Ivan Bunin (1870-1953) was the first Russian writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature - in 1933 - and he wrote these luminous, engaging stories between 1938 and 1944. Their setting harks back to earlier decades, the Russia of dachas and serfs and devotion to religious icons.
Some of the early stories in the 324-page collection are short. A story simply entitled The Caucasus could have been expanded into a novel of 500 pages by Bunin’s illustrious predecessor, Ivan Goncharov. The Caucasus is a mere four pages but it conveys all, despite its brevity. It concerns a harried wife who, despite her alerted husband, travels with her lover to a remote rustic hideaway in the Caucasus. Bunin’s natural poetic facility and attraction to the landscape infuses the narrative, beautifully rendered into English by Hugh Aplin.
“Not far from us, in a coastal ravine descending out of the wood to the sea, a shallow, limpid little river leapt quickly along its stony bed. How wonderfully its lustre rippled, seethed, at that mysterious hour when like some marvellous creature, the late moon looked out intently from behind the mountains and the woods.”
We are of course talking different languages, but Bunin would seem to have a similarly visceral attachment to the rustic places of his native land, as does his near contemporary, the great French writer Marcel Pagnol.
In the story Styopa, a young landowner seduces the local inn-keeper’s daughter of that name, at the inn where he stops with his horse and drosky in the middle of a torrential downpour. Father is away temporarily, and the young grandee takes full advantage in her bedroom. Tearfully, she wails that he must marry her - surprisingly enough he agrees and duly makes preparations for the wedding. She is only 16 but in six months, as he tells her breezily, she will be old enough to marry.
He appears to draw on an ancient folk-tale in A Ballad where “the snows in the steppe (are) deeper than the height of a man.” An old prince is so much of a sexual predator that he even intends to seduce his son’s new bride. Having got wind of the old prince’s plan, son and bride flee on a troika, while father gives chase on his steed. Not long into his attempt to catch up with them, the old lecher is attacked by a wolf with eyes like fire who claws him in the Adam’s apple and kills him on the spot.
There are a couple of longer stories later in the sequence of tales. The 32-page Natalie unleashes further his taste for the erotic, which must have made his stories gold-dust in Soviet Russia, being in stark contrast to the chaste nineteenth century tales of writers like Tolstoy, Turgenev and Chekhov. In sum, Bunin can perhaps be viewed as the sensual celebrant of White Russian decadence, but he has the lyrical power of Turgenev and understands human relations with striking percipience. Highly recommended.
Paddy Kehoe
