“That wondrous world where we walked side by side”[1]
Rene Guerra
Ivan Bunin first came to Odessa on 9th June 1896. Afterwards he visited this city annually, sometimes twice a year. He visited Odessa over thirty times in total. One of the most significant for the writer was his third visit to Odessa in the summer of 1898. It was then that he met Nikolai Petrovich Tsakni, the editor of the Yuzhnoye Obozrenie newspaper. Bunin often visited Nikolai Petrovich’s dacha[2], where he met his daughter Anna. Ivan Alexeyevich fell in love with her, soon proposed to Anna Nikolaevna and she said yes. The wedding took place on 23rd September 1898. The newly-weds took up residence in the house of the Tsakni family at 44 Khersonskaya Street, but the happiness of the young couple was short–lived – after a year and a half their marriage broke up.
Besides his marriage with A. Tsakni, Bunin had other ties with Odessa, not matrimonial, but more durable and happier, lasting for many years. These were his friendly relations with artists in Odessa and members of the Association of South Russian Artists: P. A. Nilus, E. I. Bukovetsky, V. P. Kurovsky, the writer and artist A.M. Fedorov, etc. His new friends had a custom of gathering at Bukovetsky’s on Thursdays.
“Thursday was the name of weekly meetings of South Russian painters, writers, artists… in a word, people who loved art, fun and social parties. After lunch the artists would take out their albums, the writers and poets would read their works, the singers would sing, those who could play musical instruments played the piano[3].”
In the summer of 1898 Pyotr Nilus met Ivan Bunin for the first time in Odessa. That meeting turned into a strong lifelong friendship. It was testified by the writer’s second wife Vera Nikolaevna Muromtseva-Bunina: “Especially he made friends with P. A. Nilus, their friendship lasted for many years and turned into almost fraternal relations. In addition to his inner qualities, he appreciated in Nilus his subtle talent as an artist, not only as a poet of colours in painting, but also as an expert in nature and people, especially women, and tried to persuade him to start writing fiction. He also appreciated his musicality. Pyotr Alexandrovich could whistle entire symphonies[4].”
In 1906 Nilus first expressed himself as a writer. His first short story Morning was dedicated to Bunin (Novoye Slovo, iss. 9, 1906). In his letters Nilus repeatedly stressed that as a writer he was primarily indebted to Bunin. “Well, brother, you’ve inspired me so much that I’m still writing,” he informed Bunin on 9th June 1905, while working on Morning.
The painter, art critic and writer Pyotr Alexandrovich Nilus was born in 1869 in the village of Busheny of the Podolsk province. In 1876 the family moved to Odessa, and the following year young Pyotr was sent to the St Peter and Paul’s Technical School. However, Nilus left school in the sixth form and entered the Odessa Drawing School, where his teacher was K. K. Kostandi. From 1889 on he continued his studies at the St Petersburg Academy of Arts under Ilya Repin who recommended the young artist to start exhibiting as soon as possible and return to his hometown, where the Association of South Russian Artists had begun to stand out very significantly.
After returning to Odessa, Nilus took active part in local artistic life and became one of the central figures of the artistic community. In 1893 he became a member of the Association of South Russian Artists and took part in almost all of its exhibitions between 1890 and 1919.
P.A. Nilus also painted portraits of famous writers. Two of them are particularly noteworthy: those of A. P. Chekhov (1910) and of I. A. Bunin (1918).
From P. A. Nilus’ reminiscences: “The first time I saw Anton Pavlovich was in 1901 in Yalta, at his dacha. I came to him with I. A. Bunin. I remember a dry, bright April day, a shimmering dust-laden road of Autka [now Chekhovo], a white house and a dusty garden. A. P. was by his house, in a buttoned-up summer coat, in a soft hat and with a cane in his hand; a crane was standing next to him, one leg tucked beneath it.
‘I thought that you were here to buy my house,’ A. P. said, smiling, when Bunin introduced me to him.
‘Why do you live in Odessa? Only acacia trees are good here…’
“We talked about Odessa, its inhabitants, the local press and women. Anton Pavlovich did not like anything in Odessa: neither acacia trees, nor press, nor women. It seemed that A. P. was quite amused by my top hat, and when we entered the house, he took it from my hands, went up to the mirror, put it on and said:
‘Whenever I come to Paris, I immediately buy a top hat – a great thing <…>.’ My attempts to paint his portrait were unsuccessful. A. P. was not quite well and worried, waiting for his sick wife in Yalta. The sessions were short – half an hour and an hour each <…>. I left, and only a few years later, after A. P.’s death, I deemed it my duty to finish what I had begun with the sketch and photographs as best I could <…>. I. A. Bunin was almost always present during the sessions. We talked about almost everything: literature, critics, publishers, how one should write properly, land prices, the future of postcards that then were beginning to become fashionable, the revolution, new readers and how you should behave with your friend, arriving in a cab and wishing to avoid paying, etc., etc. During the sessions in order not to weary A. P. I asked him to do what he wanted. He would look through newspapers and drink kefir.
‘Ivan Alexeyevich,’ A. P. used to say more than once when Bunin was there, ‘read something by Chekhov.’
“Bunin was an excellent reader of Chekhov’s short stories. A. P. was the first to laugh at his fiction in a lively human way. ‘Bukishon’, ‘Bukishonchik’, as Bunin was referred to in the Chekhov family where he was loved for his vivacity, youthful sharpness of observation and humour that appeared in his works only ten years later.
“The most vivid impression of Chekhov’s figure is seen in I. A. Bunin’s reminiscences, albeit not in an artistic manner, but more convincing than any protocol description. Bunin’s portrait of Chekhov was formed mysteriously, between the lines, God knows how. This is probably how a real literary portrait should be[5].”
From V. N. Muromtseva-Bunina’s reminiscences: “Ivan Alexeyevich wrote to Chekhov about Anton Pavlovich’s portrait that Nilus wanted to paint. The friends sailed to Yalta at the very end of March… On arriving in Yalta Nilus set about painting Anton Pavlovich’s portrait. During the sessions (albeit short, lasting half an hour), at Chekhov’s insistence, Bunin was always present, which made the sessions fly by unnoticed amid lively conversations, jokes and laughter[6].”
Chekhov’s death shocked Bunin deeply. “Indeed, for him the loss was great. Chekhov was the only one of the writers to be really close to him, love and appreciate him; Ivan Alexeyevich felt this, and he himself admired and loved him[7].”
Memories of Chekhov and Tolstoy, whom he considered as his teachers, take a special place in Bunin’s work. The first notes for his book, About Chekhov, were made in 1904 for the Znanie (“Knowledge”) collection[8]. It was never finished: Ivan Alexeyevich passed away in Paris on 8th November 1953. A few years after her husband’s death Vera Nikolaevna, with the help of Leonid Fedorovich Zurov, a writer and their family’s long-time friend, finished the book based on Ivan Alexeyevich’s notes. It was published with a preface by M. A. Aldanov and an introduction by V. N. Bunina (New York: Publishing House Named After Chekhov, 1955).
Bunin saw the outbreak of the Revolution in the estate of his cousin sister in the village of Glotovo of the Yelets district. But disturbances, pogroms and fires made Ivan Alexeyevich and Vera Nikolaevna in late October 1917 move to Moscow, and from there to Odessa the following summer. “…We rented Shishkin’s dacha for the summer outside Bolshoy Fontan[9] (“Big Fountain”) and lived there till October. Then we moved to the city, where Eugene Iosifovich Bukovetsky, an artist, leased out for us two very nice rooms in his wonderful mansion[10]. We lived there for a year and almost four months. The artist Pyotr Alexandrovich Nilus, Ivan Alexeyevich’s great friend, lived there as well[11].”
They could relax only in the suburbs, in dachas in the summer of 1918. Ivan Alexeyevich and Vera Nikolaevna took advantage of this. In one of the rooms of this mansion Pyotr Nilus painted Ivan Bunin’s portrait. The artist called his work I. A. Bunin by the Window.
On 6th April 1919 detachments of the Red Army entered Odessa. “The first Bolshevik troops led by Ataman Grigoriev entered, 1,500 soldiers in all! This is the force from which the French, the Greeks and other troops had fled. Odessa is a Bolshevik city[12].”
There was the Soviet Government in the city till 23rd August, with terror, famine, shootings and robberies again. All this was described expressively by Bunin in The Cursed Days. His notes end on 20th June 1919. The new Government imposed a 50-million fine on the “bourgeois”, for non-payment of which harsh punitive sanctions were expected. It was collected according to the lists of house-owners, which were regularly published in the Izvestia newspaper. However, Bukovetsky’s house, where the Bunins and Nilus lived, was not included in the lists. On 11th April 1919 I. Bunin, E. Bukovetsky and P. Nilus wrote to the new Government asking it to secure the premises they lived in for them[13]. In The Cursed Days (25th April) Bunin wrote about a commissar’s visit to Bukovetsky’s house “on the subject of possible moving into this living space by the proletariat[14].” The incident was settled thanks to Nilus’ efforts.
In The Grass of Oblivion Valentin Kataev recalls: “By this time Bunin had already been so compromised by his counterrevolutionary views, which he did not conceal, that he could have been shot without ceremony and would probably have been shot if not for his old friend, the artist Nilus from Odessa, who lived in the same house, in the attic described in Chang’s Dreams: not in an ordinary attic, but in one that was “warm, smelled pleasantly of cigars, was well-carpeted, furnished with antiques, its walls covered with paintings and brocade…” Hadn’t Nilus shown such frenzied energy – he telegraphed to Lunacharsky in Moscow and implored the chairman of the Odessa Revolutionary Committee almost on his knees – who knows what would have happened. Anyway, Nilus received a special so-called “certificate of protection” for the life, property and personal inviolability of Academician Bunin, which was pinned to the varnished, rich door of the mansion in Knyazheskaya Street[15].”
V.N. Muromtseva-Bunina recalled: “Our flat was exempt from requisition. Besides Bukovetsky and Nilus, Voloshin helped us very easily, eagerly and altruistically. He seems to have been a very easy-going and pleasantly simple man. He came running in the afternoon to inform us about this and set about writing a sign very happily: ‘The Art Neorealist School of Bukovetsky, Nilus and Voloshin’[16].”
At the end of the Civil War, on 24th December 1919, Nilus emigrated by steamer to Varna (Bulgaria). And after him, on 26th January 1920, on the French Sparta steamer the Bunins sailed to Istanbul, and from there, via Sofia and Belgrade, arrived in Paris in late March.
Nilus wandered around the cities of the Balkan states for several years, taking part in local exhibitions in Sofia (1920), Vienna (1921), Zagreb (1922–1923), Bucharest (1923) and Belgrade (1923). In late 1923 he moved to Paris where he took up residence in the same house with I. A. Bunin on the fifth storey at 1 Jacques Offenbach Street (1, rue Jacques Offenbach, Paris XVI) in the Passy district, settled by many Russian emigres.
The first P.A. Nilus’ solo exhibitions in Paris were held in 1924 at the prestigious G. Petit and J. Charpentier, M. Bernheim galleries (1926). The artist’s works attracted the attention of the famous art dealer and publisher A. Vollard. Nilus’ exhibition at the Zak Gallery (1934) was a great success; it was the last solo exhibition in his life.
Speaking of Nilus the artist, it is impossible not to speak about him as a well-known author, fiction writer, essayist and critic. In the span of twelve years (1906–1917), Nilus wrote several dozen short stories published in periodicals; many of them were included in his Stories (Moscow, 1911) and On the Shore (Moscow, 1917) collections.
Here is the famous critic, Yu. Aykhenvald’s review: “P. Nilus’ On the Shore stories really breathe of the salty aroma of the Black Sea, Odessa, the sun of the South, and spices of nature and the soul. There is something sharp and piquant in his plots and manner – elegance, not specifically Russian, though Russian teachers (Chekhov and Bunin) shaped his talent, albeit the author himself was not very conscious of this[17]…”
And this is what Ivan Bunin wrote: “He was a talented fiction writer: his On the Shore story, published in 1906 in the Shipovnik (“Rosehip”) almanac, then a book of short stories published by the Publishing House of Writers in Moscow, were a major success; he was a subtle connoisseur of music and had almost perfect pitch[18]…”
Bunin was actively involved in the Znanie (“Knowledge”) group: between 1904 and 1909 his poems were published in thirteen editions. Book 1 contained the poem Happiness (“There is no sun, but ponds are bright…”) dedicated to P. Nilus.
In 1901 Pyotr Nilus dedicated his painting Loneliness to Ivan Bunin, where a young woman sitting on the seashore is depicted against the background of an autumn landscape. In its mood this painting is very much in tune with Bunin’s lyrics of that time. In 1902 it was exhibited at the Thirtieth Exhibition of the Wanderers in Moscow and Odessa. The large size of the painting (160 x 135 centimeters), which can rarely be found in Nilus’ works, is impressive.
Among the numerous reviews in Odessa one is particularly interesting, where this painting is given prominent attention: “Our south Russian artists from Odessa take a very eminent place in the exhibition and certainly attract attention with their talented works <…>. P.A. Nilus submitted several works, of which we can single out the most interesting one – Loneliness. The painting is not devoid of various decadent and symbolic innovations and misconceptions, but nevertheless there is something in it that indicates the obvious talent of the artist who is able to express what he intended even with rather contrived means and conventions of new art. Remove all these conventions from the painting – symbolic trees (to a certain extent à la Nesterov), decadent colours of air, clouds, expanses and other things – and you will have a very poetic, purely elegiac depiction of loneliness, so intensely felt amid nature, which is enough in Mr Nilus’ painting and which he feels very keenly[19].”
In 1903 the Our Evenings collection published a copy of P. Nilus’ Loneliness painting (p. 19), prose and I. Bunin’s In Memoriam poem[20].
The poet and literary critic Yuri Ivask justly wrote: “Emigration is always a misfortune. After all, exiles are doomed to homesickness and usually to poverty. But emigration is not always a failure – creativity, creative success is possible even in a foreign country[21].”
That tragic page of Russian history of the twentieth century turned out to be a great success for its victims and, ultimately, for the entire Russian culture. And the best proof of this is the worldwide success of representatives of the Russian elite abroad, which today has become a national pride not only of France, but also of Russia. With their creative work, with their lives they proved that they had once made a difficult yet right choice.
[1]I.A. Bunin. Selected Poems. Sovremennye Zapiski Publishing House. Paris, 1929. P. 203.
[2]The 7th station of Bolshoy Fontan is ten miles away from Odessa.
[3]V. N. Muromtseva-Bunina. Conversations With Memory. Novy Zhurnal, New York, 1960, b. 60, p. 172.
[4]V.N. Muromtseva-Bunina. Bunin’s Life: 1870-1906. Paris, 1958. P. 113.
[5]Pyotr Nilus on Chekhov. Rech, 2 July 1914, Iss. 177.
[6]V.N. Muromtseva-Bunina. Bunin’s Life: 1870-1906. Paris, 1958. P.135.
[7]Ibid. P. 155.
[8]I.A. Bunin wrote About Chekhov for the Znanie collection for 1904 (b. 3. St Petersburg, 1905).
[9]Bolshoy Fontan is one of the oldest and most popular resorts near Odessa, known since the Russian Empire.
[10]27 Knyazheskaya Street.
[11]V.N. Muromtseva-Bunina. Letter to A. Baboreko dated 03/13/1958.
[12]In the Words of the Bunins. Diaries of I.A. and V.N. Vol. 1. Frankfurt am Main, Posev, 1977. P. 224.
[13]A copy of the letter is kept at the Department of Manuscript Collections of M. Rylsky Institute of the History of Folklore and Ethnography of the National Academy of Sciences of the Ukraine. F. 20, op. 1, ed. khr. 65, L. 36.
[14]I.A. Bunin. Collected Works. Vol. X. The Cursed Days. Berlin: Petropolis, 1935. P. 126.
[15]V.P. Kataev. The Holy Well; The Grass of Oblivion. Moscow, Sovetsky Pisatel, 1969. Pp. 206-207.
[16]In the Words of the Bunins. Diaries of I.A. and V.N. Vol. 1, Frankfurt am Main: Posev, 1977. P. 229.
[17]The Rech newspaper.
[18]I. A. Bunin. In Memoriam: P.A. Nilus. Paris, Russkiye Novosti, iss. 54, 24th May 1946.
[19]Vuchetich N. Two Words on the Thirtieth Exhibition of Paintings by the Wanderers. Theatre: A Newspaper Dedicated to Fine Arts and Sports. Odessa, 1902, Iss. 248, pp. 1-2.
[20]Our Evenings. Literary and art collection. Iss. 1 [and the only one]. Odessa: the printers of the Southern Russia Printing Company, 1903.
[21]Yu. P. Ivask. In the West. An anthology of Russian poetry abroad. New York: Publishing House Named After Chekhov, 1953. P. 5.
