The Achievement of Ivan Bunin F. D. Reeve (bio) Ivan Bunin, Collected Stories of Ivan Bunin, translated by Graham Hettlinger. Ivan R. Dee, 2007. 384 pages. $19.95 pb. This remarkable translation of thirty-five stories by the writer who, Vladislav Khodasevich said, "crowned the Russian classical tradition . . . remaining faithful to his anti-Symbolist position and rejecting the whole Silver Age," brings to life in English one of the finest writers of his time. Bunin was born [End Page 654] in Voronezh in October 1870 and died in Paris in November 1953. First respected for his poetry, then rewarded for his prose, he never treated the two forms of expression as entirely separate. By the age of thirty he was considered a leading contemporary Russian poet, for he had already earned the Pushkin Prize and would soon become a member of the Russian Academy. Although he made good friends throughout the literary worlds of Petersburg and Moscow, he never wrote in the dominant mode of the day: he was always either behind or ahead of his time. Perhaps that had to do with his being one of four children raised in an impoverished family in the rural gentry. He belonged to a class without being able to live like other members of that class. The more likely answer is that his singularity followed from his native talent, from what his mother said made him "special"—"Nobody has such an inner spirit as he." Bunin had a keen eye for details and was an adept mimic of other children and grownups. For a while as a boy he ate black bread and fuzzy pickles like the peasants because he wanted to be wholly aware of what came from the earth, and he was particularly responsive to "the divine grandeur of the world." His celebrated poetry, written mostly before the First World War, would appeal to few readers today. Because its details are clear and bright, it vividly evokes nature but is often overlaid by a sentimental theme or attitude. We might now think of his poems as snapshots in a slideshow, and himself, distanced from their events but taking them into his consciousness, having the finger on the button. It's nature poetry, of which there was a florid lot before modernism, poetry filled with colors and sounds and scents and monotonous paired rhymes, like Bunin's "Leaf-fall," a poem of some 175 lines that Alexander Blok praised. Here's a stanza: Last happy moments of being together!Fall already knows what thisProfound and speechless quiet is—The harbinger of much foul weather. Nature's femininity extends back to Eve. In Russia, when Bunin was entering the literary swing, the symbolist cult of the Eternal Feminine was at its peak. Bunin rejected it, but it's not hard to read his paeans to nature as declarations of love to a woman and from that it's easy to skip over to the predominant theme of his fiction: how the combination of love and passion in a man's affair with a beautiful, tantalizingly ideal, exquisitely sensual, intelligent, self-sufficient young woman inevitably leads to death—or at least to loss. Of course there are other themes and other stories, but the prevailing attitude is nostalgic, which characterizes the early work in a gentle, often touching way. But after the Russian Revolution, the defeat of the Whites, and his self-imposed exile to France, nostalgia becomes determinant. Many of his plots and much of his overall attitude seem to derive from Turgenev but with the [End Page 655] crucial difference that Bunin wrote about love as Turgenev didn't dare. No wonder that Lermontov's work was called the dawn light of Russian classical literature and that Bunin's was deemed the evening glow. The innovative poet and editor Alexander Tvardovsky said pointedly in 1965, soon after Khrushchev's fall, "From the viewpoint of time, Bunin was the last of the Russian literary classics whose experience we haven't the right to forget. Bunin's work is our closest example of an artist's devotion to precision, to a noble conciseness in Russian literary style, to a clarity and sublime...
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Jan 1, 2014
M.A Osman + 5
Open Access