Ivan Bunin

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Ivan Bunin : biography

22 October 1870 – 8 November 1953

In his view on Russia and its history Bunin for a while had much in common with A.K.Tolstoy (of whom he spoke with great respect); both tended to idealize the pre-Tatar Rus. Years later he greatly modified his stance on Russian history, forming a more negative outlook. "There are two streaks in our people: one dominated by Rus, another by Chudh and Merya. Both have in them a frightening instability, sway… As Russian people say of themselves: we are like wood – both club and icon may come of it, depending on who is working on this wood", Bunin wrote years later.

In emigration Bunin continued his experiments with extremely concise, ultra-ionized prose, taking Chekhov and Tolstoy’s ideas on expressive economy to the last extreme. The result of this was God’s Tree, a collection of stories so short, some of them were half a page long. Professor Pyotr Bitsilly thought God’s Tree to be "the most perfect of Bunin’s works and the most exemplary. Nowhere else can such eloquent laconism can be found, such definitive and exquisite writing, such freedom of expression and really magnificent demonstration of over matter. No other book of his has in it such a wealth of material for understanding of Bunin’s basic method – a method in which, in fact, there was nothing but basics. This simple but precious quality – honesty bordering on hatred of any pretense – is what makes Bunin so closely related to… Pushkin, Tolstoy and Chekhov", Bitsilli wrote.

Highly influential, even if controversial, was his Cursed Days 1918–1920 diary, of which scholar Thomas Gaiton Marullo wrote:

Despite being virtually banned in the USSR up until the mid-1950s, Bunin exerted a strong influence over several generations of Soviet writers. Among those who owed a lot to Bunin, critics mentioned Mikhail Sholokhov, Konstantin Fedin, Konstantin Paustovsky, Sokolov-Mikitov, and later Yuri Kazakov, Vasily Belov and Viktor Likhonosov.

Ivan Bunin’s books have been translated into many languages, and the world’s leading writers praised his gift. Romain Rolland called Bunin a "artistic genius"; he was spoken and written of in much the same vein by writers like Henri de Régnier, Thomas Mann, Rainer Maria Rilke, Jerome K. Jerome, and Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz. In 1950, on the eve of his 80th birthday, François Mauriac expressed in a letter his delight and admiration, but also his deep sympathy to Bunin’s personal qualities and the dignified way he’d got through all the tremendous difficulties life had thrown at him. In a letter published by Figaro André Gide greeted Bunin "on behalf of all France", calling him "the great artist" and adding: "I don’t know of any other writer… who’s so to the point in expressing human feelings, simple and yet always so fresh and new". European critics often compared Bunin to both Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, crediting him with having renovated the Russian realist tradition both in essence and in form.