The Challenge of Ivan Bunin

Despite all the trials prepared for him by time and history, Bunin always remained himself

By Kirill Privalov

Human generations are bound together in such a tight chain that the distance between the links is sometimes very hard to determine. However, we normally realise the connection of times subconsciously, even reflexively. When you personally touch this baton, polished by the hands of many, many people who have lived, worked and loved on Earth before you, your head spins from the feeling of eternity and the continuity of History.

In this issue of the Russian Mind magazine we will celebrate the 155th birth anniversary of Ivan Alexeyevich Bunin: a poet, writer, and thinker. In 1933 he was the first Russian author to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for «the strict skill with which he has developed the traditions of Russian classical prose-writing.» The issue is also dedicated to those outstanding figures who represented Russian culture – and, therefore, our lives – in the twentieth century. First of all, to Bunin’s contemporaries both in emigration and in Russia. After all, the stream of Russian culture, scattered by the will of a merciless era, is actually one and indivisible: it has no limits or borders in terms of States and generations alike.

…My father recalled his meetings with the poet and excellent translator of poetry Samuil Yakovlevich Marshak. Marshak, a disciple of Vladimir Stasov, one of the most influential Russian art critics after the reforms of Alexander II, once told him about how Stasov lived in Paris in the late 1880s. One day he was sitting in a Russian cafe on Passy when a grey-haired, stately old man came in.

“Hello,” the old man said.

None of the people sitting inside answered him. They did not even move and did not turn their heads in his direction. The old man looked at the people, who had just been so noisy, but were now suspicious and frozen, turned abruptly on his heels and left, slamming the door.

«Who was it?» Stasov asked his companion.

The answer was as biting as a whip:

«Dantes!”

«That’s when I felt the connection of times. Pushkin and I: it’s something surreal!… Figuratively speaking, we were separated by only two or three handshakes,» Marshak concluded his story.

I had a similar state of surrealism from what was happening in the home of the writer Umm-El-Banine, who lived in Paris. I was holding the following photograph in my hands: Ivan Alexeyevich Bunin in a soft hat slightly pulled down over his eyes, his face expression dreamy and haughty, tired and ironic. It is written in Bunin’s eternal pen at the bottom: «What is your German writer before this?» (A kind of token of faithfulness to Ernst Jünger, Umm-El-Banine’s great friend). And on the back: «Let me say, Janim [in the Turkic languages it is a form of address, meaning “my life”, “my darling”], in the words of Karl Ivanovich from Childhood by Leo Tolstoy:

Remember when you are close,

Remember when you are far away,

Also remember forever,

Just as I am faithful and loving!

I. B. 18 August 1946. Paris.”

Bunin and… me! Isn’t it fantastic? But I was holding that photo in my hands. And the one to whom it was dedicated was in front of me. Umm-El-Banine – slender, light and smiling. She laughed, looking at my hands trembling as I was holding the picture, like a fragile ancient Novgorod charter: «Don’t be afraid, the card won’t fall apart. Just like the armchair you’re sitting in. Whenever Bunin came here and sank into it, it was standing in the same place…»

The Bunin of Paris. Bunin’s Paris. The boulevards he walked on, the cafes he met with his friends in, and the halls where he read his novels and short stories, and sometimes his poems. La Muette, Place des Ternes, the Champs-Elysees… I remember a poet asserting that people’s looks can polish any stone. In this case, there are a lot of Bunin’s “autographs” left on the pavements of Paris.

«The hardest thing for a Russian in exile is to remain himself. Unfortunately, it happens that a writer who has fled his home from the need to act against his conscience and make dubious compromises has to mortify his spirit again in order to survive, but this time abroad. One yoke, noticeable or not, gives way to another… fortunately, this cup has passed me by.»

In my view, these words that Andrei Sinyavsky said in Paris are applicable to Ivan Bunin. Despite all the trials prepared for him by time and history, Bunin always remained himself. Like what? Here is what Umm-El-Banine wrote about this in her book Ivan Bunin’s Last Duel: «The small Debussy Hall could hardly accommodate all of Bunin’s numerous devotees. The reclining chairs were taken by storm: they had even to put chairs on the stage…

At the Nobel Prize ceremony, Stockholm, 1933. From left to right: G. N. Kuznetsova, I. Trotsky, V. N. Bunina, Andrei Sedykh, I. A. Bunin

“The crush in the hall did not affect me. Since I enjoyed Bunin’s favour, I was given a chair in the front row just opposite the reader. As straight as a candle and as imposing as a king, he appeared in the hall majestically and was greeted with thunderous applause. The snowy whiteness of his hair and his exquisite elegance gave him an irresistible charm. When he started reading, I was even more delighted: his voice, which was too loud in my small room, was just perfect there. It reached all the corners of the hall, humming like a trumpet and enchanting both us and himself. Under the gaze of his admirers Bunin towered and reigned supreme…

“Bunin did not take advantage of the audience’s admiration and did not protract his reading, as others would have done in his place. In addition, he read ideally: neither too fast nor too slowly; he had excellent diction and never fell into pomposity: he read with the same restraint as he wrote. The evening ended with a triumph and a standing ovation. A monarch responding to his subjects’ greetings from a balcony would not have nodded to the crowd with more regal grandeur than Bunin did.»

A lord, narcissistic and constantly reflecting: this is how Bunin appears in many memoirs. Besides, Bunin’s pose had nothing of the “celebrity type” that he might have felt after being awarded the Nobel Prize. It was all perfectly natural, because it couldn’t have been otherwise.

«Both before emigrating and after leaving Russia, both before the Nobel Prize and after it, Bunin, in fact, remained the same,» Nina Nikolaevna Berberova, another wonderful émigré writer, told me in Paris. “A very agreeable representative of old Russia. He reminded me of my grandfather, not even my parents. I saw my parents in the context of the revolutions – first the February Revolution, then the Bolshevik one. But I couldn’t imagine Bunin in that context. He wasn’t old, but he was old-fashioned…»

Yes, Ivan Alexeyevich himself felt as if he had belonged more to the generation of Ivan Turgenev and Leo Tolstoy than of Maxim Gorky and Vikenty Veresaev. Maybe it was precisely in this «old-fashionedness» that the secret of Bunin’s chosenness lay, which we are beginning to comprehend fully now that – without exaggeration –various Russian media cite Cursed Days almost weekly. Including Bunin’s chosenness as a poet. (It seems that this aspect of Bunin’s genius has not yet been sufficiently appreciated: is it because as a poet he belongs more to the generation of Fyodor Tyutchev than to his contemporaries?) A lyric poet, philosopher and prophet:

False messiahs walked in the world,

But I was not deceived and guessed,

That lechery and disgrace are their liturgies,

And their speeches are a clanging cymbal.

He wrote these lines long before the truly cursed days – the dispossession of kulaks, the purges, and the Gulag. Alas, they were largely prophetic.

Unlike Gorky, Kuprin, and A.N. Tolstoy, Bunin did not return to his motherland, despite the charm and exhortations of “messengers” from Moscow who kept inviting him earnestly and kindly (it suffices to name at least Konstantin Simonov and his wife, the actress Valentina Serova). He never returned, not even as a tourist-visitor. This irreconcilability is also another challenge of Ivan Bunin, who wrote in October 1952, shortly before his death, in the preface to his book The Rose of Jericho, published by the Chekhov Publishing House: «I was not among those who were caught off guard by it (the revolution – K.P.), for whom its scale and atrocities were unexpected, but nevertheless reality exceeded all my expectations: no one who did not see it will ever understand what the Russian Revolution soon turned into. This sight was an absolute horror to anyone who had not lost the image and likeness of God…»

And from the Cursed Days: «Russia is a classic country of troublemaker. There were holy men, and there were builders of high, albeit cruel fortresses. But what a long and incessant struggle they were in with the troublemakers, the destroyers: all sorts of sedition, quarrel, bloody disorder and absurdity!»

Bunin openly loathed any forms of violence, rudeness, and humiliation. In a short but heartfelt article On Bunin, published in the Vozrozhdenie Parisian emigre magazine on the tenth anniversary of the writer’s death, Zinaida Alexeyevna Schakovskoy, a well-known writer and public figure of the Russian diaspora, recalled how Ivan Alexeyevich, «justly outraged at the Nazi customs officers who stripped him naked at the border”, asked her (she was not yet the Russian Mind’s editor-in-chief at that time – she became one in the late 1960s), «to publicize this outrage in the press.» Later, after the publication of Dark Avenues, he would present her with one of its first copies, accompanied by an inscription: «The Decameron was written during the plague. Dark Avenues in the years of Hitler and Stalin – when they strove to devour each other.»

However, the Soviet authorities paid Bunin with mutual «love”. After repeated fruitless attempts to convince Russia’s first Nobel laureate in literature to return home on a wave of post-war patriotism, the second edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, whose first volumes appeared in the early 1950s, declared the writer to be “obsessed with an absolutely rabid hatred of Soviet Russia.»

Monument to I. A. Bunin in the town of Grasse, France

Nevertheless, Stalin’s Cerberuses were powerless to separate the writer from Russia. The only way they managed to take revenge on Bunin, who was painfully experiencing the belated fame that came to him abroad, was to deprive him of the right to be buried in his native land. But there is a logic in this posthumous punishment that was beyond the dictators’ control. Bunin rests surrounded if not by people close to him (a genius is always lonely), then by those who are connected with him both by their destinies and their talent: Remizov, Shmelev, Zaitsev, Nadezhda Teffi, Georgy Ivanov, Aldanov, Sasha Cherny, to name but a few. If the “people’s path” to the small town of Saint-Genevieve-des-Bois near Paris does not “disappear” (to put it in Alexander Pushkin’s words), it is primarily because Ivan Bunin is buried in its cemetery. The faraway and beautiful constellation of luminaries of Russian literature continues to give Russians its warmth even from another world, and the main planet in this incredible galaxy is him – Ivan Alexeyevich Bunin. It’s not without reason that they say that the Russian cemetery in Saint-Genevieve-des-Bois has a unique atmosphere.

…Each of us chose a pot (laying fresh flowers on graves in Saint-Genevieve-des-Bois is banned). The writer Viktor Petrovich Astafyev, who came from Moscow, was with chrysanthemums, and I was with veronicas. So, we made for the cemetery “gilded” in the autumn. The Russian cemetery stood in the foggy October languor. It was Saturday morning: the church was closed, and there were almost no people in sight… We walked along a small avenue, and the further and deeper we went, the more anxious and tense the old writer was. I sensed his tension, but at first attributed it to his age. I thought: “Astafyev, as a man who stands much closer to the last bank of the river of life than to the first, involuntarily attunes himself to the cemetery in a mournful philosophical way.” But once Bunin’s grave appeared, Viktor Petrovich rushed to it, like someone thirsting to a spring, and I realised that I was mistaken.

“This is where you sleep, Ivan Alexeyevich… This is how it is…” Astafyev froze at a small grey grave. He fell silent. It seemed that he wanted to be alone, and I stepped aside. “Yes, yes, go!” The writer nodded gratefully. «I’ll stay here for a while.»

At the corner of the avenue I turned round and saw Astafyev standing with his hands tightly gripping the granite beam of the cross, as if numb. My first thought was to dash to help him. It was as if the four-pointed Maltese cross on Bunin’s grave could, like a statue of a Knight Commander, drag him into the realm of shadows. But then it dawned on me: on the contrary, Astafyev was drawing strength from a rough stone, warm from the autumn sun. All his life he had been walking to a meeting with Bunin, and now it had taken place.

Whitish, yellow, and red leaves were falling onto the brick-strewn paths and close rows of tombstones. Father Siluan, an angelic-like creature, an émigré cemetery priest, trotted past, pushing his moped with difficulty. A flock of French boys picking up mushrooms, which grow abundantly on Russian graves, ran swiftly past…

When I returned, Astafyev was still standing in the same position, with his eyes closed. Only his lips were moving. Was he reading a prayer? Or Bunin’s poems?

…There is no one in the universe,

Only God and me.

He alone knows my

Dead sadness.

What I hide from everyone…

The cold, the lustre, the Mistral.

Astafyev heard my steps and said:

“Do you happen to have a piece of paper?”

I had a page from a notebook in my pocket. The writer took it and started drawing Bunin’s grave. The biro was shaking, and the drawing was very rough, but the basic contours were correct.

“Oh, what a shame! I, an old fool, should have taken at least a handful of earth or a twig from home to leave on his grave…. At home they will ask me how Ivan Alexeyevich is here,” Astafyev put the cap back onto the biro and lapsed into silence again.