Ivan Bunin
1870–1953
Biography
Ivan Alexeyevich Bunin (1870–1953) was born in Voronezh, in central Russia, into a noble family that had fallen on hard times. As a young man he worked on newspapers and in government offices and travelled widely. He published his first verse before turning mainly to prose. He is admired for a precise, richly coloured style and for close, unsentimental observation of the countryside and of ordinary people, and he saw himself as the heir to the realist tradition of the great nineteenth-century Russian writers.
His short novels The Village (1910) and Dry Valley (1912) are hard-edged studies of rural life. The autobiographical novel The Life of Arseniev traces a man's youth in the Russian provinces. The diary Cursed Days is an angry record of the revolution and civil war years, 1918 to 1920. Bunin left Russia in 1920 and lived in France for the rest of his life, mostly in Paris. In 1933 he became the first Russian writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, a recognition of his strict craftsmanship in the classic Russian prose tradition.
His story The Gentleman from San Francisco (Господин из Сан-Франциско, The Gentleman from San Francisco) is on this site and is one of his most widely read pieces. A wealthy American travels with his wife and daughter to Italy and dies suddenly during the trip. Through the way the luxury hotels and the steamship crew handle his death, Bunin shows how little money can protect a person from the indifference of the world. It is a sharp, compact study of class, vanity and mortality.
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Books
Господин из Сан-Франциско
by Иван Алексеевич Бунин
A rich American, having worked all his life, takes his family on a luxury cruise to Europe and dies suddenly on Capri. Bunin's story shows how little the money and the ship's comforts matter once he is a corpse in a cheap hotel room. This book uses the racial and other slurs of…
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.