Ivan Bunin - Böcker

A much neglected literary figure, Ivan Bunin is one of Russia's major writers and ranks with Tolstoy and Chekhov at the forefront of the Russian Realists. Drawing artistic inspiration from his personal experience, these powerful, evocative stories are set in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Russia of his youth, in the countries that he visited and in France, where he spent the last thirty years of his life. In the title story, for example, a family's tour of fashionable European resorts comes to an unexpected end; 'Late Hour' describes an old man's return to the little Russian town in the steppes that he has not seen since his early youth; while 'Mitya's Love' explores the darker emotional reverberations of sexual experience. Throughout his stories there is a sense of the precariousness of existence, an omnipresent awareness of the impermanence of human aspirations and achievements.

The first Russian to be awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, Ivan Bunin is often considered the last of the great Russian masters. Already renowned in Russia before the revolution, he fled the country in 1920 and lived the remainder of his life in France, where he continued to write for thirty years. Bunin made his name as a short-story writer with such masterpieces as ""The Gentleman from San Francisco,"" the title piece in one of his collections and one of the stories in this volume. His last book of stories, Dark Avenues, was published in the 1940s. Among his longer works were a fictional autobiography, The Life of Arseniev (1930), and its sequel, Youth (1939), which were later collected into one volume, and two memoirs, The Accursed Days (1926), and Memories and Portraits (1950). He also wrote books on Tolstoy and Chekhov, both of whom he knew personally. Bunin, in fact, serves as a link-both personal and literary-between Tolstoy, whom he met as a young man, Chekhov, a close friend, and Vladimir Nabokov, who was influenced by Bunin early in his career and who moved in the same émigré literary circles in the twenties and thirties. Bunin achieved his greatest mastery in the short story, and much of his finest work appears in this volume-the largest collection of his prose works ever published in English. In Robert Bowie's fine translation, with extensive annotations and a lengthy critical afterword, this work affords readers of English their first opportunity for a sustained encounter with a Russian classic, and one of the great writers of the twentieth century.

In this edited translation of famed writer Ivan Bunin's Recollections translator Thomas Gaiton Marullo provides an intimate look at leading political, social, cultural, and literary figures from late imperial Russia, through the First World War and the revolutions of 1905 and 1917 to the birth of the Russian diaspora and the rise of the Soviet state. Through engaging, colorful, and often idiosyncratic vignettes, Bunin (1870–1953) details his admiration for Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov, Sergei Rachmaninov, and Fyodor Chaliapin. He shares his love-hate relationships with Maxim Gorky, Alexei Tolstoy, and Alexander Kuprin. In addition, Marullo's translation reveals Bunin's hatred of avant-gardists, particularly Vladimir Mayakovsky, as well as his thoughts and experiences on war, revolution, and exile. Bunin's work led, in the end, to his bittersweet reception of the Nobel Prize in Literature (1933) in Stockholm, making him the first Russian and the first writer in exile ever to receive this award. Recollections reveals the author's feelings toward this unprecedented event. Bunin's Recollections stands not only as a stark summa of his passage through literature and life but also as an equally bold apologia as to his place in both.

In this edited translation of famed writer Ivan Bunin's Recollections translator Thomas Gaiton Marullo provides an intimate look at leading political, social, cultural, and literary figures from late imperial Russia, through the First World War and the revolutions of 1905 and 1917 to the birth of the Russian diaspora and the rise of the Soviet state. Through engaging, colorful, and often idiosyncratic vignettes, Bunin (1870–1953) details his admiration for Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov, Sergei Rachmaninov, and Fyodor Chaliapin. He shares his love-hate relationships with Maxim Gorky, Alexei Tolstoy, and Alexander Kuprin. In addition, Marullo's translation reveals Bunin's hatred of avant-gardists, particularly Vladimir Mayakovsky, as well as his thoughts and experiences on war, revolution, and exile. Bunin's work led, in the end, to his bittersweet reception of the Nobel Prize in Literature (1933) in Stockholm, making him the first Russian and the first writer in exile ever to receive this award. Recollections reveals the author's feelings toward this unprecedented event. Bunin's Recollections stands not only as a stark summa of his passage through literature and life but also as an equally bold apologia as to his place in both.

”The Gentleman from San Francisco” is easily the best known of Ivan Bunin's stories and has achieved the stature of a masterpiece. But Bunin's other stories are not to be missed. In Sunstroke, Graham Hettlinger has selected the “Gentleman” and twenty-four other stories and translated them afresh—several for the first time in English. The result is a collection that is remarkable in its crystalline prose, surprising in its vibrancy. It includes, among others, “Raven,” “Cold Fall,” “Muza,” “Styopa,” “Antigone,” ”In Paris,” and “Late Hour.” Never has the last of the great “gentry” writers and the first Russian to win the Nobel Prize for Literature received a more caring and passionate translation. Sunstroke confirms Bunin's stature as one of the greatest—and most neglected—Russian writers of the twentieth century.

The Nobel PrizeDwinning author's great anti-Bolshevik diary of the Russian Revolution, translated into English for the first time, with an Introduction and Notes by Thomas Gaiton Marullo. A harrowing description of the forerunners of the concentration camps and the Gulag. —Marc Raeff

"The Gentleman from San Francisco" is easily the best known of Ivan Bunin's stories and has achieved the stature of a masterpiece. But Bunin's other stories and novellas are not to be missed. Over the last several years a great many of them have been freshly and brilliantly translated by Graham Hettlinger. Together, along with four new pieces, they are now published in a one-volume paperback collection of Bunin's greatest writings. In Mr. Hettlinger's renderings readers will see why Bunin was regarded by many of his contemporaries as the rightful successor to Tolstoy and Chekhov as a master of Russian letters.

Only edition in printThe Village, Ivan Bunin’s first full-length novel, is a bleak and uncompromising portrayal of rural life in south-west Russia. Set at the time of the 1905 Revolution and centring on episodes in the lives of a landowner and his self-educated peasant brother, the book follows characters sunk so far below the average of intelligence as to be scarcely human. A triumph of bitter realism, Bunin’s cruel, lyrical prose reveals the pettiness, violence and ignorance of life on the land, foreshadowing the turbulences of Russia in the twentieth century.

Only edition in printOne of the great achievements of twentieth-century Russian émigré literature, Dark Avenues – translated here for the first time into English in its entirety – took Bunin’s poetic mastery of language to new heights.Written between 1938 and 1944 and set in the context of the Russian cultural and historical crises of the preceding decades, this collection of short fiction centres around dark, erotic liaisons. Love – in its many varied forms – is the unifying motif in a rich range of narratives, characterized by the evocative, elegiac, elegant prose for which Bunin is renowned.

Ivan Bunins roman Byn, som idag räknas till den ryska realistiska litteraturens klassiker, skildrar livet på landsbygden fram till den första ryska revolutionen 1905. Två bröder, Tichon, handlingsmänniskan och cynikern, och Kuzma, romantikern och drömmaren, utgör romanens huvudpersoner, men framför allt är det bondeklassens liv och verklighet som är huvudtemat i boken. Före Bunin hade ingen annan rysk författare gått lika långt när det gäller att ge en realistisk skildring av böndernas liv, och boken väckte en hetsig debatt när den kom ut första gången 1909. Här fanns ingenting av Lev Tolstojs idealisering, bara den hudnära och hårda verklighetsskildringen.