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Ivan Bunin, the great Russian poet, short story writer,
novelist and translator, was born in 1870 in Voronezh, a city south
of Moscow. His father came from a long line of landed gentry and
the Bunins traced their ancestry all the way back to the 15th century when
their ancestor first arrived in Russia from Poland. Ivan’s father
was a tempestuous type hooked on hunting and singing old Russian and Gypsy
love songs to guitar accompaniment. What little was left of the family
property he drank and played at card tables thus squandering his and his
wife’s fortune. Ivan’s mother was different - timid, tender and sensitive
all bent on bringing up her children.
Bunin’s childhood and youth were spent almost entirely in
the country on his father’s estate where he was tutored by Moscow University
student Nikolai Romashkov, a highly educated and well read young man. The
two dreamed about travels to faraway lands and sifted through geographical
magazines admiring pictures of Egyptian pyramids, palm trees and spear-wielding
savages of the South Seas. Ivan was steeped in Homer’s Odyssey and
Don Quixote by Cervantes spending long hours discussing Old World nobility,
knighthood and the Middle Ages.
As an 11-year-old schoolboy, Ivan Bunin wrote his first poem
and before long, saw his verse published by Rodina magazine. He never finished
school however because his father could no longer afford paying for his
tuition. Getting back home, Ivan continued his studies under the guidance
of his elder brother Yuli who had virtually been exiled to his home
estate under the watchful eye of the local police department. Having finished
high school with honors and being a university graduate, Yuli taught his
younger brother foreign languages, philosophy, social and natural sciences.
Naturally inclined to literature, Ivan was an avid reader of Russian and
foreign classics.
At the age of 19 Ivan Bunin left his family estate never
to get back there again. To make ends meet he was desperately looking for
a job and kept writing on. His first book of poems followed shortly. Boasting
a very good command of English which he learned all by himself, Bunin made
a Russian translation of Henry Longfellow’s “The Song of Hiawatha” following
up the success with a string of new publications, both in prose and poetry.
His effort was soon recognized by critics and was subsequently honored
on several occasions, receiving in particular, the very prestigious Pushkin
Prize. In 1909, the Russian Academy of Sciences elected Bunin one of its
twelve honorary members. Painfully disillusioned by the 1914 outbreak of
World War One, Bunin appreciated even more keenly, amid all that senseless
global carnage, the true meaning of journalistic and, even more so, poetic
word. His poems were filled with dark and scary premonition of the imminent
collapse of the great Russian Empire. Openly averse to the 1917 Bolshevik
revolution, Bunin poured scorn on his country’s new leaders who he thought
would inevitably bring the nation to ruin. Ivan Bunin left Moscow
in May 1918 and spent two years in the south with his wife Vera Muromtseva
before eventually leaving Russia on the last French ship to sail from Odessa.
After spending some time in Paris, they moved south and settled in Grasse
in the Maritime Alps. During the 1920 Bunin published
several more books where the love theme was increasingly being replaced
by ideas of exile and death.
In 1933, Ivan Bunin became the first Russian to receive the
Nobel Prize for Literature for what the Swedish Academy said was “the strict
artistry with which he has carried on the classical Russian traditions
in prose writing.” In his awarding address, the Academy’s Per Halstrom
heaped praise on Bunin’s poetic talent underscoring his outstanding ability
to provide an expressive and correct picture of the surrounding life. Bunin
returned the courtesy hailing what he said was the Academy’s courageous
decision to award an émigré writer. Years later Boris
Pasternak, Mikhail Sholokhov and Iosif Brodsky expanded the list of Russian
Nobel prizewinning authors.
In 1936 Ivan Bunin left on a European tour to meet his publishers
and translators. In Lindau, Germany, he was arrested and subjected
to a humiliating search. During World War Two Bunin, who was a strong opponent
of Nazism, remained in France and even though living literally from hand
to mouth, published nothing, hated the invaders and rejoiced at Soviet
and Allied victories.
His letters and diaries now increasingly reflected Bunin’s
desire to get back to Moscow, but for an old and ailing man it a near impossibility...
At least he would never come back as long as Josef Stalin remained in the
Kremlin...
His health seriously undermined by the war, Nazi occupation,
malnutrition and moral pain, Ivan Bunin was now increasingly succumbing
to illness. The great Russian poet and novelist died in Paris on November
8, 1953 and was buried at the Saint Genevieve de Bois cemetery just outside
the city...
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