67 Facts About Ivan Bunin

Ivan Bunin was noted for the strict artistry with which he carried on the classical Russian traditions in the writing of prose and poetry.

Ivan Bunin was born on his parental estate in Voronezh province, the third and youngest son of Aleksey Nikolayevich Bunin and Lyudmila Aleksandrovna Bunina.

Ivan Bunin had two younger sisters: Masha and Nadya and two elder brothers, Yuly and Yevgeny.

Chubarovs, according to Ivan Bunin, "knew very little about themselves except that their ancestors were landowners in Kostromskaya, Moskovskaya, Orlovskya and Tambovskaya Guberniyas".

Ivan Bunin's early childhood, spent in Butyrky Khutor and later in Ozerky, was a happy one: the boy was surrounded by intelligent and loving people.

In 1881 Ivan Bunin was sent to a public school in Yelets, but never completed the course: he was expelled in March 1886 for failing to return to the school after the Christmas holidays due to the family's financial difficulties.

In May 1887 Ivan Bunin published his first poem "Village Paupers" in the Saint Petersburg literary magazine Rodina.

In Spring 1889, Ivan Bunin followed his brother to Kharkiv, where he became a government clerk, then an assistant editor of a local paper, librarian, and court statistician.

Ivan Bunin spent the first half of 1894 travelling all over Ukraine.

In 1895 Ivan Bunin visited the Russian capital for the first time.

Admittedly infatuated with the latter's prose, Ivan Bunin tried desperately to follow the great man's lifestyle too, visiting sectarian settlements and doing a lot of hard work.

Ivan Bunin was even sentenced to three months in prison for illegally distributing Tolstoyan literature in the autumn of 1894, but avoided jail due to a general amnesty proclaimed on the occasion of the succession to the throne of Nicholas II.

Ivan Bunin met Anton Chekov in 1896, and a strong friendship ensued.

Ivan Bunin justified a pause of two years in the early 1900s by the need for "inner growth" and spiritual change.

At the turn of the century Ivan Bunin made a major switch from poetry to prose which started to change both in form and texture, becoming richer in lexicon, more compact and perfectly poised.

Ivan Bunin's works featured regularly in Znanie's literary compilations; beginning with Book I, where "Black Earth" appeared along with several poems, all in all he contributed to 16 books of the series.

Ivan Bunin was a close friend of Chekhov and his family and continued visiting them regularly until 1904.

Ivan Bunin was elected a member of the Russian Academy the same year.

In 1910 Ivan Bunin published The Village, a bleak portrayal of Russian country life, which he depicted as full of stupidity, brutality, and violence.

Ivan Bunin said he realised now that the working class had become a force powerful enough to "overcome the whole of Western Europe," but warned against the possible negative effect of the Russian workers' lack of organisation, the one thing that made them different from their Western counterparts.

On his return to Odessa in April 1911, Ivan Bunin wrote "Waters Aplenty", a travel diary, much lauded after its publication in 1926.

Life in the city was dangerous but Ivan Bunin still visited publishers and took part in the meetings of the Sreda and The Art circles.

Much as he hated Bolshevism, Ivan Bunin never endorsed the idea of foreign intervention in Russia.

Slowly and painfully, overcoming physical and mental stress, Ivan Bunin returned to his usual mode of writing.

In France Ivan Bunin published many of his pre-revolutionary works and collections of original novellas, regularly contributing to the Russian emigre press.

In France, Ivan Bunin found himself, for the first time, at the center of public attention.

Ivan Bunin cited this edition as the most credible one and warned his future publishers against using any other versions of his work rather than those featured in the Petropolis collection.

In 1937 Ivan Bunin finished his book The Liberation of Tolstoy, held in the highest regard by Leo Tolstoy scholars.

In 1938 Ivan Bunin began working on what would later become a celebrated cycle of nostalgic stories with a strong erotic undercurrent and a Proustian ring.

For Ivan Bunin, though, this isolation was a blessing and he refused to re-locate to Paris where conditions might have been better.

Ivan Bunin was a staunch anti-Nazi, referring to Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini as "rabid monkeys".

Ivan Bunin risked his life, sheltering fugitives in his house in Grasse after Vichy was occupied by the Germans.

Ivan Bunin was receiving offers to contribute to newspapers in unoccupied Switzerland, but declined them.

Once, in the audience at a Soviet Russian Theatre show in Paris, Ivan Bunin found himself sitting next to a young Red Army colonel.

On 19 June 1945, Ivan Bunin held a literary show in Paris where he read some of the Dark Avenue stories.

Ivan Bunin started to communicate closely with the Soviet connoisseurs, journalist Yuri Zhukov and literary agent Boris Mikhailov, the latter receiving from the writer several new stories for proposed publishing in the USSR.

Rumours started circulating that the Soviet version of The Complete Ivan Bunin was already in the works.

In 1946, speaking to his Communist counterparts in Paris, Ivan Bunin praised the Supreme Soviet's decision to return Soviet citizenship to Russian exiles in France, still stopping short of saying "yes" to the continuous urging from the Soviet side for him to return.

Ivan Bunin was aided by his wife, who, along with Zurov, completed the work after Bunin's death and saw to its publication in New York in 1955.

Ivan Bunin revised a number of stories for publication in new collections, spent considerable time looking through his papers and annotated his collected works for a definitive edition.

In 1951 Ivan Bunin was elected the first ever hononary International PEN member, representing the community of writers in exile.

On 2 May 1953, Ivan Bunin left in his diary a note that proved to be his last one.

Ivan Alekseyevich Bunin died in a Paris attic flat in the early hours of 8 November 1953.

On 30 January 1954, Ivan Bunin was buried in the Sainte-Genevieve-des-Bois Russian Cemetery.

In 1965, The Complete Ivan Bunin came out in Moscow in nine volumes.

Ivan Bunin made history as the first Russian writer to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature.

The immediate basis for the award was the autobiographical novel The Life of Arseniev, but Ivan Bunin's legacy is much wider in scope.

Ivan Bunin is regarded as a master of the short story, described by scholar Oleg Mikhaylov as an "archaist innovator" who, while remaining true to the literary tradition of the 19th century, made huge leaps in terms of artistic expression and purity of style.

The symbolist's flights of imagination and grotesque passions foreign to him, Ivan Bunin made nature his field of artistic research and here carved his art to perfection.

Ivan Bunin's verse was praised by Aleksander Kuprin while Blok regarded Bunin as among the first in the hierarchy of Russian poets.

One great admirer of Ivan Bunin's verse was Vladimir Nabokov, who compared him to Blok.

The wholesomeness of Ivan Bunin's character allowed him to avoid crises to become virtually the only author of the first decades of the 20th century to develop gradually and logically.

Yet, an outsider to all the contemporary trends and literary movements, Ivan Bunin was never truly famous in Russia.

Ivan Bunin maintained the truly classic traditions of realism in Russian literature at the very time when they were in the gravest danger, under attack by modernists and decadents.

Ivan Bunin was greatly interested in international myths and folklore, as well as the Russian folkloric tradition.

Ivan Bunin despised Shmelyov for his pseudo-Russian pretenses, though admitting his literary gift.

Ivan Bunin had an extraordinarily sharp ear for falseness: he instantly recognized this jarring note and was infuriated.

The best of Ivan Bunin's prose had a strong philosophical streak to it.

In terms of ethics Ivan Bunin was under the strong influence of Socrates, he argued that it was the Greek classic who first expounded many things that were later found in Hindu and Jewish sacred books.

Ivan Bunin was particularly impressed with Socrates's ideas on the intrinsic value of human individuality, it being a "kind of focus for higher forces".

In emigration Ivan Bunin continued his experiments with extremely concise, ultra-ionized prose, taking Chekhov and Tolstoy's ideas on expressive economy to the last extreme.

Unlike the works of early Soviets and emigres and their self-censoring backdrop of memory, myth, and political expediency, Ivan Bunin's truth reads almost like an aberration.

Ivan Bunin's diary foreshadowed such 'libelous' memoirs as Yevgenia Ginzburg's Journey into the Whirlwind and Within the Whirlwind, and Nadezhda Mandelstam's Hope Against Hope and Hope Abandoned, the accounts of two courageous women caught up in the Stalinist terror of the 1930s.

Ivan Bunin's books have been translated into many languages, and the world's leading writers praised his gift.

Bunin's first love was Varvara Pashchenko, his classmate in Yelets [not plausible as Ivan was at a male gymnasium and Varvara at an all female gymnasium], daughter of a doctor and an actress, whom he fell for in 1889 and then went on to work with in Oryol in 1892.

Ivan Bunin felt betrayed, and for a time his family feared the possibility of him committing suicide.

In 1927, while in Grasse, Ivan Bunin fell for the Russian poet Galina Kuznetsova, on vacation there with her husband.