Early life Ivan Bunin was born on his parental estate in
Voronezh province, the third and youngest son of Aleksey Nikolayevich Bunin (1827–1906) and Lyudmila Aleksandrovna Bunina (née Chubarova, 1835–1910). He had two younger sisters: Masha (Maria Bunina-Laskarzhevskaya, 1873–1930) and Nadya (who later died very young) and two elder brothers, Yuly and Yevgeny. Having come from a long line of
Russian nobility, Bunin was especially proud that poets
Anna Bunina (1774–1829) and
Vasily Zhukovsky (1783–1852) were among his ancestors. He wrote in his 1952 autobiography: "The Bunins are descended from Simeon Bunkovsky, a nobleman who came from Poland to the court of the Great Prince
Vasily Vasilyevich," he wrote in 1915, quoting the Russian gentry's
Armorial Book. According to Bunin, his mother's family, the Chubarovs, "knew very little about themselves except that their ancestors were landowners in
Kostromskaya,
Moskovskaya,
Orlovskya and
Tambovskaya
Guberniyas". "As for me, from early childhood I was such a libertine as to be totally indifferent both to my own 'high blood' and to the loss of whatever might have been connected to it," he added. Ivan Bunin's early childhood, spent in Butyrky
Khutor and later in Ozerky (of
Yelets county,
Lipetskaya Oblast), Elder brothers Yuly and Yevgeny showed great interest in mathematics and painting respectively, his mother said later, yet, in their mother's words, "Vanya has been different from the moment of birth... none of the others had a soul like his." Bunin's experiences of rural life had a profound impact on his writing. "There, amidst the deep silence of vast fields, among cornfields – or, in winter, huge snowdrifts which were stepping up to our very doorsteps – I spent my childhood which was full of melancholic poetry," Bunin later wrote of his Ozerky days. In Spring 1889, Bunin followed his brother to
Kharkiv, where he became a government clerk, then an assistant editor of a local paper, librarian, and court statistician. In January 1889 he moved to
Oryol to work on the local
Orlovsky Vestnik newspaper, first as an editorial assistant and later as de facto editor; this enabled him to publish his short stories, poems and reviews in the paper's literary section. Some of his articles, essays and short stories, published earlier in local papers, began to feature in the Saint Petersburg periodicals. Tellingly, it was Tolstoy himself who discouraged Bunin from slipping into what he called "total peasantification." Several years later, while still admiring Tolstoy's prose, Bunin changed his views regarding his philosophy which he now saw as
utopian. In 1895–1896 Bunin divided his time between Moscow and Saint Petersburg. In 1897 his first short story collection
To the Edge of the World and Other Stories came out, He met Anton Chekov in 1896, and a strong friendship ensued. Soon after the book's release, Gorky called Bunin (in a letter to Valery Bryusov) "the first poet of our times." In 1900 the novella
Antonov Apples (Антоновские яблоки) was published; later it was included in textbooks and is regarded as Bunin's first real masterpiece, but it was criticised at the time as too nostalgic and elitist, allegedly idealising "the Russian nobleman's past." Other acclaimed novellas of this period,
On the Farm,
The News from Home, and
To the Edge of the World (На край света), showing a penchant for extreme precision of language, delicate description of nature and detailed psychological analysis, made him a popular and well-respected young author. Bunin's works featured regularly in Znanie's literary compilations; beginning with Book I, where "
Black Earth" appeared along with several poems, all in all he contributed to 16 books of the series. These travelling sketches were to change the critics' assessment of Bunin's work. Before them Bunin was mostly regarded as (using his own words) "a melancholy lyricist, singing hymns to noblemen's estates and idylls of the past." In the late 1900s critics started to pay more notice to the colourfulness and dynamics of his poetry and prose. "In terms of artistic precision he has no equal among Russian poets,"
Vestnik Evropy wrote at the time. Bunin attributed much importance to his travels, counting himself among that special "type of people who tend to feel strongest for alien times and cultures rather than those of their own" and admitting to being drawn to "all the necropolises of the world." Besides, foreign voyages had, admittedly, an eye-opening effect on the writer, helping him to see Russian reality more objectively. In the early 1910s Bunin produced several famous novellas which came as a direct result of this change in perspective. In October 1909 Bunin received his second Pushkin Prize for
Poems 1903–1906 and translations of (
Lord Byron's
Cain, and parts of Longfellow's
The Golden Legend). He was elected a member of the
Russian Academy the same year. It was much later that Bunin was proclaimed one of the most innovative Russian writers of the century.
1910–1920 , 1905 In 1910 Bunin published
The Village (Деревня), a bleak portrayal of Russian country life, which he depicted as full of stupidity, brutality, and violence. This book caused controversy and made him famous. Its harsh realism (with "characters having sunk so far below the average level of intelligence as to be scarcely human") prompted Maxim Gorky to call Bunin "the best Russian writer of the day." By the spring of 1916, overcome by pessimism, Bunin all but stopped writing, complaining to his nephew, N.A. Pusheshnikov, of how insignificant he felt as a writer and how depressed he was for being unable to do more than be horrified at the millions of deaths being caused by the War. he once said, allegedly, to Merezhkovsky who still cherished hopes for
Pilsudsky's military success against the Bolshevik regime. Slowly and painfully, overcoming physical and mental stress, Bunin returned to his usual mode of writing.
Scream, his first book published in France, was compiled of short stories written in 1911–1912, years he referred to as the happiest of his life. According to Bunin scholar Thomas Gaiton Marullo,
Cursed Days, one of the very few anti-Bolshevik diaries to be preserved from the time of the Russian Revolution and civil war, linked "Russian anti-utopian writing of the nineteenth century to its counterpart in the twentieth" and, "in its painful exposing of political and social utopias... heralded the anti-utopian writing of
George Orwell and
Aldous Huxley. Bunin and Zamyatin had correctly understood that the Soviet experiment was destined to self destruct," Marullo wrote. In the 1920s and 1930s Bunin was regarded as the moral and artistic spokesman for a generation of expatriates who awaited the collapse of Bolshevism, a revered senior figure among living Russian writers, true to the tradition of Tolstoy and Chekhov. He became the first Russian to win the
Nobel Prize for Literature, which was awarded to him in 1933 "for following through and developing with chastity and artfulness the traditions of Russian classic prose." Per Halstroem, in his celebratory speech, noted the laureate's poetic gift. Bunin for his part praised the
Swedish Academy for honouring a writer in exile. In his speech, addressing the Academy, he said: In France, Bunin found himself, for the first time, at the center of public attention. Although reluctant to become involved in politics, Bunin was now feted as both a writer and the embodiment of non-Bolshevik Russian values and traditions. His travels throughout Europe featured prominently on the front pages of the Russian emigre press for the remainder of the decade. Bunin's prose became more introspective, which was attributed to "the fact that a Russian is surrounded by enormous, broad and lasting things: the steppes, the sky. In the West everything is cramped and enclosed, and this automatically produces a turning towards the self, inwards."
The war years As
World War II broke out, Bunin's friends in New York, anxious to help the Nobel Prize laureate get out of France, issued officially-endorsed invitations for him to travel to the US, and in 1941 they received their
Nansen passports enabling them to make the trip. But the couple chose to remain in Grasse. A journalist who visited the Villa in 1942 described Bunin as a "skinny and emaciated man, looking like an ancient patrician". For Bunin, though, this isolation was a blessing and he refused to re-locate to Paris where conditions might have been better. "It takes 30 minutes of climbing to reach our villa, but there's not another view in the whole world like the one that's facing us," he wrote. "Freezing cold, though, is damning and making it impossible for me to write," he complained in one of his letters. Ivan Bunin was a staunch anti-Nazi, referring to
Adolf Hitler and
Benito Mussolini as "rabid monkeys". He risked his life, sheltering fugitives (including Jews such as the pianist A. Liebermann and his wife) Under the occupation Bunin never ceased writing but, according to Zurov, "published not a single word. He was receiving offers to contribute to newspapers in unoccupied Switzerland, but declined them. Somebody visited him once, a guest who proved to be an agent, and proposed some literary work, but again Ivan Alekseyevich refused." On 24 September 1944, Bunin wrote to Nikolai Roshchin: "Thank God, the Germans fled Grasse without a fight, on August 23. In the early morning of the 24th the Americans came. What was going on in the town, and in our souls, that's beyond description." "For all this hunger, I'm glad we spent the War years in the South, sharing the life and difficulties of the people, I'm glad that we've managed even to help some", Vera Muromtseva-Bunina later wrote.
Last years In May 1945 the Bunins returned to 1, rue Jacques Offenbach in Paris. Aside from several spells at the Russian House (a clinic in
Juan-les-Pins) where he was convalescing, Bunin stayed in the French capital for the rest of his life. Once, in the audience at a Soviet
Russian Theatre show in Paris, Bunin found himself sitting next to a young Red Army colonel. As the latter rose and bowed, saying: "Do I have the honour of sitting next to Ivan Alekseyevich Bunin?" the writer sprang to his feet: "I have the even higher honour of sitting next to an officer of the great Red Army!" he passionately retorted. On 19 June 1945, Bunin held a literary show in Paris where he read some of the
Dark Avenue stories. In the autumn of 1945, on the wave of the great patriotic boom, Bunin's 75th birthday was widely celebrated in the Parisian Russian community. Bunin started to communicate closely with the Soviet connoisseurs, journalist
Yuri Zhukov and literary agent Boris Mikhailov, the latter receiving from the writer several new stories for proposed publishing in the USSR. Rumours started circulating that the Soviet version of
The Complete Bunin was already in the works. In the late 1940s Bunin, having become interested in the new Soviet literature, in particular the works of
Aleksandr Tvardovsky and
Konstantin Paustovsky, entertained plans of returning to the Soviet Union, as
Aleksandr Kuprin had done in the 1930s. In 1946, speaking to his Communist counterparts in Paris, Bunin praised the Supreme Soviet's decision to return Soviet citizenship to Russian exiles in France, still stopping short of saying "yes" to the continuous urging from the Soviet side for him to return. Financial difficulties and the French reading public's relative indifference to the publication of
Dark Avenues figured high among his motives. "Would you mind asking the Union of Writers to send me at least some of the money for books that've been published and re-issued in Moscow in the 1920s and 1930s? I am weak, I am short of breath, I need to go to the South but am too skinny to even dream of it," Bunin wrote to
Nikolay Teleshov in a 19 November 1946, letter. Bunin also revised a number of stories for publication in new collections, spent considerable time looking through his papers and annotated his collected works for a definitive edition. A lavish burial service took place at the Russian Church on
Rue Daru. All the major newspapers, both Russian and French, published large obituaries. For quite a while the coffin was held in a
vault. On 30 January 1954, Bunin was buried in the
Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois Russian Cemetery. == Legacy ==