Book description
A much neglected literary figure, Ivan Bunin is one of Russia's major
writers and ranks with Tolstoy and Chekhov at the forefront of the
Russian Realists. Drawing artistic inspiration from his personal
experience, these powerful, evocative stories are set in the late
nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Russia of his youth, in the
countries that he visited and in France, where he spent the last thirty
years of his life. In the title story, for example, a family's tour of
fashionable European resorts comes to an unexpected end;
'Late Hour'
describes an old man's return to the little Russian town in the steppes
that he has not seen since his early youth; while 'Mitya's Love'
explores the darker emotional reverberations of sexual experience.
Throughout his stories there is a sense of the precariousness of
existence, an omnipresent awareness of the impermanence of human
aspirations and achievements. Ivan Alekseyevich Bunin (1870 1953)
was the first Russian writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. The
texture of his poems and stories, sometimes referred to as "Bunin
brocade", is one of the richest in the language. His last book of
fiction, The Dark Avenues (1943), is arguably the most widely read
20th-century collection of short stories in Russia.
