Bunin Who?

Ivan Bunin may have won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1933, but today he is nearly forgotten. Either my most erudite friends have never heard of him, or they vaguely associate his name with a single short story, “The Gentleman from San Francisco,” an atypical work. Strangely enough, at the time of his death in 1953, he was widely regarded as the best--and most celebrated--Russian emigre author. What happened? Why is it that with the exception of Penguin no major trade publisher has reason to keep him in print? And why has his name been so utterly forgotten?

Not because of any lack of talent, even genius. Bunin has a style that conveys better than any other I know the hush and serenity of the Russian landscape, as well as the squalor and desperation of the typical village. Whereas Chekhov is casual and general (he once advised Maxim Gorky never to write a nature description more specific than “It grew dark” or “It was raining”), Bunin renders all the poetic specificity of woods and steppes or of muddy paths and huts without chimneys or of derelict manor houses glimmering with candles in front of soot-smudged icons.

Bunin’s world is the countryside after the liberation of the serfs, of Russia at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. His 1910 story, “The Village,” gives glimpses of peasant uprisings, of burning farms and workers on strike. Bunin left Russia in 1920 and lived in France until his death; everyone who read him in the later years was amazed by his total recall of his homeland. Like Nabokov, he was determined not to give up a single recollection. Perhaps the fact that he had been trained originally as a painter sharpened his visual observations and memories.

Not that his descriptions are strained or modernist in the Nabokovian mode. Whereas Nabokov is almost always witty (of a street he writes, “beginning with a post office and ending with a church, like an epistolary novel”), Bunin is both more serious and more relaxed. Typically he’ll write: “When the horses forded the rivulet and climbed the hill, a woman in a man’s light overcoat with sagging pockets was driving some turkeys through the burdock. The facade of the house was thoroughly featureless; it had very few windows and those that existed were small and set deep in the thick walls. Yet the gloomy porches were enormous. From one of these a young man wearing a gray school shirt belted with a broad strap was watching the approaching travelers. He was dark, had handsome eyes and was very personable, though his face was pale and bright with freckles, like a bird’s egg.”

If Maupassant and Chekhov were not still popular with readers, one might imagine that Bunin had dropped into obscurity because he wrote short stories. Bunin’s stories, however, are as good as any ever written--as original and varied in subject and composition, as distinctive from those of other writers, as fully realized and as concisely composed. And we live in an era, inaugurated by Raymond Carver, when new collections of stories (those by Nathan Englander and Melissa Bank, just to name the most recent examples) are being discussed and praised more than the newest novels. Moreover, Chekhov’s own stories have just been reissued in several new anthologies (devoted to “the unknown” or “the comic” stories, for instance, and Richard Ford has edited a collection of his own favorites).

Perhaps Bunin has been forgotten because he struck his non-Russian contemporaries as politically irrelevant. He was neither a reluctant spokesman for the Communist regime like Gorky nor a quiet dissenter like Pasternak. Nor was he driven out of his country for his opinions like Solzhenitsyn and Joseph Brodsky. No, Bunin left Russia of his own volition and openly denounced Lenin and later Stalin, though in interviews rather than in poetry or fiction, in which he almost always looked to the pre-Soviet past. At the time of his emigration most intellectuals in Europe and America were still pro-Communist; they denounced Bunin as passeist and an aristocratic counterrevolutionary. Right-wingers of the period in Europe blamed Russians for having withdrawn from World War I before a victory was secured. Nabokov had the good luck to emerge in Europe and America much later, in the 1950s, after the Cold War had begun. He also wrote plots set in France, Germany and the United States--and during the 1940s he switched to English. Just as important, Nabokov was a scathingly funny satirist who became famous (even infamous) due to a humorous and scandalous novel about a thoroughly American nymphet.

Bunin was 30 years older and a good deal stodgier. His writing is almost never funny. Worse, he was badly served by his translators, with only a few exceptions. And his was not an alluring personality. Although he lived in the south of France, in the perfume capital of Grasse, he had no desire to cultivate French writers and critics and remained hermetically sealed within the Russian emigre community. His only efforts outside his little world were directed toward winning the Nobel, which kept eluding him year after year--until he finally hit gold. Not that the prize money was a huge sum in those days; Bunin and his wife died in extreme poverty, saved from hunger only by handouts from Russian friends.

Someone should bring out a single collection of Bunin’s greatest stories and novellas, starting with “The Village” and going on to “The Elaghin Affair,” “At Sea, At Night,” “Dry Valley,” “The Gentleman from San Francisco,” “Light Breathing” and ending with “Mitya’s Love.”

In “The Gentleman from San Francisco” an intimidating American millionaire dies suddenly of apoplexy in a luxurious Capri hotel; instantly he passes from the status of feared guest to that of shameful refuse. In “At Sea, At Night,” two ancient men meet by chance on shipboard and discuss the woman they both loved, though she has long been dead and neither man feels anything for her now. In “Mitya’s Love,” an idle young man loses Katya, his love, to the lure of the theater. She takes a trip with her enamored acting coach, and then he returns to his family’s estate. There he becomes more and more despondent as he waits for a letter from Katya. After a meaningless sexual encounter with a hired peasant girl, he shoots himself in the mouth.

When he first contemplates suicide, the writing ecstatically argues for all the best reasons to stay alive: “Even Mitya understood perfectly well that it was impossible to imagine anything more absurd than that--to shoot oneself, shatter one’s skull, immediately halt the beating of a strong young heart, halt thought and feeling, lose hearing and sight, disappear from that inexpressibly beautiful world which had only just revealed itself fully to him for the first time, deprive himself instantly and forever of any participation in that life which embraced Katya and the advancing summer, the sky, the clouds, the sun, the warm wind, the corn in the fields, the villages, the countryside, the village girls, Mama, the estate, Anya, Kostya, the poems in the old magazines and, further off, Sebastopol, the Baydar Pass, the sultry mauve hills with their pine and beech forests, the blindingly white, stifling highway, the gardens at Livadia and Alupka, the burning sand by the shining sea, sun-tanned children, sun-tanned beauties--and again Katya in a white dress, under a parasol, sitting on the pebbles at the edge of the waves which were blindingly brilliant and evoked an irrepressible smile of sheer happiness. . . .”

The great Russian thinker Lev Vygotsky attempts to explain in “The Psychology of Art” the mysterious appeal of such writing. Why should an essentially dreary anecdote induce in us a feeling of lightness and excitement? Vygotsky analyzes Bunin’s story “Light Breathing,” the depressing tale of a middle-aged officer who shoots a young woman after reading her journal and discovering that she despises him. The psychologist notices that all the figurative and descriptive language runs counter to the downward tendency of the story. Boldly, Vygotsky decides that Aristotle was wrong, that the language of a literary masterpiece (whether it be “Hamlet” or “Light Breathing”) does not reinforce the mood of the action but actually contradicts it. Similarly, the passage in which Mitya contemplates suicide beautifully illustrates this seldom mentioned but convincing principle of dynamic tension.

A collection of Bunin’s best writing might include not only his fiction but also three of his vivid portraits of famous friends, “Leo Tolstoy,” “Chekhov” and “Chaliapin.” In all these works the language and especially the descriptive powers are of an unparalleled force.

His description, for example, of meeting the ancient Tolstoy on a frosty night in Moscow when he, Bunin, was only an adolescent is unforgettable. The timid boy is shown into a dim ballroom. Suddenly a bandylegged old giant in queer clothes comes rushing up to him: “The smile was enchanting, tender and at the same time somewhat sorrowful, almost pathetic, and I saw now that the small eyes were neither frightening nor sharp but just alert like an animal’s.” The great man asks many questions and gives bits of wisdom in his staccato voice: “A young writer, are you? Well, certainly, go on writing if you feel like it, but remember that it can never be the aim of life. . . . Don’t expect too much from life, you’ll never have a better time than you are having now. There is no happiness in life, there are only occasional flares of it.” When the old man learns that Bunin is a pacifist Tolstoyan living close to the soil, he says, “You wish to lead a simple life and work on the land? That’s a very good thing but don’t force yourself, don’t make a uniform of it, one can be a good man in any kind of life. . . .”

Singular guru, exceptional follower. Fortunately for us, the happy few, Bunin ignored Tolstoy’s advice and did go on to make writing the aim of his long, unhappy life. If you’re like me, a reader in search of his own sort of canon, a library of books both beautiful and honest, one that contains Hawthorne and Fitzgerald, George Eliot and Proust, Stendhal and Pushkin, then you will be eager to add Ivan Bunin to your list--but you will have to look hard to find him.