Ivan Alexander Bunin autobiography. AND

In 1887, Ivan Bunin's first poem ("Over Nadson's Grave") appeared in print.

Since 1889, his independent life began; he worked as a proofreader, statistician, librarian, newspaper reporter. Since the autumn of 1889, Bunin worked as an editor in the Orlovsky Vestnik newspaper, published his stories, poems, literary criticism and notes in the permanent section of the newspaper Literature and Printing.

In the editorial office, Bunin met Varvara Pashchenko, who worked as a proofreader, whom he married in 1891, but their marriage was not legalized (the bride's parents did not want to marry their daughter to a poor poet).

In the same year, Bunin's collection "Poems 1887-1891" was published in Orel.

At the end of August 1892, Bunin and Pashchenko moved to Poltava, where he began to serve as a statistician in the provincial zemstvo council, while simultaneously collaborating with the Poltavskiye Provincial Vedomosti newspaper, in which he published his articles, essays, and stories.

In 1892-1894, Bunin's poems and stories began to be published in the capital's publications: the newspaper "Kievlyanin", in "thick" magazines - "Bulletin of Europe", "World of God", "Russian wealth", etc.

In 1893 1894, Bunin visited the Tolstoyan colonies near Poltava, and in January 1894 he met Leo Tolstoy, a meeting with whom Bunin, as he wrote, "amazingly impressed."

In 1895, after Varvara Pashchenko left Bunin and married another, he left Poltava for St. Petersburg, and then to Moscow, where he met writers and poets Dmitry Grigorovich, Alexei Zhemchuzhnikov, Nikolai Mikhailovsky, Nikolai Zlatovratsky, symbolists Konstantin Balmont, Fyodor Sologub, Valery Bryusov, with Anton Chekhov, Vladimir Korolenko and others.

In 1897, Bunin's book "To the End of the World" and other stories was published, and a year later - a collection of poems "Under the open sky".

In June 1898, Bunin left for Odessa, where in September of the same year he married Anna Tsakni.

Bunin's family life again developed unsuccessfully, in early March 1900 the couple divorced, and in 1905 their son Kolya died.

In 1899, Ivan Bunin met the writer Maxim Gorky, who attracted him to cooperate with the Znanie publishing house.

In 1900, Bunin's story "Antonov apples" appeared in print, later included in all the readers of Russian prose, and in the same year the writer took a trip to Germany, France, and Switzerland.

At the beginning of 1901, a collection of poems "Leaf Fall" was published, which caused numerous reviews from critics.

Since 1902, Gorky's publishing house "Knowledge" began to publish Bunin's collected works in separate numbered volumes.

On October 19, 1903, Bunin was awarded the Pushkin Prize by the Russian Academy of Sciences for the poetry collection Falling Leaves (1901), as well as for the translation of the poem by the American romantic poet Longfellow The Song of Hiawatha (1896).

In addition to his own literary work, Bunin did a lot of translation. Among his poetic translations are four fragments from Longfellow's Golden Legend, Byron's philosophical dramas Cain (1905), Manfred (1904), Heaven and Earth (1909), Tennyson's Godiva, and others.

In 1904 Ivan Bunin traveled to France and Italy.

In 1906, Bunin met Vera Muromtseva in Moscow, with whom in April 1907 he went on a trip to Egypt, Syria, and Palestine. From this journey began their life together. The result of trips to the East was the cycle of essays "The Temple of the Sun" (1907-1911) and the cycle of stories "Shadow of the Bird" (1907-1911).

In 1909, the Academy of Sciences awarded Bunin the second Pushkin Prize for poetry and translations of Byron. In the same year, Bunin was elected an honorary academician.

The beginning of Bunin's enormous popularity was the story "The Village" published in 1910, which became an event in literary and social life.

In mid-December 1910, Bunin and his wife went to Egypt and further to the tropics - to Ceylon. The writer described this journey in the diary "Many Waters", the stories "Brothers", "The City of the King of Kings".

In 1911, Ivan Bunin was awarded the Golden Pushkin Medal.

In 1912, the collection "Dry Valley. Tales and Stories" was published, and later the collections "John Rydalets. Stories and Poems of 1912-1913" were published. (1913); "The Cup of Life. Stories 1913-1914." (1915); "The gentleman from San Francisco. Works 1915-1916." (1916).

From October 1917 to May 1918, the Bunins lived in Moscow. They left Moscow on May 21, 1918. From Moscow they went to Odessa, and then abroad, to France.

In his autobiography, Ivan Bunin writes: "... he lived in the south of Russia, passing from hand to hand" white "and" red ", and on January 26, 1920, having drunk the cup of inexpressible mental suffering, he emigrated first to the Balkans, then to France. In France, I lived for the first time in Paris, from the summer of 1923 I moved to the Alpes-Maritimes, returning to Paris only for some winter months.

Bunin met the October Revolution with hostility, the book of journalism "Cursed Days" (1918) became a diary of the events of the country's life and the writer's thoughts at that time.

The break with the Motherland, as it turned out later, forever, was painful for the writer. In exile, relations with prominent Russian emigrants were difficult for the Bunins.

The works of this period are permeated with the thought of Russia, the tragedy of Russian history in the twentieth century. In emigration, Bunin wrote ten new books, including collections of short stories "Mitina's Love" (1925), "The Case of Cornet Elagin" (1925), "Sunstroke" (1927), the autobiographical novel "Arsenyev's Life" (1927 1929, 1933 ), a collection of short stories "Dark Alleys" (1943).

In exile, the publishing house "Petropolis" published the book "Memoirs", the book "Selected Poems" and the book "Liberation of Tolstoy" (about his life and teachings). Short stories written in 1927-1930 - "Elephant", "Sky over the Wall" and many others - in a page, half a page, and sometimes in several lines, were included in the book "God's Tree".

In 1933, Ivan Bunin was awarded the Nobel Prize "for the truthful artistic talent with which he recreated the typical Russian character in fiction." He became the first Russian writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize. The Soviet official press, commenting on this event, explained the decision of the Nobel Committee by the intrigues of imperialism.

By the end of the 1930s, Bunin increasingly felt the dramatic nature of the break with the Motherland, avoiding direct political statements about the USSR. Fascism in Germany and Italy is sharply condemned by him. He encountered the Nazis in 1936 while traveling to Germany, when he was arrested in the city of Lindau and subjected to an unceremonious and humiliating search.

In 1939, with 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, for some time under German occupation. The writer closely followed the events in Russia, refusing any form of cooperation with the Nazi occupation authorities. He experienced the defeat of the Red Army on the eastern front very painfully, and then sincerely rejoiced at its victories. I met the victory with great joy.

In May 1945, the Bunins returned to Paris. In recent years, the writer lived in great lack of money, starving. Living in poverty, being very ill, he nevertheless wrote in recent years the book "Memoirs" (Paris, 1950), worked on the book "About Chekhov", published posthumously in 1955 in New York.

The writer's works have been translated into all European languages ​​and some Eastern ones.

Bunin repeatedly expressed a desire to return to his homeland, calling the decree of the Soviet government of 1946 "On the restoration of citizenship of the USSR subjects of the former Russian Empire ..." called "a generous measure." However, the decree on the magazines "Zvezda" and "Leningrad" (1946), which trampled on Anna Akhmatova and Mikhail Zoshchenko, forever turned the writer away from his intention to return to his homeland.

Ivan Bunin died on the night of November 8, 1953 in the arms of his wife. He is buried in the Sainte-Genevieve-des-Bois cemetery near Paris.

Bunin's wife, who possessed outstanding literary abilities, left literary memoirs about her husband - Bunin's Life and Conversations with Memory.

The work of a memoir "Grasse Diary" and the article "In Memory of Bunin" were written by Galina Kuznetsova, who lived next door to the Bunins in 1927-1942 and became a deep late affection of the writer.

The material was prepared on the basis of information from open sources

Ivan Alekseevich Bunin was born on October 22, 1870 in Voronezh into a noble family. His childhood and youth were spent in the impoverished estate of the Oryol province.

He spent his early childhood in a small family estate (the Butyrki farm in the Yelets district of the Oryol province). Ten years old he was sent to the Yelets gymnasium, where he studied for four and a half years, was expelled (for non-payment of tuition fees) and returned to the village. The future writer did not receive a systematic education, which he regretted all his life. True, the older brother Julius, who graduated with flying colors from the university, went through the entire gymnasium course with Vanya. They were engaged in languages, psychology, philosophy, social and natural sciences. It was Julius who had a great influence on the formation of Bunin's tastes and views.

An aristocrat in spirit, Bunin did not share his brother's passion for political radicalism. Julius, feeling the literary abilities of his younger brother, introduced him to Russian classical literature, advised him to write himself. Bunin enthusiastically read Pushkin, Gogol, Lermontov, and at the age of 16 he began to write poetry himself. In May 1887, Rodina magazine published the poem "The Beggar" by sixteen-year-old Vanya Bunin. Since that time, his more or less constant literary activity began, in which there was a place for both poetry and prose.

Since 1889, an independent life began - with a change of professions, with work both in provincial and metropolitan periodicals. Collaborating with the editorial office of the Orlovsky Vestnik newspaper, the young writer met the newspaper's proofreader Varvara Vladimirovna Pashchenko, who married him in 1891. The young spouses, who lived unmarried (Pashchenko's parents were against marriage), subsequently moved to Poltava (1892) and began to serve as statisticians in the provincial government. In 1891, Bunin's first collection of poems, still very imitative, was published.

1895 was a turning point in the life of the writer. After Pashchenko agreed with Bunin's friend A.I. Bibikov, the writer left the service and moved to Moscow, where he made literary acquaintances with L.N. Tolstoy, whose personality and philosophy had a strong influence on Bunin, with A.P. Chekhov, M. Gorky, N.D. Teleshov.

Since 1895 Bunin has been living in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Literary recognition came to the writer after the publication of such stories as “On the Farm”, “News from the Motherland” and “At the End of the World”, dedicated to the famine of 1891, the cholera epidemic of 1892, the resettlement of peasants to Siberia, and impoverishment and the decline of the petty nobility. Bunin called his first collection of short stories At the End of the World (1897). In 1898, Bunin published a poetry collection Under the Open Air, as well as a translation of Longfellow's Song of Hiawatha, which received a very high appraisal and was awarded the Pushkin Prize of the first degree.

In 1898 (some sources indicate 1896) he married Anna Nikolaevna Tsakni, a Greek woman, the daughter of a revolutionary and emigrant N.P. Click. Family life again turned out to be unsuccessful and in 1900 the couple divorced, and in 1905 their son Nikolai died.

On November 4, 1906, an event occurred in Bunin's personal life that had an important impact on his work. While in Moscow, he met Vera Nikolaevna Muromtseva, the niece of the same S.A. Muromtsev, who was chairman of the First State Duma. And in April 1907, the writer and Muromtseva went on their "first long journey" together, visiting Egypt, Syria, and Palestine. This journey not only marked the beginning of their life together, but also gave birth to a whole cycle of Bunin's stories "The Shadow of a Bird" (1907 - 1911), in which he wrote about the "light-bearing countries" of the East, their ancient history and amazing culture.

In December 1911, in Capri, the writer completed the autobiographical story "Sukhodol", which, being published in Vestnik Evropy in April 1912, was a huge success with readers and critics. On October 27-29 of the same year, the entire Russian public solemnly celebrated the 25th anniversary of I.A. Bunin, and in 1915 in the St. Petersburg publishing house A.F. Marx published his complete works in six volumes. In 1912-1914. Bunin took a close part in the work of the "Book Publishing House of Writers in Moscow", and collections of his works were published in this publishing house one after another - "John Rydalets: stories and poems 1912-1913." (1913), "The Cup of Life: Stories 1913-1914." (1915), "The Gentleman from San Francisco: Works 1915-1916." (1916).

The First World War brought Bunin "a great spiritual disappointment." But it was precisely during this senseless world slaughter that the poet and writer especially acutely felt the meaning of the word, not so much journalistic as poetic. In January 1916 alone, he wrote fifteen poems: "Svyatogor and Ilya", "Land without history", "Eve", "The day will come - I will disappear ...", etc. In them, the author fearfully expects the collapse of the great Russian state. Bunin reacted sharply negatively to the revolutions of 1917 (February and October). The pathetic figures of the leaders of the Provisional Government, as the great master believed, were only capable of leading Russia to the abyss. This period was devoted to his diary - the pamphlet "Cursed Days", first published in Berlin (Sobr. soch., 1935).

In 1920, Bunin and his wife emigrated, settling in Paris and then moving to Grasse, a small town in southern France. About this period of their life (until 1941) can be read in the talented book by Galina Kuznetsova "Grasse Diary". A young writer, a student of Bunin, she lived in their house from 1927 to 1942, becoming the last very strong hobby of Ivan Alekseevich. Infinitely devoted to him, Vera Nikolaevna made this, perhaps the biggest sacrifice in her life, understanding the emotional needs of the writer (“Being in love is even more important for a poet than traveling,” Gumilyov used to say).

In exile, Bunin creates his best works: "Mitina's Love" (1924), "Sunstroke" (1925), "The Case of Cornet Elagin" (1925) and, finally, "The Life of Arseniev" (1927-1929, 1933). These works have become a new word in Bunin's work, and in Russian literature as a whole. And according to K. G. Paustovsky, "The Life of Arseniev" is not only the pinnacle work of Russian literature, but also "one of the most remarkable phenomena of world literature."
In 1933, Bunin was awarded the Nobel Prize, as he believed, primarily for "The Life of Arseniev." When Bunin arrived in Stockholm to receive the Nobel Prize, in Sweden he was already recognized by sight. Bunin's photographs could be seen in every newspaper, in shop windows, on the cinema screen.

With the outbreak of World War II, in 1939, the Bunins settled in the south of France, in Grasse, at the Villa Jeannette, where they spent the entire war. The writer closely followed the events in Russia, refusing any form of cooperation with the Nazi occupation authorities. He experienced the defeat of the Red Army on the eastern front very painfully, and then sincerely rejoiced at its victories.

In 1945, Bunin returned to Paris again. Bunin repeatedly expressed a desire to return to his homeland, calling the decree of the Soviet government of 1946 "On the restoration of citizenship of the USSR subjects of the former Russian Empire ..." called "a generous measure." However, the Zhdanov decree on the magazines "Zvezda" and "Leningrad" (1946), which trampled on A. Akhmatova and M. Zoshchenko, forever turned the writer away from the intention to return to his homeland.

Although Bunin's work received wide international recognition, his life in a foreign land was not easy. Written in the dark days of the Nazi occupation of France, Dark Alleys, the latest collection of short stories, has gone unnoticed. Until the end of his life, he had to defend his favorite book from the "Pharisees". In 1952, he wrote to F. A. Stepun, the author of one of the reviews of Bunin’s works: “It’s a pity that you wrote that in Dark Alleys there is a certain excess of looking at female seductions ... What an “excess” there! I gave only a thousandth how men of all tribes and peoples "consider" everywhere, always women from their ten years of age until they are 90 years old.

At the end of his life, Bunin wrote a number of more stories, as well as the extremely caustic Memoirs (1950), in which Soviet culture is sharply criticized. A year after the appearance of this book, Bunin was elected the first honorary member of the Pen Club. representing writers in exile. In recent years, Bunin also began work on memoirs about Chekhov, which he was going to write back in 1904, immediately after the death of a friend. However, the literary portrait of Chekhov remained unfinished.

Ivan Alekseevich Bunin died on the night of November 8, 1953 in the arms of his wife in dire poverty. In his memoirs, Bunin wrote: “I was born too late. If I had been born earlier, my writing memories would not have been like that. , Stalin, Hitler ... How not to envy our forefather Noah! Only one flood fell to his lot ... "Bunin was buried in the cemetery of Sainte-Genevieve-des-Bois near Paris, in a crypt, in a zinc coffin.

Ivan Alekseevich Bunin- one of the largest writers and poets of Russia of the 20th century. He received worldwide recognition for his works, which became classics during his lifetime.

A brief biography of Bunin will help you understand what life path this outstanding writer went through, and for which he received the Nobel Peace Prize.

This is all the more interesting because great people are motivated and inspire the reader to new achievements. By the way, .

Ivan Bunin

Short biography of Bunin

Conventionally, the life of our hero can be divided into two periods: before emigration, and after. After all, it was the Revolution of 1917 that drew a red line between the pre-revolutionary existence of the intelligentsia and the Soviet system that replaced it. But first things first.

Childhood and youth

Ivan Bunin was born into a simple noble family on October 10, 1870. His father was a poorly educated landowner who graduated from only one class of the gymnasium. He was distinguished by a sharp disposition and extraordinary energy.

The mother of the future writer, on the contrary, was a very meek and pious woman. Perhaps it was thanks to her that little Vanya was very impressionable and began to learn the spiritual world early.

Bunin spent most of his childhood in the Oryol province, which was surrounded by picturesque landscapes.

Ivan received his primary education at home. Studying the biographies of prominent personalities, one cannot fail to notice the fact that the vast majority of them received their first education at home.

In 1881, Bunin managed to enter the Yelets Gymnasium, which he never graduated from. In 1886, he returned to his home again. The thirst for knowledge does not leave him, and thanks to his brother Julius, who graduated with honors from the university, he is actively working on self-education.

Personal life

In Bunin's biography, it is noteworthy that he was constantly unlucky with women. His first love was Barbara, but they never managed to marry, due to various circumstances.

The first official wife of the writer was 19-year-old Anna Tsakni. There was a rather cold relationship between the spouses, and this could be called a forced friendship rather than love. Their marriage lasted only 2 years, and Kolya's only son died of scarlet fever.

The second wife of the writer was 25-year-old Vera Muromtseva. However, this marriage was also unhappy. Upon learning that her husband was cheating on her, Vera left Bunin, although she later forgave everything and returned.

Literary activity

Ivan Bunin wrote his first poems in 1888 at the age of seventeen. A year later, he decides to move to Orel and gets a job as an editor of a local newspaper.

It was at this time that many poems began to appear in him, which would later form the basis of the book "Poems". After the publication of this work, he first received a certain literary fame.

But Bunin does not stop, and a few years later, collections of poems “Under the open sky” and “Leaf fall” come out from under his pen. The popularity of Ivan Nikolaevich continues to grow and over time he manages to meet with such outstanding and recognized masters of the word as Tolstoy and Chekhov.

These meetings turned out to be significant in Bunin's biography, and left an indelible impression in his memory.

A little later, collections of short stories "Antonov apples" and "Pines" appeared. Of course, a short biography does not imply a complete list of Bunin's extensive works, so we will manage to mention key works.

In 1909, the writer was awarded the title of honorary academician of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences.

Life in exile

Ivan Bunin was alien to the Bolshevik ideas of the 1917 revolution, which swallowed up all of Russia. As a result of this, he forever leaves his homeland, and his further biography consists of countless wanderings and travels around the world.

Being in a foreign land, he continues to work actively and writes some of his best works - Mitina's Love (1924) and Sunstroke (1925).

It was thanks to The Life of Arseniev that in 1933 Ivan became the first Russian writer to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. Naturally, this can be considered the peak of Bunin's creative biography.

The prize was presented to the writer by the Swedish king Gustav V. The laureate was also issued a check for 170,330 Swedish kronor. He gave part of his fee to needy people who found themselves in a difficult life situation.

Last years

By the end of his life, Ivan Alekseevich was often ill, but this did not stop him from working. He had a goal - to create a literary portrait of A.P. Chekhov. However, this idea remained unrealized due to the death of the writer.

Bunin died on November 8, 1953. An interesting fact is that until the end of his days he remained a stateless person, being, in fact, a Russian exile.

He never managed to fulfill the main dream of the second period of his life - a return to Russia.

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Biography

Ivan Bunin was born on October 10 (22), 1870 in Voronezh, where he lived for the first three years of his life. Subsequently, the family moved to the Ozerki estate near Yelets, (Oryol province, now the Lipetsk region). Father - Alexey Nikolaevich Bunin, mother - Lyudmila Alexandrovna Bunina (née Chubarova). Until the age of 11, he was brought up at home, in 1881 he entered the Yelets district gymnasium, in 1885 he returned home and continued his education under the guidance of his older brother Julius.

At the age of 17 he began to write poetry, in 1887 he made his debut in print. In 1889, he went to work as a proofreader for the local newspaper Orlovsky Vestnik. By this time, he had a long relationship with Varvara Pashchenko, an employee of this newspaper, with whom they, contrary to the wishes of their relatives, moved to Poltava (1892).

Collections "Poems" (Eagle, 1891), "Under the open sky" (1898), "Leaf fall" (1901; Pushkin Prize).

1895 - personally met Chekhov, before that they corresponded.

In the 1890s, he traveled on the steamboat "Chaika" ("bark with firewood") along the Dnieper and visited the grave of Taras Shevchenko, whom he loved and later translated a lot. A few years later, he wrote an essay "On the Seagull", which was published in the children's illustrated magazine "Vskhody" (1898, No. 21, November 1).

In 1899 he married Anna Nikolaevna Tsakni (Kakni), the daughter of a Greek revolutionary. The marriage was short-lived, the only child died at the age of 5 (1905). In 1906, Bunin enters into a civil marriage (officially formalized in 1922) with Vera Nikolaevna Muromtseva, the niece of S. A. Muromtsev, the first chairman of the First State Duma.

In the lyrics, Bunin continued the classical traditions (collection "Leaf Fall", 1901).

He showed in stories and novels (sometimes with a nostalgic mood)
The impoverishment of noble estates ("Antonov apples", 1900)
The cruel face of the village ("Village", 1910, "Dry Valley", 1911)
The disastrous oblivion of the moral foundations of life ("The Gentleman from San Francisco", 1915).
A sharp rejection of the October Revolution and the Bolshevik regime in the diary book Cursed Days (1918, published in 1925).
In the autobiographical novel "The Life of Arseniev" (1930) - a recreation of the past of Russia, childhood and youth of the writer.
The tragedy of human existence in the story ("Mitina's Love", 1925; the collection of short stories "Dark Alleys", 1943), as well as in other works, wonderful examples of Russian short prose.
Translated the "Song of Hiawatha" by the American poet G. Longfellow. It was first published in the Orlovsky Vestnik newspaper in 1896. At the end of the same year, the printing house of the newspaper published "The Song of Hiawatha" as a separate book.

Bunin was awarded the Pushkin Prize three times; in 1909 he was elected an academician in the category of fine literature, becoming the youngest academician of the Russian Academy.

In the summer of 1918, Bunin moved from Bolshevik Moscow to Odessa, occupied by German troops. As the Red Army approaches the city in April 1919, he does not emigrate, but remains in Odessa and experiences a period of Bolshevik rule there. Welcomes the capture of the city by the Volunteer Army in August 1919, personally thanks General A.I. Bolsheviks leave Russia. Emigrates to France.

In exile, he was active in social and political activities: he gave lectures, collaborated with Russian political parties and organizations (conservative and nationalist), and regularly published journalistic articles. He delivered a famous manifesto about the tasks of the Russian Diaspora in relation to Russia and Bolshevism: "The Mission of the Russian Emigration".

In 1933 he received the Nobel Prize in Literature.

He spent World War II in a rented villa in Grasse.

Many and fruitfully engaged in literary activities, becoming one of the main figures of the Russian Diaspora.

In exile, Bunin creates his best works: "Mitina's Love" (1924), "Sunstroke" (1925), "The Case of Cornet Elagin" (1925) and, finally, "The Life of Arseniev" (1927-1929, 1933). These works have become a new word in Bunin's work, and in Russian literature as a whole. And according to K. G. Paustovsky, "The Life of Arseniev" is not only the pinnacle work of Russian literature, but also "one of the most remarkable phenomena of world literature." Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1933.

According to the Chekhov publishing house, in the last months of his life, Bunin worked on a literary portrait of A.P. Chekhov, the work remained unfinished (in the book: Loopy Ears and Other Stories, New York, 1953).

He died in his sleep at two o'clock in the morning from November 7 to 8, 1953 in Paris. He was buried in the Sainte-Genevieve-des-Bois cemetery.

In 1929-1954, Bunin's works were not published in the USSR. Since 1955 - the most published writer of the "first wave" in the USSR (several collected works, many one-volume books).

Some works (“Cursed Days”, etc.) were published in the USSR only with the beginning of perestroika.

Name immortalization

In the city of Moscow there is Buninskaya alley street, the metro station of the same name is located nearby. Also on Povarskaya Street, not far from the house where the writer lived, a monument was erected to him.
In the city of Lipetsk there is Bunina street. In addition, streets with the same name are located in Yelets and Odessa.

In Voronezh, a monument to Bunin was erected in the center of the city. There is a memorial plaque on the house where the writer was born.
Bunin's museums are located in Orel and Yelets.
In Efremov there is a house-museum of Bunin, where he lived in 1909-1910.

Biography

Russian writer: prose writer, poet, publicist. Ivan Alekseevich Bunin was born on October 22 (according to the old style - October 10), 1870 in Voronezh, in the family of an impoverished nobleman who belonged to an old noble family. The "Armorial Book of Noble Families" says that there are several ancient noble families of the Bunins, descending, according to legend, from Simeon Bunikevsky (Bunkovsky), who had a noble origin and left Poland in the 15th century to Grand Duke Vasily Vasilyevich. His great-grandson, Alexander Lavrentiev son Bunin, served in Vladimir, was killed in 1552 during the capture of Kazan. The poetess Anna Petrovna Bunina (1775-1828), the poet V.A. Zhukovsky (illegitimate son of A.I. Bunin). Ivan Bunin's father is Alexey Nikolaevich Bunin, mother is Lyudmila Alexandrovna Bunina, nee Chubarova. The Bunin family had nine children, but five died; older brothers - Julius and Eugene, younger sister - Maria. The noble family of the Chubarovs also had ancient roots. The grandfather and father of Lyudmila Alexandrovna had family estates in the Oryol and Trubchevsk districts. Ivan Bunin's paternal great-grandfather was also rich, his grandfather owned small plots of land in the Oryol, Tambov and Voronezh provinces, while his father was so wasteful that he went bankrupt, which was facilitated by the Crimean campaign and the Bunin family's move to Voronezh in 1870.

The first three years of Ivan Bunin's life were spent in Voronezh, then his father, who had a weakness for clubs, cards and wine (he became addicted to wine during the Crimean campaign), was forced to move with his family to his estate - to the Butyrki farm of the Yelets district of the Oryol province. The lifestyle of Aleksey Nikolaevich led to the fact that not only his own fortune was squandered or distributed, but also what belonged to his wife. Ivan Bunin's father was an unusually strong, healthy, cheerful, resolute, generous, quick-tempered, but quick-witted man. Alexey Nikolaevich did not like to study, which is why he did not study at the Oryol gymnasium for long, but he loved to read, reading everything that came to hand. Ivan Bunin's mother was kind, gentle, but with a strong character.

Ivan Bunin received his first education from his home tutor - the son of the leader of the nobility, who once studied at the Lazarev Institute of Oriental Languages, taught in several cities, but then broke all family ties and turned into a wanderer through villages and estates. Ivan Bunin's teacher spoke three languages, played the violin, painted with watercolors, wrote poetry; he taught his pupil Ivan to read according to Homer's Odyssey. Bunin wrote his first poem at the age of eight. In 1881 he entered the gymnasium in Yelets, but studied there for only five years, since the family had no funds for the education of his youngest son. Further education took place at home: to fully master the program of the gymnasium, and then the university, Ivan Bunin was helped by his older brother Julius, who by that time had graduated from the university, spent a year in prison for political reasons and was sent home for three years. In adolescence, Bunin's work was of an imitative nature: "most of all he imitated M. Lermontov, partly A. Pushkin, whom he tried to imitate even in handwriting" (I.A. Bunin "Autobiographical note"). In May 1887, the work of Ivan Bunin appeared in print for the first time - the St. Petersburg weekly magazine Rodina published one of his poems. In September 1888, his poems appeared in the Books of the Week, where the works of L.N. Tolstoy, Shchedrin, Polonsky.

Independent life began in the spring of 1889: Ivan Bunin, following his brother Julius, moved to Kharkov. Soon he visited the Crimea, and in the fall he began working at the Oryol Bulletin. In 1891, Ivan Bunin's student book Poems. Then Ivan Bunin met Varvara Vladimirovna Pashchenko, who worked as a proofreader for the Orlovsky Vestnik newspaper. In 1891, she married Bunin, but since Varvara Vladimirovna's parents were against this marriage, the couple lived unmarried. In 1892 they moved to Poltava, where brother Julius was in charge of the statistical bureau of the provincial zemstvo. Ivan Bunin joined the service as a zemstvo council librarian, and then as a statistician in the provincial council. During his life in Poltava, Ivan Bunin met L.N. Tolstoy. At various times, Bunin worked as a proofreader, statistician, librarian, newspaper reporter. In April 1894, Bunin's first prose work appeared in print - the story "A Village Sketch" was published in Russian Wealth (the title was chosen by the publisher).

In January 1895, after the betrayal of his wife, Ivan Bunin left the service and moved first to St. Petersburg, and then to Moscow. In 1898 (1896 is indicated in some sources), Bunin married Anna Nikolaevna Tsakni, a Greek woman, the daughter of a revolutionary and emigrant N.P. Click. Family life again turned out to be unsuccessful and in 1900 the couple divorced, and in 1905 their son Nikolai died. In Moscow, the young writer met many famous artists and writers: with Balmont, in December 1895 - with A.P. Chekhov, in late 1895 - early 1896 - with V.Ya. Bryusov. After meeting D. Teleshov, Bunin became a member of the literary circle "Wednesday". In the spring of 1899, in Yalta, he met M. Gorky, who later invited Bunin to cooperate with the Znanie publishing house. Later, in his "Memoirs", Bunin wrote: "The beginning of that strange friendship that connected us with Gorky - strange because for almost two decades we were considered great friends with him, but in reality we were not - the beginning of this applies by 1899. And the end - by 1917. Then it happened that a man with whom for twenty whole years I had not had a single personal reason for enmity, suddenly turned out to be an enemy for me, for a long time aroused horror and indignation in me. In the spring of 1900, in the Crimea, Bunin met S.V. Rachmaninov and actors of the Art Theater, whose troupe toured in Yalta. Literary fame came to Ivan Bunin in 1900 after the publication of the story "Antonov apples". In 1901, the symbolist publishing house "Scorpion" published a collection of poems by Bunin "Falling Leaves". For this collection and for the translation of the poem by the American romantic poet G. Longfellow "The Song of Hiawatha" (1898, some sources indicate 1896), the Russian Academy of Sciences Ivan Alekseevich Bunin was awarded the Pushkin Prize. In 1902, the first volume of I.A. Bunin. In 1905, Bunin, who lived in the National Hotel, witnessed the December armed uprising.

In 1906, Bunin met in Moscow with Vera Nikolaevna Muromtseva (1881-1961), who in 1907 became his wife and faithful companion until the end of his life. Later V.N. Muromtseva, gifted with literary abilities, wrote a series of memoirs about her husband ("The Life of Bunin" and "Conversations with Memory"). In 1907, the young couple went on a trip to the countries of the East - Syria, Egypt, Palestine. In 1909, the Russian Academy of Sciences elected Ivan Alekseevich Bunin an honorary academician in the category of fine literature. In 1910 Bunin went on a new journey - first to Europe, and then to Egypt and Ceylon. In 1912, in connection with the 25th anniversary of Bunin's creative activity, he was honored at Moscow University; in the same year he was elected an honorary member of the Society of Lovers of Russian Literature (in 1914-1915 he was the chairman of this society). In the autumn of 1912 - in the spring of 1913, Bunin again went abroad: to Trebizond, Constantinople, Bucharest, and spent three winters in 1913-1915 in Capri. In addition to the places listed in the period from 1907 to 1915, Bunin repeatedly visited Turkey, the countries of Asia Minor, Greece, Oran, Algeria, Tunisia and the outskirts of the Sahara, India, traveled almost all of Europe, especially Sicily and Italy, was in Romania and Serbia.

Ivan Alekseevich Bunin was extremely hostile to the February and October revolutions of 1917 and perceived them as a catastrophe. May 21, 1918 Bunin left Moscow for Odessa, and in February 1920 emigrated first to the Balkans and then to France. In France, the first time he lived in Paris; from the summer of 1923 he moved to the Alpes-Maritimes and came to Paris only for some winter months. In exile, 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 by the intrigues 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 form of cooperation with the Nazi invaders and tried to constantly monitor events in Russia. In 1945 the Bunins returned to Paris. Ivan Alekseevich Bunin repeatedly expressed a desire to return to Russia, in 1946 he called the decree of the Soviet government "On the restoration of citizenship of the USSR subjects of the former Russian Empire ..." as a "generous measure", but Zhdanov's decree on the magazines Zvezda and Leningrad (1946) , which trampled on A. Akhmatova and M. Zoshchenko, led to the fact that Bunin forever abandoned his intention to return to his homeland. The last years of the writer were spent 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 a novel by L.N. Tolstoy "Resurrection". Ivan Alekseevich Bunin was buried at the Russian cemetery of Saint-Genevieve-des-Bois, near Paris.

In 1927-1942, a friend of the Bunin family was Galina Nikolaevna Kuznetsova, who became a deep late affection for Ivan Alekseevich Bunin and wrote a number of memoirs ("Grasse Diary", article "In Memory of Bunin"). In the USSR, the first collected works of I.A. Bunin was published only after his death - in 1956 (five volumes in the Ogonyok Library).

Among the works of Ivan Alekseevich Bunin are a novel, short stories, short stories, essays, poems, memoirs, translations of works by the classics of world poetry: "Poems" (1891; collection), "To the End of the World" (January 1897; collection of stories), "Under open air" (1898; collection of poems), "Antonov apples" (1900; story), "Pines" (1901; story), "New Road" (1901; story), "Falling Leaves" (1901; collection of poems; Pushkin Prize ), "Chernozem" (1904; story), "Temple of the Sun" (1907-1911; a series of essays about a trip to the countries of the East), "Village" (1910; story), "Dry Valley" (1911; story), "Brothers" (1914), "The Cup of Life" (1915; collection of stories), "The Gentleman from San Francisco" (1915; story), "Cursed Days" (1918, published in 1925; diary entries about the events of the October Revolution and its consequences), Mitina's Love (1925; collection of short stories), "The Case of Cornet Elagin" (1927), "Sunstroke" (1927; collection of short stories), "Arseniev's Life" (1927-1929, 1933; autobiographical novel; a separate edition was published in 1930 in Paris); "Dark Alleys" (1943; a cycle of short stories; published in New York), "The Liberation of Tolstoy" (1937, a philosophical and literary treatise on L.N. Tolstoy, published in Paris), "Memoirs" (1950; printed in Paris ), "About Chekhov" (published posthumously in 1955, New York), translations - "Song of Hiawatha" by G. Longfellow (1898, in some sources - 1896; Pushkin Prize).

Biography

Ivan Alekseevich Bunin was born on October 22, 1870 in Voronezh into a noble family. His childhood and youth were spent in the impoverished estate of the Oryol province. The future writer did not receive a systematic education, which he regretted all his life. True, the older brother Julius, who graduated with flying colors from the university, went through the entire gymnasium course with Vanya. They were engaged in languages, psychology, philosophy, social and natural sciences. It was Julius who had a great influence on the formation of Bunin's tastes and views.

Bunin began to write early. He wrote essays, sketches, poems. In May 1887, Rodina magazine published the poem "The Beggar" by sixteen-year-old Vanya Bunin. Since that time, his more or less constant literary activity began, in which there was a place for both poetry and prose.

Outwardly, Bunin's poems looked traditional both in form and in subject matter: nature, joy of life, love, loneliness, sadness of loss and a new rebirth. And yet, despite the imitativeness, there was some special intonation in Bunin's verses. This became more noticeable with the release in 1901 of the poetry collection Falling Leaves, which was enthusiastically received by both readers and critics.

Bunin wrote poetry until the end of his life, loving poetry with all his heart, admiring its musical structure and harmony. But already at the beginning of his creative path, a prose writer was more and more clearly manifested in him, and so strong and deep that Bunin's first stories immediately earned the recognition of the famous writers of that time Chekhov, Gorky, Andreev, Kuprin.

In 1898, Bunin married a Greek woman, Anna Tsakni, having experienced a strong love and subsequent strong disappointment with Varvara Pashchenko. However, by his own admission, Ivan Alekseevich, he never loved Tsakni.

In the 1910s, Bunin traveled a lot, going abroad. He visits Leo Tolstoy, gets acquainted with Chekhov, actively cooperates with the Gorky publishing house "Knowledge", gets acquainted with the niece of the chairman of the first Duma AS Muromtsev Vera Muromtseva. And although in fact Vera Nikolaevna became "Madam Bunina" already in 1906, they were able to officially register their marriage only in July 1922 in France. Only by this time Bunin managed to achieve a divorce from Anna Tsakni.

Vera Nikolaevna was devoted to Ivan Alekseevich until the end of his life, becoming his faithful assistant in all matters. Possessing great spiritual strength, helping to endure all the hardships and hardships of emigration, Vera Nikolaevna also had a great gift of patience and forgiveness, which was important when dealing with such a difficult and unpredictable person as Bunin was.

After the resounding success of his stories, the story "The Village", which became immediately famous, appeared in print - Bunin's first major work. This is a bitter and very bold work, in which the reader is presented with half-mad Russian reality with all its contrasts, precariousness, and broken destinies. Bunin, perhaps one of the few Russian writers of that time, was not afraid to tell the hard truth about the Russian village and the downtroddenness of the Russian peasant.

"The Village" and the "Sukhodol" that followed it determined Bunin's attitude towards his heroes - the weak, the destitute and the restless. But hence the sympathy for them, pity, the desire to understand what is happening in the suffering Russian soul.

In parallel with the rural theme, the writer developed in his stories the lyric, which had previously been outlined in poetry. Female characters appeared, albeit barely outlined - the charming, airy Olya Meshcherskaya (the story "Light Breath"), the ingenuous Klasha Smirnova (the story "Klasha"). Later, female types with all lyrical passion will appear in Bunin's emigrant stories and stories - "Ida", "Mitina's Love", "The Case of Cornet Elagin" and, of course, in his famous cycle "Dark Alleys".

In pre-revolutionary Russia, Bunin, as they say, "rested on his laurels" - he was awarded the Pushkin Prize three times; in 1909 he was elected an academician in the category of fine literature, becoming the youngest academician of the Russian Academy.

In 1920, Bunin and Vera Nikolaevna, who did not accept either the revolution or the Bolshevik government, emigrated from Russia, "having drunk the inexpressible cup of mental suffering," as Bunin later wrote in his biography. On March 28 they arrived in Paris.

Ivan Alekseevich returned to literary creativity slowly. Longing for Russia, uncertainty about the future oppressed him. Therefore, the first collection of short stories "The Scream", published abroad, consisted only of stories written in the happiest time for Bunin - in 1911-1912.

And yet the writer gradually overcame the feeling of oppression. In the story "The Rose of Jericho" there are such heartfelt words: "There is no separation and loss, as long as my soul, my Love, Memory is alive! In the living water of the heart, in the pure moisture of love, sadness and tenderness, I immerse the roots and stems of my past ... "

In the mid-1920s, the Bunins moved to the small resort town of Grasse in southern France, where they settled in the Belvedere villa, and later settled in the Janet villa. Here they were destined to live most of their lives, to survive the Second World War. In 1927, in Grasse, Bunin met the Russian poetess Galina Kuznetsova, who was vacationing there with her husband. Bunin was fascinated by the young woman, she, in turn, was delighted with him (and Bunin knew how to charm women!). Their romance received wide publicity. The offended husband left, Vera Nikolaevna suffered from jealousy. And here the incredible happened - Ivan Alekseevich managed to convince Vera Nikolaevna that his relationship with Galina is purely platonic, and they have nothing but the relationship of a teacher and a student. Vera Nikolaevna, as it may seem incredible, believed. She believed because she could not imagine her life without Jan. As a result, Galina was invited to live with the Bunins and become a "family member".

For almost fifteen years, Kuznetsova shared a common home with Bunin, playing the role of an adopted daughter and experiencing with them all the joys, troubles and hardships.

This love of Ivan Alekseevich was both happy and painfully difficult. It also turned out to be extremely dramatic. In 1942, Kuznetsova left Bunin, carried away by the opera singer Margo Stepun.

Ivan Alekseevich was shocked, he was oppressed not only by the betrayal of his beloved woman, but also with whom she cheated! "How she (G.) poisoned my life - she still poisons me! 15 years! Weakness, lack of will ...", he wrote in his diary on April 18, 1942. This friendship between Galina and Margo for Bunin was like a bleeding wound until the end of his life.

But despite all the hardships, endless hardships, Bunin's prose gained new heights. The books "Rose of Jericho", "Mitina's Love", collections of stories "Sunstroke" and "God's Tree" were published in a foreign land. And in 1930, the autobiographical novel "The Life of Arseniev" was published - a fusion of memoirs, memoirs and lyric-philosophical prose.

On November 10, 1933, newspapers in Paris came out with huge headlines "Bunin - Nobel Laureate." For the first time during the existence of this award, the award in literature was presented to a Russian writer. Bunin's all-Russian fame grew into worldwide fame.

Every Russian in Paris, even those who have not read a single line of Bunin, took it as a personal holiday. The Russian people experienced the sweetest of feelings - the noble feeling of national pride.

The award of the Nobel Prize was a huge event for the writer himself. Recognition came, and with it (albeit for a very short period, the Bunins were extremely impractical) material security.

In 1937, Bunin completed the book "The Liberation of Tolstoy", which, according to experts, became one of the best books in all literature about Leo Nikolayevich. And in 1943, "Dark Alleys" was published in New York - the pinnacle of the writer's lyrical prose, a true encyclopedia of love. In "Dark Alleys" you can find everything - both sublime experiences, and conflicting feelings, and violent passions. But Bunin was closest to love, pure, bright, like the harmony of the earth with the sky. In "Dark Alleys" she, as a rule, is short, and sometimes instantaneous, but her light illuminates the whole life of the hero.

Some critics of that time accused Bunin's "Dark Alleys" either of pornography or of senile voluptuousness. Ivan Alekseevich was offended by this: “I consider Dark Alleys to be the best thing I have written, and they, idiots, think that I have dishonored my gray hairs with them ... Pharisees do not understand that this is a new word, a new approach to life,” - he complained to I. Odoevtseva.

Until the end of his life, he had to defend his favorite book from the "Pharisees". In 1952, he wrote to F. A. Stepun, the author of one of the reviews of Bunin’s works: “It’s a pity that you wrote that in Dark Alleys there is a certain excess of considering female charms ... What an “excess” there! I only gave thousandth part of how men of all tribes and peoples "consider" everywhere, always women from their ten years of age to 90 years of age.

The last years of his life the writer devoted to work on a book about Chekhov. Unfortunately, this work remained unfinished.

Ivan Alekseevich made his last diary entry on May 2, 1953. "It's still amazing to the point of tetanus! After some, a very short time, I will not be - and the deeds 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 quietly. The funeral service was solemn - in the Russian church on the Rue Daru in Paris with a large gathering of people. All newspapers - both Russian and French - placed extensive obituaries.

And the funeral itself took place much later, on January 30, 1954 (before that, the ashes were in a temporary crypt). Ivan Alekseevich was buried in the Russian cemetery of Saint-Genevieve de Bois near Paris. Next to Bunin, after seven and a half years, the faithful and selfless companion of his life, Vera Nikolaevna Bunina, found her peace.

Literature.

Elena Vasilyeva, Yuri Pernatiev. "100 famous writers", "Folio" (Kharkiv), 2001.

Ivan Alekseevich Bunin. Biography

"No, it's not the landscape that draws me,
Not paint I strive to notice,
And what shines in these colors -
Love and joy of being."
I. Bunin

Ivan Alekseevich Bunin was born on October 23, 1870 (October 10, old style) in Voronezh, on Dvoryanskaya Street. The impoverished landowners Bunins belonged to a noble family, among their ancestors - V.A. Zhukovsky and poetess Anna Bunina.

In Voronezh, the Bunins appeared three years before the birth of Vanya, to teach their eldest sons: Yulia (13 years old) and Evgeny (12 years old). Julius, who was extremely capable of languages ​​and mathematics, studied brilliantly, Eugene studied poorly, or rather, did not study at all, he left the gymnasium early; he was a gifted artist, but in those years he was not interested in painting, he chased pigeons more. As for the youngest, his mother, Lyudmila Alexandrovna, always said that "Vanya was different from the rest of the children from birth," that she always knew that he was "special", "no one has such a soul as his" .

In 1874, the Bunins decided to move from the city to the village to the Butyrki farm, in the Yelets district of the Oryol province, to the last estate of the family. That spring Julius graduated from the gymnasium with a gold medal and in the fall had to leave for Moscow to enter the university's mathematics department.

In the village, little Vanya "heard enough" of songs and fairy tales from his mother and yards. Memories of childhood - from the age of seven, as Bunin wrote - are connected with him "with the field, with peasant huts" and their inhabitants. He disappeared for days on end in the nearest villages, grazed cattle together with peasant children, traveled at night, and made friends with some of them.

Imitating the shepherd, he and his sister Masha ate black bread, radish, "rough and bumpy cucumbers," and at this meal, "without realizing it, they shared the earth itself, all that sensual, material, from which the world was created," wrote Bunin in the autobiographical novel "The Life of Arseniev". Even then, with a rare power of perception, he felt, by his own admission, "the divine splendor of the world" - the main motive of his work. It was at this age that an artistic perception of life was revealed in him, which, in particular, was expressed in the ability to depict people with facial expressions and gestures; he was already a talented storyteller. About eight years Bunin wrote the first poem.

In the eleventh year he entered the Yelets gymnasium. At first he studied well, everything was easy; could memorize a whole page of poetry from one reading, if it interested him. But from year to year, studies went worse, in the third grade he remained for the second year. Most of the teachers were gray and insignificant people. In the gymnasium, he wrote poetry, imitating Lermontov, Pushkin. He was not attracted by what is usually read at this age, but read, as he said, "anything."

He did not graduate from the gymnasium, later he studied independently under the guidance of his elder brother Yuly Alekseevich, a candidate of the university. In the autumn of 1889, he began working in the editorial office of the Orlovsky Vestnik newspaper, often he was the actual editor; published in it his stories, poems, literary-critical articles, and notes in the permanent section "Literature and Printing". He lived by literary work and was in great need. His father went bankrupt, in 1890 he sold his estate in Ozerki without a manor, and having lost his manor, in 1893 he moved to Kmenka to his sister., Mother and Masha - to Vasilyevsky to Bunin's cousin Sofya Nikolaevna Pusheshnikova. There was nowhere for the young poet to wait for help.

In the editorial office, Bunin met Varvara Vladimirovna Pashchenko, the daughter of a Yelets doctor who worked as a proofreader. His passionate love for her was marred at times by quarrels. In 1891, she got married, but their marriage was not legalized, they lived without getting married, the father and mother did not want to marry their daughter to a poor poet. Bunin's youthful novel formed the plot basis of the fifth book of Arseniev's Life, which was published separately under the title Lika.

Many imagine Bunin dry and cold. V. N. Muromtseva-Bunina says: "True, sometimes he wanted to appear like that - he was a first-class actor," but "he who did not know him to the end cannot even imagine what kind of tenderness his soul was capable of." He was one of those who did not reveal himself to everyone. He was distinguished by the great strangeness of his nature. It is hardly possible to name another Russian writer who, with such self-forgetfulness, so impetuously expressed his feeling of love, as he did in his letters to Varvara Pashchenko, combining in his dreams the image with everything beautiful that he found in nature, in poetry and music. With this side of his life - restraint in passion and the search for an ideal in love - he resembles Goethe, who, by his own admission, in "Werther" much is autobiographical.

At the end of August 1892, Bunin and Pashchenko moved to Poltava, where Julius Alekseevich worked as a statistician in the provincial zemstvo administration. He took both Pashchenko and his younger brother into his administration. In the Poltava zemstvo, the intelligentsia was grouped, involved in the populist movement of the 70-80s. The Bunin brothers were part of the editorial board of the Poltava Provincial Gazette, which since 1894 has been under the influence of the progressive intelligentsia. Bunin placed his works in this newspaper. By order of the Zemstvo, he also wrote essays "about the fight against harmful insects, about the harvest of bread and herbs." As he believed, so many of them were printed that they could make up three or four volumes.

He also collaborated with the Kievlyanin newspaper. Now Bunin's poems and prose began to appear more often in "thick" magazines - "Vestnik Evropy", "The World of God", "Russian Wealth" - and attracted the attention of luminaries of literary criticism. N. K. Mikhailovsky spoke well of the story "The Village Sketch" (later entitled "Tanka") and wrote about the author that he would become a "great writer." At this time, Bunin's lyrics acquired a more objective character; autobiographical motifs characteristic of the first collection of poems (it was published in Orel as an appendix to the Orlovsky Vestnik newspaper in 1891), by definition of the author himself, excessively intimate, gradually disappeared from his work, which now received more complete forms.

In 1893-1894, Bunin, in his words, "because of falling in love with Tolstoy as an artist", was a Tolstoyan and "adapted to the bondar trade." He visited the Tolstoyan colonies near Poltava and traveled to the Sumy district to the sectarians. Pavlovka - to the "Malevants", in their views close to the Tolstoyans. At the very end of 1893, he visited the Tolstoyan farm Khilkovo, which belonged to Prince. YES. Khilkov. From there he went to Moscow to see Tolstoy and visited him on one of the days between January 4 and 8, 1894. The meeting made on Bunin, as he wrote, "an amazing impression." Tolstoy and dissuaded him from "giving up to the end."

In the spring and summer of 1894 Bunin traveled around Ukraine. “In those years,” he recalled, “I was in love with Little Russia, in its villages and steppes, eagerly sought rapprochement with its people, eagerly listened to songs, their soul.” The year 1895 was a turning point in Bunin's life: after the "flight" of Pashchenko, who left Bunin and married his friend Arseniy Bibikov, in January he left the service in Poltava and left for St. Petersburg, and then to Moscow. Now he was entering the literary milieu. Great success at the literary evening, held on November 21 in the hall of the Credit Society in St. Petersburg, encouraged him. There he made a reading of the story "To the End of the World".

His impressions from more and more new meetings with writers were varied and sharp. D.V. Grigorovich and A.M. Zhemchuzhnikov, one of the creators of Kozma Prutkov, who continued the classical 19th century; populists N.K. Mikhailovsky and N.N. Zlatovpatsky; symbolists and decadents K.D. Balmont and F.K. Solgub. In December, in Moscow, Bunin met the leader of the Symbolists, V.Ya. Bryusov, December 12 at the "Big Moscow" hotel - with Chekhov. I was very interested in the talent of Bunin V.G. Korolenko - Bunin met him on December 7, 1896 in St. Petersburg on the anniversary of K.M. Stanyukovich; in the summer of 1897 - with Kuprin in Lustdorf, near Odessa.

In June 1898 Bunin left for Odessa. Here he became close with the members of the "Association of South Russian Artists", who gathered for "Thursdays", made friends with the artists E.I. Bukovetsky, V.P. Kurovsky (about her in Bunin's poems "In Memory of a Friend") and P.A. Nilus (from him Bunin took something for the stories "Galya Ganskaya" and "Chang's Dreams").

In Odessa, Bunin married Anna Nikolaevna Tsakni (1879-1963) on September 23, 1898. Family life did not go well, Bunin and Anna Nikolaevna separated in early March 1900. Their son Kolya died on January 16, 1905.

In early April 1899, Bunin visited Yalta, met with Chekhov, and met Gorky. During his visits to Moscow, Bunin visited "Wednesdays" by N.D. Teleshov, who united prominent realist writers, willingly read his unpublished works; the atmosphere in this circle was friendly, no one was offended by frank, sometimes destroying criticism. On April 12, 1900, Bunin arrived in Yalta, where the Art Theater staged Chekhov's "The Seagull", "Uncle Vanya" and other performances for Chekhov. Bunin met Stanislavsky, Knipper, S.V. Rachmaninov, with whom he forever established friendship.

The 1900s were a new frontier in Bunin's life. Repeated travels through the countries of Europe and to the East have widened the world before his eyes, so greedy for new impressions. And in the literature of the beginning decade, with the release of new books, he won recognition as one of the best writers of his time. He spoke mainly with poetry.

On September 11, 1900, he went with Kurovsky to Berlin, Paris, and Switzerland. In the Alps, they climbed to great heights. On his return from abroad, Bunin ended up in Yalta, lived in Chekhov's house, spent "an amazing week" with Chekhov, who arrived from Italy a little later. In the Chekhov family, Bunin became, in his words, "one of his own"; with his sister Maria Pavlovna, he was in "almost brotherly relations." Chekhov was invariably "gentle, friendly, cared for him like a senior." Since 1899, Bunin met with Chekhov every year, in Yalta and in Moscow, during the four years of their friendly communication, until Anton Pavlovich's departure abroad in 1904, where he died. Chekhov predicted that Bunin would become a "great writer"; he wrote in the story "The Pines" as "very new, very fresh and very good." "Magnificent", in his opinion, "Dreams" and "Gold Bottom" - "there are places just surprising."

At the beginning of 1901, a collection of poems "Leaf Fall" was published, which caused numerous reviews of critics. Kuprin wrote about the "rare artistic subtlety" in conveying the mood. Blok for "Falling Leaves" and other poems recognized Bunin's right to "one of the main places" among modern Russian poetry. Falling Leaves and Longfellow's translation of The Song of Hiawatha were awarded the Pushkin Prize of the Russian Academy of Sciences, awarded to Bunin on October 19, 1903. Since 1902, Bunin's collected works began to appear in separate numbered volumes in Gorky's publishing house "Knowledge". And again travel - to Constantinople, to France and Italy, across the Caucasus, and so all his life he was attracted by various cities and countries.

Photo of Vera Muromtseva with Bunin's inscription on the back: V.N. Bunin, early 1927, Paris

On November 4, 1906, Bunin met in Moscow, in the house of B.K. Zaitseva, with Vera Nikolaevna Muromtseva, daughter of a member of the Moscow City Council and niece of the Chairman of the First State Duma S.A. Muromtsev. On April 10, 1907, Bunin and Vera Nikolaevna set off from Moscow to the countries of the East - Egypt, Syria, Palestine. On May 12, having made their "first long journey", they went ashore in Odessa. From this journey began their life together. About this journey - a cycle of stories "The Shadow of a Bird" (1907-1911). They combine diary entries - descriptions of cities, ancient ruins, monuments of art, pyramids, tombs - and legends of ancient peoples, excursions into the history of their culture and the death of kingdoms. On the depiction of the East by Bunin Yu.I. Aikhenvald wrote: “He is captivated by the East, the “light-bearing countries”, about which he now recalls with an unusual beauty of a lyric word ... For the East, biblical and modern, Bunin knows how to find the appropriate style, solemn and sometimes as if flooded with sultry waves of the sun, decorated precious inlays and arabesques of figurativeness; and when it comes to the gray-haired antiquity, lost in the distances of religion and mothology, then you experience the impression that some majestic chariot of humanity is moving before us.

Bunin's prose and verses now acquired new colors. An excellent colorist, he, according to P.A. Nilus, "principles of painting" resolutely instilled in literature. The previous prose, as Bunin himself noted, was such that "it forced some critics to interpret" him, for example, "as a melancholic lyricist or a singer of noble estates, a singer of idylls", and his literary activity was revealed "more vividly and more diversely only from 1908, 190 9 years". These new features inspired Bunin's prose stories "Shadow of a Bird". The Academy of Sciences awarded Bunin in 1909 the second Pushkin Prize for poetry and translations of Byron; third - also for poetry. In the same year, Bunin was elected an honorary academician.

The story "The Village", published in 1910, caused great controversy and was the beginning of Bunin's enormous popularity. "The Village", the first major work, was followed by other novels and stories, as Bunin wrote, "sharply painting the Russian soul, its light and dark, often tragic foundations", and his "merciless" works caused "passionate hostile responses." During these years, I felt how my literary forces were growing stronger every day. " Gorky wrote to Bunin that "no one took the village so deeply, so historically." Bunin widely captured the life of the Russian people, touched on historical, national problems and what was the topic of the day - wars and revolutions - depicts, in his opinion, "in the footsteps of Radishchev," a contemporary village without any beauty. it became impossible to depict the peasants in the tone of Nardnicheskoy idealization.

A look at the Russian countryside was developed by Bunin partly under the influence of travel, "after a sharp slap in the face abroad." The village is depicted as not immobile, new trends penetrate it, new people appear, and Tikhon Ilyich himself thinks about his existence as a shopkeeper and tavern keeper. The story "The Village", (which Bunin also called a novel), like his work as a whole, affirmed the realistic traditions of Russian classical literature in an age when they were attacked and denied by modernists and decadents. It captures the richness of observations and colors, the strength and beauty of the language, the harmony of the drawing, the sincerity of tone and truthfulness. But "Village" is not traditional. People appeared in it, mostly new in Russian literature: the Krasov brothers, Tikhon's wife, Rodka, Young, Nikolka Gray and his son Deniska, girls and women at the wedding of Young and Deniska. Bunin himself noted this.

In mid-December 1910, Bunin and Vera Nikolaevna went to Egypt and further to the tropics - to Ceylon, where they stayed for half a month. They returned to Odessa in the middle of April 1911. The diary of their voyage is "Many Waters". About this journey - also the stories "Brothers", "City of the King of Kings". What the Englishman felt in The Brothers is autobiographical. According to Bunin, travel in his life played a "great role"; regarding his wanderings, he even developed, as he said, "a certain philosophy." The 1911 diary "Many Waters", published almost unchanged in 1925-1926, is a high example of a new lyric prose both for Bunin and for Russian literature.

He wrote that "this is something like Maupassant." Close to this prose are the stories immediately preceding the diary - "The Shadow of a Bird" - poems in prose, as the author himself determined their genre. From their diary - the transition to "Dry Valley", in which the experience of the author of "Village" in creating everyday prose and lyric prose was synthesized. "Dry Valley" and the short stories written soon after marked Bunin's new creative rise after "The Village" - in the sense of great psychological depth and complexity of images, as well as the novelty of the genre. In "Dry Valley" in the foreground is not historical Russia with its way of life, as in the "Village", but "the soul of a Russian person in the deepest sense of the word, an image of the traits of the psyche of a Slav," said Bunin.

Bunin went his own way, did not join any fashionable literary trends or groupings, as he put it, "did not throw out any banners" and did not proclaim any slogans. Criticism noted the powerful language of Bunin, his art of raising "everyday phenomena of life" into the world of poetry. There were no "low" topics unworthy of the poet's attention for him. There is a great sense of history in his poems. The reviewer of the journal "Vestnik Evropy" wrote: "His historical style is unparalleled in our poetry... Prosaism, accuracy, beauty of language are brought to the limit. There is hardly another poet whose style would be so unadorned, everyday, as here; dozens of pages you will not find a single epithet, not a general comparison, not a single metaphor ... such a simplification of the poetic language without prejudice to poetry is only possible for true talent ... With regard to pictorial accuracy, Mr. Bunin has no rivals among Russian poets " .

The book "The Cup of Life" (1915) touches upon the deep problems of human existence. The French writer, poet and literary critic Rene Gil wrote to Bunin in 1921 about the French-made "Cup of Life": "How complicated everything is psychologically! And at the same time - this is your genius, everything is born from simplicity and exact observation of reality: an atmosphere is created where one breathes something strange and disturbing, emanating from the very act of life! This kind of suggestion, the suggestion of that secret that surrounds the action, we know in Dostoevsky too; but with him it comes from the abnormality of the imbalance of the characters , because of his nervous passion, which hovers, like some kind of exciting aura, around some cases of madness. You have the opposite: everything is a radiation of life, full of strength, and disturbs precisely by its own forces, primordial forces, where under the visible unity lies complexity, something inescapable, violating the customary to a clear norm.

Bunin worked out his ethical ideal under the influence of Socrates, whose views are set forth in the writings of his students Xenophon and Plato. More than once he read the semi-philosophical, semi-poetic work of the "divine Plato" (Pushkin) in the form of a dialogue - "Phidon". After reading the dialogues, he wrote in his diary on August 21, 1917: "How much Socrates said, in Indian, in Jewish philosophy!" "The last minutes of Socrates," he notes in his diary the next day, "as always, greatly disturbed me."

Bunin was fascinated by his doctrine of the value of the human person. And he saw in each of the people to some extent "concentration ... of high forces", to the knowledge of which, Bunin wrote in the story "Returning to Rome", called Socrates. In his enthusiasm for Socrates, he followed Tolstoy, who, as V. Ivanov said, followed "the paths of Socrates in search of the norm of good." Tolstoy was also close to Bunin because for him goodness and beauty, ethics and aesthetics are indistinguishable. "Beauty is like a crown of goodness," Tolstoy wrote. Bunin affirmed in his work eternal values ​​- goodness and beauty. This gave him a sense of connection, fusion with the past, the historical continuity of being. "Brothers", "Lord from San Francisco", "Loopy Ears", based on the real facts of modern life, are not only accusatory, but deeply philosophical. "Brothers" is a particularly illustrative example. This is a story about the eternal themes of love, life and death, and not just about the dependent existence of colonial peoples. The embodiment of the idea of ​​this story is equally based on the impressions of a trip to Ceylon and on the myth of Mar - a legend about the god of life-death. Mara is an evil demon of Buddhists - at the same time - the personification of being. Bunin took a lot for prose and poetry from Russian and world folklore, Buddhist and Muslim legends, Syrian legends, Chaldean, Egyptian myths and myths of the idolaters of the Ancient East, the legends of the Arabs attracted his attention.

He had a great sense of homeland, language, history. Bunin said: "All these sublime words, wondrous beauty of songs, cathedrals - all this is necessary, all this has been created for centuries ...". One of the sources of his creativity was folk speech. Poet and literary critic G.V. Adamovich, who knew Bunin well and communicated closely with him in France, wrote to the author of this article on December 19, 1969: Bunin, of course, "knew, loved, appreciated folk art, but was exceptionally clear about fakes according to it and to ostentatious style russe. Cruel - and correct - his review of Gorodetsky's poems is an example of this. Even Blok's "Kulikovo Field" is, in my opinion, a wonderful thing, it annoyed him precisely because of his "too Russian" outfit ... He said - "this is Vasnetsov" , that is, a masquerade and an opera. But he treated something that was not a "masquerade" differently: I remember, for example, something about "The Tale of Igor's Campaign." The meaning of his words was approximately the same as in Pushkin's words: all the poets gathered together cannot compose such a miracle! But the translations of "The Tale of Igor's Campaign" revolted him, in particular, the translation of Balmont. Because of the forgery of an exaggerated Russian style or size, he despised Shmelev, although he recognized his talent. Bunin in general there was a rare ear for falsehood, for the "pedal": as soon as he heard falsehood, he fell into a rage. Because of this, he loved Tolstoy so much and, as I remember, once said: "Tolstoy, who nowhere has a single exaggerated word ..."

In May 1917, Bunin arrived in the village of Glotovo, in the estate of Vasilyevsky, Oryol province, lived here all summer and autumn. On October 23, my wife and I left for Moscow, on October 26 we arrived in Moscow, lived on Povarskaya (now Vorovsky Street), in Baskakov's house No. 26, apt. 2, with the parents of Vera Nikolaevna, the Muromtsevs. The time was alarming, battles were going on, "past their windows, wrote Gruzinsky A.E. on November 7 to A.B. Derman, - a gun rattled along Povarskaya". Bunin spent the winter of 1917-1918 in Moscow. In the lobby of the house where the Murmtsevs had an apartment, a watch was established; the doors were locked, the gates were blocked with logs. On duty and Bunin.

A house in the Vasilyevsky estate (the village of Glotovo, Oryol province), where, according to Bunin, the story "Light Breath" was written

Bunin joined the literary life, which, in spite of everything, with all the swiftness of social, political and military events, with devastation and famine, still did not stop. He visited the "Book Publishing House of Writers", participated in its work, in the literary circle "Sreda" and in the Art circle.

On May 21, 1918, Bunin and Vera Nikolaevna left Moscow - through Orsha and Minsk to Kyiv, then to Odessa; January 26 old style In 1920 they sailed to Constantinople, then through Sofia and Belgrade they arrived in Paris on March 28, 1920. Long years of emigration began - in Paris and in the south of France, in Grasse, near Cannes. Bunin said to Vera Nikolaevna that "he cannot live in the new world, that he belongs to the old world, to the world of Goncharov, Tolstoy, Moscow, Petersburg; that poetry is only there, and in the new world he does not catch it."

Bunin as an artist grew up all the time. "Mitina's Love" (1924), "Sunstroke" (1925), "The Case of Cornet Elagin" (1925), and then "The Life of Arseniev" (1927-1929,1933) and many other works marked new achievements in Russian prose. Bunin himself spoke of the "poignant lyricism" of Mitya's Love. This is most captivating in his novels and short stories of the last three decades. They also - one might say in the words of their author - a kind of "modpnost", poetry. In the prose of these years, the sensual perception of life is excitingly conveyed. Contemporaries noted the great philosophical meaning of such works as Mitina's Love or Arseniev's Life. In them, Bunin broke through "to a deep metaphysical feeling of the tragic nature of man." K.G. Paustovsky wrote that "The Life of Arseniev" is "one of the most remarkable phenomena of world literature."

In 1927-1930, Bunin wrote short stories ("Elephant", "Sky over the Wall" and many others) - a page, half a page, and sometimes several lines, they were included in the book "God's Tree". What Bunin wrote in this genre was the result of a bold search for new forms of extremely concise writing, the beginning of which was laid not by Tergenev, as some of his contemporaries claimed, but by Tolstoy and Chekhov. Professor of Sofia University P. Bitsilli wrote: “It seems to me that the collection “God’s Tree” is the most perfect of all Bunin’s works and the most revealing. no other, therefore, contains so much data for studying his method, for understanding what lies at its basis and on what it, in essence, is exhausted. and a valuable quality that Bunin has in common with the most truthful Russian writers, with Pushkin, Tolstoy, Chekhov: honesty, hatred of any falsehood ... ".

In 1933, Bunin was awarded the Nobel Prize, as he believed, primarily for "The Life of Arseniev." When Bunin arrived in Stockholm to receive the Nobel Prize, in Sweden he was already recognized by sight. Bunin's photographs could be seen in every newspaper, in shop windows, on the cinema screen. On the street, the Swedes, seeing a Russian writer, looked around. Bunin pulled his lambskin hat over his eyes and grumbled: - What is it? The perfect success of the tenor.

The remarkable Russian writer Boris Zaitsev spoke about Bunin's Nobel days: "... You see, we were some kind of last people there, emigrants, and suddenly an emigrant writer was awarded an international prize! A Russian writer! .. And they were awarded not for some political writings, but still for fiction... I was writing at that time in the Vozrozhdenie newspaper... So I was urgently instructed to write an editorial about receiving the Nobel Prize. It was very late, I remember what happened ten in the evening when they told me this. For the first time in my life I went to the printing house and wrote at night ... I remember that I left in such an excited state (from the printing house), went out to place d "Italie and there, you know, went around everything bistro and in each bistro I drank a glass of cognac for the health of Ivan Bunin!

In 1936, Bunin went on a trip to Germany and other countries, as well as to meet with publishers and translators. In the German city of Lindau, for the first time, he encountered fascist locks; he was arrested, subjected to an unceremonious and humiliating search. In October 1939, Bunin settled in Grasse at the villa "Jannette", lived here throughout the war. Here he wrote the book "Dark Alleys" - stories about love, as he himself said, "about her" dark "and most often very gloomy and cruel alleys." This book, according to Bunin, "talks about the tragic and about many things tender and beautiful - I think that this is the best and most original thing that I have written in my life."

Under the Germans, Bunin did not print anything, although he lived in great lack of money and hunger. He treated the conquerors with hatred, rejoiced at the victories of the Soviet and allied troops. In 1945, he said goodbye to Grasse forever and on the first of May returned to Paris. He has been sick a lot in recent years. Nevertheless, he wrote a book of memoirs and worked on the book "About Chekhov", which he did not manage to finish. In total, Bunin wrote ten new books in exile.

In letters and diaries, Bunin speaks of his desire to return to Moscow. But in old age and in illness, it was not easy to take such a step. Most importantly, there was no certainty whether the hopes for a quiet life and for the publication of books would come true. Bunin hesitated. The "case" of Akhmatova and Zoshchenko, the noise in the press around these names finally determined his decision. He wrote to M.A. Aldanov on September 15, 1947: “Today I wrote a letter from Teleshov on the evening of September 7 ... “What a pity that you did not experience the time when your big book was typed, when you were so expected here, when you could have been full up to his neck, and rich and in such high esteem! “After reading this, I tore my hair for an hour. And then I immediately calmed down, remembering what could have been for me instead of satiety, wealth and honor from Zhdanov and Fadeev ...”

Bunin is now read in all European languages ​​and in some Eastern languages. We publish it in millions of copies. On his 80th birthday, in 1950, François Mauriac wrote to him about his admiration for his work, about the sympathy that his personality inspired and his cruel fate. Andre Gide, in a letter published in the Le Figaro newspaper, says that on the threshold of his 80th birthday, he turns to Bunin and greets him "on behalf of France", calls him a great artist and writes: "I do not know writers ... who have sensations would be more precise and at the same time unexpected. They admired the work of Bunin R. Rolland, who called him a "brilliant artist", Henri de Regnier, T. Mann, R.-M. Rilke, Jerome Jerome, Yaroslav Ivashkevich. Reviews of German, French, English, etc. the press from the beginning of the 1920s and later on were mostly enthusiastic, affirming world recognition for him. As early as 1922, the English magazine The Nation and Athenaeum described the books The Gentleman from San Francisco and The Village as extremely significant; everything in this review is sprinkled with big praises: "A new planet in our sky!.", "Apocalyptic force...". At the end: "Bunin won his place in world literature." Bunin's prose was equated with the works of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, while saying that he "updated" Russian art "both in form and in content." In the realism of the last century, he brought new features and new colors, which brought him closer to the Impressionists.

Ivan Alekseevich Bunin died on the night of November 8, 1953 in the arms of his wife in dire poverty. In his memoirs, Bunin wrote: “I was born too late. If I had been born earlier, my writing memories would not have been like that. , Lenin, Stalin, Hitler ... How not to envy our forefather Noah! Only one flood fell to his lot ... " Bunin was buried in the cemetery of Sainte-Genevieve-des-Bois near Paris, in a crypt, in a zinc coffin.

You are a thought, you are a dream. Through the smoky blizzard
Crosses are running - outstretched hands.
I listen to the pensive spruce -
A melodious ringing... Everything is just a thought and sounds!
What lies in the grave, are you?
Parting, sadness was marked
Your hard way. Now they are gone. Crosses
They keep only ashes. Now you are a thought. You are eternal.

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

Life and art

Ivan Bunin was born on October 22, 1870 in 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 Yelets gymnasium lasted only 4 years and was discontinued due to the family's inability to pay for studies. Ivan's education was taken over by his elder brother Julius 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 print publishing houses. After an unsuccessful civil marriage with Varvara Pashchenko, Bunin leaves for St. Petersburg and then to Moscow.

Confession

In Moscow, Bunin is included in the circle of famous writers of his time: L. Tolstoy, A. Chekhov, V. Bryusov, M. Gorky. The first recognition comes to the novice author after the publication of the story "Antonov apples" (1900).

In 1901, Ivan Bunin was awarded the Pushkin Prize from the Russian Academy of Sciences for the published collection of poems Falling Leaves and the translation of the poem The Song of Hiawatha by G. Longfellow. The second time the Pushkin Prize was awarded to Bunin 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, Heine. The writer was fluent in 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, Ceylon, Turkey, Romania, Italy.

Since 1905, after the suppression of the first Russian revolution, the theme of the historical fate of Russia appeared in Bunin's prose, which was reflected in the story "The Village". The story of the unflattering life of the Russian village was a bold and innovative step in Russian literature. At the same time, in Bunin's stories (“Light Breath”, “Klasha”), female images are formed with passions hidden in them.

In 1915-1916, Bunin's stories were published, including "The Gentleman from San Francisco", in which they find a place for reasoning about 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, from there to the Balkans and Paris. In exile, Bunin spent the second half of his life, dreaming of returning to his homeland, but not fulfilling his desire. In 1946, upon the issuance of a decree granting Soviet citizenship to subjects of the Russian Empire, Bunin had a burning desire to return to Russia, but criticism of the Soviet authorities 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 Arseniev (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. A significant amount of money received by Bunin as a bonus, for the most part, was distributed to those in need.

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

In the late 1920s, Bunin wrote a number of short stories - "Elephant", "Roosters", etc., in which his literary language is honed, trying to most concisely express the main idea of ​​​​the work.

In the period 1927-42. Galina Kuznetsova lived with the Bunins, a young girl whom Bunin represented as his student and adopted daughter. 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 experienced the years of the Second World War in the suburbs of Paris and closely followed the events on the Russian front. Numerous proposals from the Nazis, coming to him as a famous writer, he invariably rejected.

At the end of his life, Bunin published practically nothing due to a long and serious illness. His last works are "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. Extensive obituaries in memory of the Russian writer were placed in all European and Soviet newspapers. He was buried in a Russian cemetery near Paris.