revolutionary period, when they both collaborated with the Odessa newspaper “Yuzhnoe Slovo”. Leaving Russia, Bunin received a power of attorney from Shmelev to publish his books abroad. In 1923, Shmelev moved to France and lived for several months - 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 Pyotr Struve left the newspaper Vozrozhdenie, Bunin refused to participate in the activities of this publication; Shmelev believed that such an approach would be beneficial to his opponents. In 1946, Ivan Sergeevich reacted extremely negatively to Bunin’s agreement to meet with Soviet Ambassador Alexander Bogomolov. The difference in approaches to some life issues was also reflected in creativity: thus, polemicizing with Bunin’s frankness when describing the sensual experiences of the hero in “Mitya’s Love,” Shmelev in his book “Love History” (1927) demonstrated rejection of “sinful passion.” Shmelev perceived Bunin’s book “Dark Alleys” as pornography.

Bunin did not communicate with the Acmeist poet Georgy Adamovich in the pre-revolutionary period. 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 to know each other, because the founder of the school of Acmeism, Nikolai Gumilyov, did not welcome “possible outside influences.” In France, Adamovich, who was seriously involved in literary criticism, dedicated a number of works to Bunin; he did not always react approvingly to Georgy Viktorovich’s reviews. However, on a number of key issues, especially during the post-war split among the emigrants, 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 her memoirs about Bunin, and defended her from opponents.

Bunin's acquaintance with the poet Vladislav Khodasevich occurred in 1906, but until their move to France, their relationship was superficial. In emigration they became close, Bunin invited Vladislav Felitsianovich to Grasse, and in the second half of the 1920s the writers corresponded. Some cooling occurred after, in a review of Bunin’s collection “Selected Poems,” written in 1929, Khodasevich gave a high assessment of Ivan Alekseevich as a prose writer and a very restrained assessment as a poet. Vladimir Nabokov, in one of his letters to his wife, spoke about a visit to Mur’s Parisian cafe in 1936: “There I briefly saw Khodasevich, who had turned very yellow; Bunin hates him.” Researchers argued that, on the contrary, Ivan Alekseevich helped Vladislav Felitsianovich with money, they met at literary events and exchanged books.

The writer Nina Berberova in her book “My Italics” (1972) recalled Bunin as an extremely ambitious, capricious, capricious person. Their communication began in 1927, when Khodasevich and his wife Berberova arrived at the Belvedere villa in Grasse. Judging by Muromtseva’s diaries, Nina Nikolaevna made a pleasant impression on the owners of the villa: “Simple, sweet, well-mannered.” During the war, 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 Shrayer noted, found themselves “in hostile camps of Russian emigration.” In her memoirs, Berberova wrote: “I try to avoid collapse, and for Bunin it began on that day... when S.K. Makovsky picked him up to take him to the Soviet ambassador Bogomolov to drink Stalin’s health.”

The fate of the archive

Bunin's archive turned out to be fragmented. In May 1918, Ivan Alekseevich, leaving Moscow with Muromtseva, transferred a significant part of his documents (previously stored in the Moscow branch of the Lyon Credit Bank) to his older brother. Bunin took only a few materials with him to Odessa and then to Paris, including letters and youthful diaries. Julius Alekseevich died in 1921. Bunin's pre-revolutionary manuscripts, photographs, drafts, magazine and newspaper publications with critics' reviews, and books with dedicatory inscriptions that remained in his house went to the translator Nikolai Pusheshnikov, whose mother was Ivan Alekseevich's cousin. Pusheshnikov passed away in 1939. From the late 1940s, his family began donating manuscripts and autographs to the Central State Archive of Literature and Art and other state repositories. In addition, some documents from the Pusheshnikovs ended up in private collections.

In France, a new archive of Bunin was formed, left after the writer’s death with his widow. During the early “thaw”, Muromtseva agreed to send her husband’s materials in small batches to the Soviet Union - they went to TsGALI, 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 Militsa Green, a teacher at the University of Edinburgh. In the early 1970s, she took dozens of boxes of scattered materials from Paris to Edinburgh and spent several years inventorying and organizing them; the catalog alone, reproducing the list of documents she received, consisted of 393 pages. Under the editorship of Militsa Green, the three-volume book “The Mouths of the Bunins” was published (Frankfurt am Main, “Posev”, 1977-1982), containing the diary entries of Ivan Alekseevich and Vera Nikolaevna. Militsa Green, who died in 1998, donated Bunin’s archive to the University of Leeds during her lifetime.

Bunin was under the scrutiny of Soviet censorship for decades. Two years after the writer left Russia, the Main Directorate for Literature and Publishing (Glavlit) was established - a body that exercised control over all printed products published in the USSR. The first circular issued by Glavlit prescribed a ban on “the import from abroad... of works that are definitely hostile to Soviet power.” In 1923, the censorship department published a secret bulletin containing a detailed review of books that were written by emigrant writers. Bunin was also mentioned in the document. The Glavlit employee who prepared the certificate noted that the pre-revolutionary works included in his collection “The Scream” (Berlin, Slovo Publishing House, 1921) could not be allowed to be published, because the author of “naturalistic stories” tried to “find a rationale” 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 Gosizdat, who examined the handwritten version of the book, gave instructions to remove from it all the works of emigrant poets. The reworking of “The Village...” did not take place, the publication was never published. Some softening of ideological guidelines occurred during the NEP period, when publishing cooperatives were able to publish several of Bunin’s works, including “The Gentleman from San Francisco” and “Chang’s Dreams.” The censors' orders were not always followed at that time. For example, Glavlit did not recommend “Mitya’s Love” for release because “its author is a White Guard emigrant,” but the story, written in Paris, was published in 1926 by the Leningrad publishing house “Priboy.”

Very harsh measures against emigrant writers were taken in the 1920s by the Glavpolitprosvet, created under the People's Commissariat of Education. This institution periodically audited libraries, ridding them of “counter-revolutionary literature.” Bunin’s name invariably appeared on the lists sent out by Gospolitprosvet and accompanied by the demand to “cleanse the funds.” After 1928, his books were not published in the USSR for almost three decades. The position of the Soviet government in relation to Ivan Alekseevich was expressed by the People's Commissar of Education Anatoly Lunacharsky, who reported in the journal “Bulletin of Foreign Literature” (1928, No. 3) that Bunin is “a landowner... who knows that his class is bulging with life.”

The gradual return of Ivan Alekseevich’s works to the Soviet reader began during the “thaw” years - so, in 1956, a collection of his works was published in five volumes, which included novellas and short stories written both in pre-revolutionary Russia and in France. In 1961, the almanac “Tarussa Pages” was published in Kaluga, containing Paustovsky’s essay “Ivan Bunin”. The publication of the collection resulted in the dismissal of the editor-in-chief of the Kaluga Book Publishing House; the director of the enterprise was reprimanded “for loss of vigilance.” Nevertheless, in subsequent decades, a significant part of the writer’s creative heritage (including the novel “The Life of Arsenyev” and the book “Dark Alleys”) became available to the Soviet reader. The exception was the diary “Cursed Days,” which was published only in the late 1980s in several magazines at once.

Bunin and cinema

Researchers have drawn attention to the fact that Bunin's prose is cinematic - it is no coincidence that the concepts of “close-up” and “wide plan” were used in relation to his stories. The possibility of adapting Bunin's work for the first time 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, who gave recommendations on drawing up a power of attorney and disposing of copyrights. 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 also remained unfulfilled.

Soviet and Russian filmmakers began turning to Bunin's work in the 1960s, but there were few successful film adaptations, according to journalist V. Nuriev (Nezavisimaya Gazeta). Vasily Pichul, while a student at VGIK, shot an educational short film “Mitya’s Love” in 1981. In 1989, the film “Unurgent Spring” was released, based on the story of the same name, as well as the works “Rus”, “Prince among Princes”, “Flies”, “Cranes”, “Caucasus”, the story “Sukhodol” and diary entries Bunin (director Vladimir Tolkachikov). In 1994, the melodrama “Dedication to Love” was filmed (directed by Lev Tsutsulkovsky); The film is based on the stories “Easy Breathing”, “Cold Autumn” and “Russia”. A year later, director Boris Yashin presented the film “Meshcherskys”, based on Bunin’s stories “Natalie”, “Tanya”, “In Paris”.

A very notable event was the release in 2011 of the film “Sukhodol” (directed by Alexandra Strelyanaya), based on Bunin’s story of the same name. The film received a number of awards at film festivals and also received critical attention. Their opinions about the work of Alexandra Strelyana were divided: some called the film “an ethnographic study, as if specially created to obtain great aesthetic pleasure”; others regarded it as “cumbersome pastiche.” Nikita Mikhalkov’s film “Sunstroke,” filmed in 2014 based on the story and book “Cursed Days” of the same name, generated a lot of feedback. According to publicist Leonid Radzikhovsky, Mikhalkov was not mistaken when he decided to combine a work about love with diary entries: “Bunin’s stories about love (especially “Dark Alleys,” but also “Sunstroke,” written in 1925) are illuminated by this very Sun, this sunset fire , which destroyed both the heroes and the “country that does not exist” and where they lived and “breathed easily.”

Bunin Ivan Alekseevich (1870-1953) - Russian writer, poet. The first Russian writer to win the Nobel Prize (1933). He spent part of his life in exile.

Life and art

Ivan Bunin was born on October 22, 1870 into an impoverished family of a noble family in Voronezh, from where the family soon moved to the Oryol province. Bunin's education at the local Yeletsk gymnasium lasted only 4 years and was terminated due to the family's inability to pay for his studies. Ivan's education was taken over by his older brother Yuli Bunin, who received a university education.

The regular appearance of poems and prose by young Ivan Bunin in periodicals began at the age of 16. Under the wing of his older brother, he worked in Kharkov and Orel as a proofreader, editor, and journalist in local publishing houses. After an unsuccessful civil marriage with Varvara Pashchenko, Bunin leaves for St. Petersburg and then to Moscow.

Confession

In Moscow, Bunin is among the famous writers of his time: L. Tolstoy, A. Chekhov, V. Bryusov, M. Gorky. The first recognition came to the novice author after the publication of the story “Antonov Apples” (1900).

In 1901, for the published collection of poems “Falling Leaves” and the translation of the poem “The Song of Hiawatha” by G. Longfellow, Ivan Bunin was awarded the Pushkin Prize from the Russian Academy of Sciences. The Pushkin Prize was awarded to Bunin for the second time in 1909, along with the title of honorary academician of fine literature. Bunin's poems, which were in line with the classical Russian poetry of Pushkin, Tyutchev, Fet, are characterized by a special sensuality and the role of epithets.

As a translator, Bunin turned to the works of Shakespeare, Byron, Petrarch, and Heine. The writer spoke excellent English and studied Polish on his own.

Together with his third wife Vera Muromtseva, whose official marriage was concluded only in 1922 after a divorce from his second wife Anna Tsakni, Bunin travels a lot. From 1907 to 1914, the couple visited the countries of the East, Egypt, the island of Ceylon, Turkey, Romania, and Italy.

Since 1905, after the suppression of the first Russian revolution, the theme of the historical fate of Russia appears in Bunin’s prose, which is reflected in the story “The Village”. The story of the unpleasant life of the Russian village was a bold and innovative step in Russian literature. At the same time, in Bunin’s stories (“Easy Breathing,” “Klasha”), female images with hidden passions are formed.

In 1915-1916, Bunin’s stories were published, including “The Gentleman from San Francisco,” in which he discussed the doomed fate of modern civilization.

Emigration

The revolutionary events of 1917 found the Bunins in Moscow. Ivan Bunin treated the revolution as the collapse of the country. This view, revealed in his diary entries of the 1918-1920s. formed the basis of the book “Cursed Days”.

In 1918, the Bunins left for Odessa, and from there to the Balkans and Paris. Bunin spent the second half of his life in exile, dreaming of returning to his homeland, but not realizing his desire. In 1946, upon the release of a decree on granting Soviet citizenship to subjects of the Russian Empire, Bunin became eager to return to Russia, but criticism of the Soviet government of the same year against Akhmatova and Zoshchenko forced him to abandon this idea.

One of the first significant works completed abroad was the autobiographical novel “The Life of Arsenyev” (1930), dedicated to the world of the Russian nobility. For him, in 1933, Ivan Bunin was awarded the Nobel Prize, becoming the first Russian writer to receive such an honor. The significant sum of money Bunin received as a bonus was mostly distributed to those in need.

During the years of emigration, the central theme in Bunin’s work became the theme of love and passion. She found expression in the works “Mitya’s Love” (1925), “Sunstroke” (1927), and in the famous cycle “Dark Alleys,” which was published in 1943 in New York.

At the end of the 1920s, Bunin wrote a number of short stories - “Elephant”, “Roosters”, etc., in which he honed his literary language, trying to most succinctly express the main idea of ​​​​the work.

During the period 1927-42. Galina Kuznetsova, a young girl whom Bunin introduced as his student and adopted daughter, lived with the Bunins. She had a love relationship with the writer, which the writer himself and his wife Vera experienced quite painfully. Subsequently, both women left their memories of Bunin.

Bunin lived through the years of World War II on the outskirts of Paris and closely followed events on the Russian front. He invariably rejected numerous offers from the Nazis that came to him as a famous writer.

At the end of his life, Bunin published practically nothing due to a long and serious illness. His last works were “Memoirs” (1950) and the book “About Chekhov,” which was not completed and was published after the author’s death in 1955.

Ivan Bunin died on November 8, 1953. All European and Soviet newspapers published extensive obituaries in memory of the Russian writer. He was buried in a Russian cemetery near Paris.

Name: Ivan Bunin

Age: 83 years old

Place of Birth: Voronezh, Russia

A place of death: Paris, France

Activity: Russian writer and poet

Family status: was married to Vera Nikolaevna Muromtseva

Ivan Bunin - biography

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, Alexey Nikolaevich, fought in the Crimea in his youth, then lived on his estate the usual, repeatedly described landowner life - hunting, warmly welcoming guests, drinking and cards. His carelessness ultimately brought his family to the brink of ruin.

All household concerns lay on the shoulders of the mother, Lyudmila Aleksandrovna Chubarova, a quiet, pious woman, five of whose nine children died in infancy. The death of his beloved sister Sasha seemed like a terrible injustice to little Vanya, and he forever stopped believing in the good God that both his mother and the church talked about.

Three years after Vanya’s birth, the family moved to his grandfather’s estate Butyrki in the Oryol province. “Here, in the deepest silence of the field,” 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 Arsenyev,” which Bunin himself considered his main book.

He noted that early on he acquired amazing sensitivity: “My vision was such that I saw all seven stars in the Pleiades, I could hear the whistle of a marmot in an evening field a mile away, I got drunk smelling the smell of lily of the valley or an old book.” The parents paid little attention to their son, and his teacher became his brother Yuli, who graduated from the university, managed to participate in the revolutionary circles of the Black Peredelites, for which he served a year in prison and was expelled from Moscow for three years.

In 1881, Bunin entered the Yeletsk gymnasium. He was an average student, and was expelled from the sixth grade for non-payment - family affairs became very bad. The estate in Butyrki was sold, and the family moved to neighboring Ozerki, where Ivan had to finish his high school course as an external student, under the guidance of his older brother. “Less than a year had passed,” said Julius, “he had grown so mentally that I could already have conversations with him almost as an equal on many topics.” In addition to studying languages, philosophy, psychology, social and natural sciences, thanks to his brother, a writer and journalist, Ivan became especially interested in literature.

At the age of 16, Ivan Bunin began “to write poetry especially zealously” and “wrote an unusual amount of paperwork” before he decided to send a poem to the capital’s magazine “Rodina.” To his surprise, it was printed. He forever remembered the delight with which he came from the post office with the latest issue of the magazine, re-reading his poems every minute. They were dedicated to the memory of the fashionable poet Nadson, who died of consumption.

Weak, openly imitative verses did not stand out among hundreds of their kind. Many years passed before Bunin's true talent was revealed in poetry. Until the end of his life, he considered himself primarily a poet and was very angry when his friends said that his works were exquisite, but old-fashioned - “nobody writes like that now.” He really avoided any newfangled trends, remaining faithful to the traditions of the 19th century

An early, barely visible dawn, the heart of sixteen years.
The drowsy haze of the garden with the linden light of warmth.
Quiet and mysterious is the house with the last cherished window.
There is a curtain in the window, and behind it is the Sun of my universe.

This is a memory of the very first youthful love for Emilia Fechner (the prototype of Ankhen in “The Life of Arsenyev”), the young governess of the daughters of O.K. who lived next door. Tubbe, distiller of the landowner Bakhtiyarov. The writer’s brother Evgeniy married Tubba’s stepdaughter, Nastya, in 1885. Young Bunin was so carried away by Emilia that Tubbe considered it best to send her back home.

Soon, having received the consent of his parents, the young poet set off from Ozerki to adulthood. At parting, the mother blessed her son, whom she considered “special from all her children,” with a family icon depicting the meal of the Three Pilgrims with Abraham. It was, as Bunin wrote in one of his diaries, “a shrine that connects me with a tender and reverent connection with my family, with the world where my cradle, my childhood is.” The 18-year-old young man left his home as an almost fully formed person, “with a certain amount of life baggage - knowledge of the real people, not fictitious, with knowledge of small-scale life, the village intelligentsia, with a very subtle sense of nature, almost an expert in the Russian language, literature, with a heart open to love."

He met love in Orel. 19-year-old Bunin settled there after long wanderings around Crimea and southern Russia. Having got a job at the Orlovsky Vestnik newspaper, he became friends with the young daughter of a doctor, Varya Pashchenko - she worked as a proofreader for the same newspaper. With the money of their brother Yuli, they rented an apartment in Poltava, where they lived in a civil marriage - Varya’s father was against the wedding. Three years later, Doctor Pashchenko, seeing Bunin’s immense passion, still gave his permission for the marriage, but Varya hid her father’s letter. She preferred his wealthy friend Arseny Bibikov to the poor writer. “Oh, to hell with them,” Bunin wrote to his brother, “here, obviously, 200 acres of land played a role.”

Since 1895, Bunin left the service and, having moved to Moscow, devoted himself entirely to literature, earning money through 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 accepted into the editorial offices of literary magazines, met famous writers, even became friends with Chekhov and learned a lot from him. Both the populist realists and the symbolist innovators appreciated him, but neither one nor the other considered him “theirs.”

He himself was more inclined towards the realists and constantly attended the “Wednesdays” of the writer Teleshov, where Gorky, the Wanderer, and Leonid Andreev attended. In the 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 deadest time of my entire youth, although outwardly I lived then in a very varied, sociable way, in public, so as not to be left 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, owner of the newspaper Southern Review, with which Bunin collaborated. They got married after a few days of dating. “At the end of June I went to Lustdorf to visit Fedorov. Kuprin, the Kartashevs, then the Tsaknis, who lived in a dacha at the 7th station. “I suddenly proposed in the evening,” Bunin wrote in his diary in 1898.

He was fascinated by her large black eyes and mysterious silence. After the wedding, it turned out that Anya is very talkative. Together with her mother, she mercilessly scolded her husband for lack of money and frequent absences. Less than a year later, he and Anna broke up, and two years later this “vaudeville” marriage broke up. Their son Nikolai died of scarlet fever at the age of five. Unlike Varvara Pashchenko, Anna Tsakni did not leave any traces in Bunin’s work. Varvara can be recognized in Lika from “The Life of Arsenyev” and in many of the heroines of “Dark Alleys”.

The first success in creative biography came to Bunin in 1903. For his collection of poems “Falling Leaves,” he received the Pushkin Prize, the highest award of the Academy of Sciences.

Critics also recognized his prose. The story “Antonov Apples” secured for the writer the title of “singer of noble nests,” although he portrayed the life of the Russian village in no way blissfully 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. “The quiet young lady with Leonard’s eyes” immediately attracted Bunin. This is how Vera Nikolaevna talked about their meeting:

“I stopped thinking: should I go home? Bunin appeared at the door. “How did you get here?” - he asked. I was angry, but calmly replied: “The same as you.” - “But who are you?” -"Human". - "What do you do?" - “Chemistry. I study at the natural sciences department of the Higher Women’s Courses.” - “But where else can I see you?” - “Only at our house. We accept on Saturdays. On other days I am very busy." Having listened to enough talk about the dissolute life of artistic people,

Vera Nikolaevna was openly afraid of the writer. Nevertheless, she could not resist his persistent advances and in the same 1906 she became “Mrs. Bunina,” although they were able to officially register their marriage only in July 1922 in France.

They went on their honeymoon to the East for a long time - to Egypt, Palestine, Syria. In our wanderings we reached 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 lost - I probably won’t write anymore... A poet shouldn’t be happy, he should live alone, and the better for him, the worse for him.” scriptures. The better you are, the worse...” he told his wife. “In this case, I’ll try to be as bad as possible,” she joked.

Nevertheless, the next decade became the most fruitful in the writer’s work. He was awarded another prize from the Academy of Sciences and was elected its honorary academician. “Just at the hour when the telegram arrived with congratulations to Ivan Alekseevich on his election to academician in the category of fine literature,” said Vera Bunina, “the Bibikovs were having dinner with us. Bunin had no bad feeling towards Arseny, they even, one might say, were friends. Bibikova stood up from the table, was pale, but calm. A minute later, separately and dryly, she said: “Congratulations.”

After the “sharp slap in the face abroad,” as he called his travels, Bunin ceased to be afraid of “exaggerating his colors.” The First World War did not arouse patriotic enthusiasm in him. He saw the country's weakness and was afraid of its destruction. In 1916 he wrote many poems, including these:

The rye is burning, the grain is flowing.
But who will reap and knit?
The smoke is burning, the alarm is ringing.
But who will decide to fill it?
Now the demon-possessed army will arise, and like Mamai, it will go through all of Rus'...
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 to be the “possessed” Bolsheviks, but also to 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 hungry took place in our country in a literary way, only out of a desire to kick the government once again, to create an extra tunnel under it. It’s scary to say, but it’s true: if it weren’t for the people’s disasters, thousands of intellectuals would be downright miserable people: how then can they sit down, protest, what can they shout and write about?”

In May 1918, Bunin and his wife barely escaped from hungry Moscow to Odessa, where they experienced a change in many authorities. In January 1920 they fled to Constantinople. In Russia, nothing held Bunin anymore - his parents died, his brother Yuli 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 fall of 1920, Bunin arrived in Paris and immediately got to work. Ahead were 33 years of emigration, during which he created ten books of prose. Bunin’s old friend Zaitsev wrote: “Exile even did him good. It sharpened the sense of Russia, of irrevocability, and thickened the previously strong juice of his poetry.”

Europeans also learned about the emergence of a new talent.

In 1921, a collection of Bunin’s stories, “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. And how could one not burst into a nostalgic tear from these lines: “And a minute later, glasses and wine glasses, bottles with multi-colored vodkas, pink salmon, a dark-skinned balyk, a bleu with shells open on ice shards, an orange square Chester, a black shiny a lump of pressed caviar, a tub of champagne, white and sweaty from the cold... We started with pepper... "

The old feasts seemed even more abundant in comparison with the emigrants' scarcity. Bunin published a lot, but his existence was far from idyllic. Age was showing itself, the Parisian winter dampness caused attacks 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 pompous name “Belvedere”. There their guests were 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 his fellow countrymen in need from his limited means. In 1926, the young writer Galina Kuznetsova came to visit him from Paris. Soon a romance began between them. Subtle, 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 court Vera Nikolaevna. The complex vicissitudes of their relationship became the topic of emigrant gossip and ended up on the pages of memoirs. Endless quarrels and reconciliations spoiled a lot of blood for all four, and even drove Zurov to madness. However, this “autumn romance,” which lasted for 15 years, inspired all of Bunin’s later work, including the novel “The Life of Arsenyev” and the collection of love stories “Dark Alleys.”

This would not have happened if Galina Kuznetsova had turned out to be an empty-headed beauty - she became a real assistant for the writer. In her “Grasse Diary” you 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 romance ended unexpectedly - in 1942, Galina became interested in opera singer Marga Stepun. Bunin could not find a place for himself, exclaiming: “How she poisoned my life - she is still poisoning me!”

At the height of the novel, news came that Bunin had been awarded the Nobel Prize. The entire Russian emigration perceived it as their triumph. In Stockholm, Bunin was greeted by the king and queen, the descendants of Alfred Nobel, and dressed up society ladies. And he only looked at the deep white snow, which he had not seen since leaving 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 have his country behind him. The country, through the mouth of its diplomats, persistently protested against awarding the prize to the “White Guard”.

The prize that year was 150 thousand francs, but Bunin very quickly distributed it to the petitioners. During the war, he hid in Grasse, where the Germans did not reach, several Jewish writers who were in danger of death. About that time he wrote: “We live badly, very badly. Well, we eat frozen potatoes. Or some water with something nasty floating in it, some kind of carrot. This is called soup... We live in a commune. Six persons. And no one has a penny to their name.” Despite the hardships, Bunin rejected all offers from the Germans to join them in their service. Hatred of Soviet power was temporarily forgotten - like other emigrants, he closely followed events at the front, moving flags on the map of Europe that hung in his office.

In the fall of 1944, France was liberated, and Bunin and his wife returned to Paris. In 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 Soviet writers began visiting him, through whom proposals to return to the USSR were conveyed. They promised to provide him with 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 flirting of the Soviet government with the writer ended after the publication of his book “Dark Alleys” in New York. They were seen as almost pornography. He complained to Irina Odoevtseva: “I consider “Dark Alleys” the best thing I wrote, and they, idiots, think that I disgraced my gray hairs with them... The Pharisees do not understand that this is a new word, a new approach to life.” Life has set the record straight - the 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 his last poem, and in May of the following year he made his last entry in his diary: “This is still amazing to the point of tetanus! In some, very short time, I will be gone - and the affairs 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 major newspapers published obituaries, and even the Soviet Pravda published a short message: “The emigre 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 final refuge next to him. By that time, Bunin’s works, after 40 years of oblivion, began to be published again in his homeland. His dream came true - his compatriots were able to see and recognize the Russia he saved, which had long since sunk into history.