"Come back home, my soul!" Presidential Library marking Ivan Bunin’s anniversary

October 22, 2020 marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of Ivan Alekseevich Bunin (1870-1953) - one of the most talented representatives of the Silver Age in prose and poetry, winner of the 1933 Nobel Prize in Literature. The electronic collections of the Presidential Library contain not only digitized copies of editions of his works of the early 20th century, photographs, letters, but also research papers dedicated to the writer, abstracts of dissertations.

Ivan Bunin was born into an old noble family in Voronezh. The father, who received a small inheritance, went bankrupt, so Bunin spent his childhood and youth in the ancestral estates of Butyrka and Ozerka in the Eletsky district of the Oryol province (now located in Lipetsk Region).

From an early age, Bunin was very sensitive to Russian literature and was proud that he could rightfully call one of the leading figures of Russian literature, the poet Vasily Zhukovsky, the son of Afanasy Bunin, Ivan Alekseevich's ancestor on the paternal side, and a captured Turkish woman as his relative.

The seemingly modest nature of Yelets Region entered the flesh and blood of the growing writer, he will then dream about it in exile in Paris. 

The first prose book by Ivan Bunin - the collection “To the Ends of the World” and Other Stories”, was published in 1897 in St. Petersburg. It is with this edition that the above-mentioned catalog-album “Ivan Bunin in Print (1897–2011)” starts with. At the beginning of 1901, the Moscow publishing house "Scorpion" published a collection of Bunin's poems "Leaf Fall", which (together with the translation of "Song of Hiawatha") was awarded the Pushkin Prize of the Russian Academy of Sciences (1903). In 1915, in Petrograd, the publishing house "A. F. Marks Publishing and Printing Association" presented readers with a six-volume complete collection of the writer's works as a free supplement to the illustrated magazine "Niva".

In pre-revolutionary times, Bunin was one of the most published and readable literary men of the Silver Age, he moved in the brilliant artistic environment of the two capitals. The photographs from the Presidential Library’s collections capture him next to Maxim Gorky, Fyodor Chaliapin and others.

The writer regarded the Russian revolution as a national catastrophe, did not accept it categorically. He expressed his attitude towards it in the book "Cursed Days", which contains diary entries from 1918 to 1920. In January 1920, Bunin left Russia for good and settled in Paris. There he wrote his most intimate works related to his homeland: "Sunstroke", "The Case of the Cornet Elagin", "Ida", the story "Mitya's Love", the lyric and autobiographical novel "The Life of Arsenyev", stories and short stories included in the cycle " Dark Alleys ", about which Bunin himself once mentioned:" I think "Dark Alleys" is the best that I have written... ". But not a single work of the first representative of Russian writers who received the Nobel Prize legally crossed the borders of the USSR. Everything written by him before leaving for forced emigration was also under an unspoken ban.

"The most reading country in the world" practically did not know either prose or poetry of the world famous writer.

In Soviet times “an interest in Bunin, when he was not published, was simply pointless for most readers. So I didn’t read Bunin’s works before the war, because in Voronezh, where I lived then, it was impossible to get Bunin’s works”, - veteran writer Grigory Baklanov lamented. But when, finally, the long-awaited meeting of the works of the emigre writer with the Russian-speaking reader took place, Bunin took his rightful place among the pillars of Russian literature. The first collection of his works in the USSR was published in 1956.

An active study of his literary heritage began, which is confirmed, among other things, by the selection of dissertation abstracts, which entered the electronic collections of the Presidential Library, spotlighting the writer's contribution to the national treasury of culture.

From the author's abstract of Valentina Fedotova "The Poetics of the Diary Prose of Ivan Bunin", examining the writer's personal notes throughout almost his entire life, one can draw conclusions about what significance they had for his work. The assertion that diaries do not pose and do not solve any actual artistic tasks, some researchers today seem controversial, the author of the work notes: "Many diaries contain complete, artistically organized fragments".

Records of the first decade of the 20th century, according to the author, convey the characteristic mood in Ivan Alekseevich's assessment of the impending political storm in Russia. Even in the atmosphere of the patriarchal world, which was reflected in “Antonov Apples”, Bunin saw the inevitability of the change of eras, the running of time, mercilessly destroying everything that is outliving its age: and feasts, not to perish at the first encounter with a new life?"

Later, Bunin wrote in the "Cursed Days" that the Bolsheviks "are ready for the destruction of at least half of the Russian people for the sake of the destruction of the" accursed past". By the way, in France, according to the author of the essay "Poetics of the diary prose of Ivan Bunin", Ivan Alekseevich continued to write only in Russian.

Analyzing from abroad the causes of the deepest social crisis, which Bunin considered the October revolution 1917, he will write in the “Cursed Days”: “From us, like a tree, - both a club and an icon, - depending on the circumstances, who processes this tree: Sergiy of Radonezh or Emelka Pugachev. If I didn’t love this “icon”, this Rus’, I didn’t see why I would go so crazy all these years, because of what I suffered so continuously, so fiercely?”

The theme of that “Rus”, that “icon” sounds especially shrill in Bunin's early poems and stories published on the pages of pre-revolutionary magazines, which are available on the Presidential Library's portal. Thus, the collection "1914" provides such lines written by Ivan Alekseevich Bunin.