"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 ...

Considered one of the most influential authors of twentieth century Russian Literature, Ivan Bunin's "Dark Avenues" is the culmination of a life's work which unrelentingly questioned of the political doxa whilst taking his poetic mastery of language to dark new heights. Written between 1938 and 1944 and set in the context of a disintegrating Russian culture, this collection of short fiction centres around dark, erotic liaisons told with a rich, elegaic poetics which probes the artistic lim...

Ivan Bunin was the first Russian to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. A realist writer with a baroque style, he was considered to be the modern heir of the literary tradition established by Tolstoy and Chekov. Born in 1870 in Voronezh, Central Russia, he began his career working for various newspapers and literary publications until his collections of poetry and short stories made him famous, which enabled him to make a living as a freelance writer. In the wake of the Bolshevik Revol...

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 Eur...

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

Short stories have always been a sort of instant access into an author’s brain, their soul and heart. A few pages can lift our lives into locations, people and experiences with a sweep of landscape, narration, feelings and emotions that is difficult to achieve elsewhere.In this series we try to offer up tried and trusted ‘Top Tens’ across many different themes and authors. But any anthology will immediately throw up the questions – Why that story? Why that author?The theme ...

Ivan Bunin was a Russian author, poet and diarist, who in 1933 (at the age of 63) won the Nobel Prize in Literature "for the strict artistry with which he has carried on the classical Russian traditions in prose writing." Viewed by many at the time as the heir to his friend and contemporary Chekhov, Bunin wrote his poems and stories with a depth of description that attracted the admiration of his fellow authors. Maxim Gorky described him as "the best Russian writer of the day" and "the fir...

There is something about the number 3.The Ancient Greeks believed 3 was the perfect number, and in China 3 has always been a lucky number, and they know a thing or two.Most religions also have 3 this and 3 that and, of course, in these mo

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...

Short stories have always been a sort of instant access into an author’s brain, their soul and heart. A few pages can lift our lives into locations, people and experiences with a sweep of landscape, narration, feelings and emotions that is difficult to achieve elsewhere.In this series we try to offer up tried and trusted ‘Top Tens’ across many different themes and authors. But any anthology will immediately throw up the questions – Why that story? Why that author?The theme ...

The work is about the delicate nature of life and how even something as simple as breathing can be filled with beauty and complexity. Bunin writes about the appreciation of life in all its forms and how even the most mundane moments can be filled with wonder. He also reflects on the fragility of life and how it can be so easily taken away.

Son is a complex, emotionally charged novella by Ivan Bunin that explores the father-son relationship. The story follows the son's journey as he returns to his childhood home to bury his father and confronts the ghosts of his past. Bunin expertly uses symbols and imagery to convey the son's inner turmoil and emotional state. The novella is considered a masterpiece of Russian literature.