Ivan Bunin’s Capri Island

Abstract

The article (written in the genre of “intellectual area studies”) discusses the circumstances of the stay of the Nobel laureate in literature Ivan Alekseevich Bunin (1870-1953) on the island of Capri, near Naples. It is noted that I.A. Bunin is one of the main “travelers” in Russian literature: in addition to Europe, he traveled to North Africa, Asia Minor and the Middle East, even reaching Ceylon. During these frequent months-long “voyages,” Bunin during his lifetime repeatedly received reproaches from his contemporaries for “being alienated from Russia.” The author of the article, on the contrary, believes that for Bunin (who considered himself the literary successor of N.V. Gogol) there were the concepts of the road and journey that were the most natural and organic context for thinking about Russia and the peculiarities of its historical fate. The article shows that the island of Capri has become a special place in the intellectual biography of Bunin: there he and his wife V.N. Muromtsev-Bunin spent three creatively fruitful winters of 1911/1912, 1912/1913 and 1913/1914. The center of Bunin’s Capri is the Grand Hotel Quisisana (which still exists today), which became the scene of one of Bunin’s most famous stories “The Gentleman from San Francisco.” The author of the article shows that it was on the island of Capri that I.A. Bunin not only wrote dozens of his best works about Russian life, but also developed the principles of his own “philosophy of creativity.” The article analyzes the evolution of relations between I.A. Bunin with the Russian “residents” of Capri: the “proletarian writer” M. Gorky (A.M. Pesh-kov), the writer L.N. Andreev and the outstanding Russian opera singer F.I. Chaliapin.