Ivan Bunin - Biography - Emigration

Emigration

On March 28, after short stints in Sofia and Belgrade, Bunin and Muromtseva arrived in Paris, from then on dividing their time between apartments at 1, rue Jacques Offenbach in the 16th arrondissement of Paris and rented villas in or near Grasse in the Alpes Maritimes. Much as he hated Bolshevism, Bunin never endorsed the idea of foreign intervention in Russia. "It's for the common Russian countryman to sort out his problems for himself, not for foreign masters to come and maintain their new order in our home. I'd rather die in exile than return home with the help of Poland or England. As my father taught me: 'Love your own tub even if it's broken up'", he once said, allegedly, to Merezhkovsky who still cherished hopes for Pilsudsky's military success.

Slowly and painfully, overcoming physical and mental stress, Bunin returned to his usual mode of writing. Scream, his first book published in France, was compiled of short stories written in 1911–1912, years he referred to as the happiest of his life.

In France Bunin published many of his pre-revolutionary works and collections of original novellas, regularly contributing to the Russian emigre press. According to Vera Muromtseva, though, her husband often complained of his inability to get used to life in the new world. He said he belonged to "the old world, that of Goncharov and Tolstoy, of Moscow and St. Petersburg, where his muse had been lost, never to be found again". Yet his new prose was marked with obvious artistic progress: Mitya's Love (Митина любовь, 1924), Sunstroke (Солнечный удаp, 1925), Cornet Yelagin's Case (Дело коpнета Елагина, 1925) and especially The Life of Arseniev (Жизнь Аpсеньева, written in 1927–1929, published in 1930–1933) were praised by critics as bringing Russian literature to new heights. Konstantin Paustovsky called The Life of Arseniev an apex of the whole of Russian prose and "one of the most striking phenomena in the world of literature".

In 1925–1926 Cursed Days, Bunin's diary of the years 1918–1920 started to appear in the Paris-based Vizrozhdenye newspaper (its final version was published by Petropolis in 1936). According to Bunin scholar Thomas Gaiton Marullo, Cursed Days, one of the very few anti-Bolshevik diaries to be preserved from the time of the Russian Revolution and civil war, linked "Russian anti-utopian writing of the nineteenth century to its counterpart in the twentieth" and, "in its painful exposing of political and social utopias, Cursed Days heralded the anti-utopian writing of George Orwell and Aldous Huxley. Bunin and Zamyatin had correctly understood that the Soviet experiment was destined to self destruct," Marullo wrote.

In the 1920s and 1930s Bunin was regarded as the moral and artistic spokesman for a generation of expatriates who awaited the collapse of Bolshevism, a revered senior figure among living Russian writers, true to the tradition of Tolstoy and Chekhov. Accordingly, he was the first Russian to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, which was awarded to him in 1933 "for following through and developing with chastity and artfulness the traditions of Russian classic prose". Per Halstroem, in his celebratory speech, noted the laureate's poetic gift. Bunin for his part praised the Swedish Academy for honoring a writer in exile. In his speech, addressing the Academy, he said:

Overwhelmed by the congratulations and telegrams that began to flood me, I thought in the solitude and silence of night about the profound meaning in the choice of the Swedish Academy. For the first time since the founding of the Nobel Prize you have awarded it to an exile. Who am I in truth? An exile enjoying the hospitality of France, to whom I likewise owe an eternal debt of gratitude. But, gentlemen of the Academy, let me say that irrespective of my person and my work your choice in itself is a gesture of great beauty. It is necessary that there should be centers of absolute independence in the world. No doubt, all differences of opinion, of philosophical and religious creeds, are represented around this table. But we are united by one truth, the freedom of thought and conscience; to this freedom we owe civilization. For us writers, especially, freedom is a dogma and an axiom. Your choice, gentlemen of the Academy, has proved once more that in Sweden the love of liberty is truly a national cult.

In France, Bunin found himself, for the first time, at the center of public attention. He felt profoundly shocked by the barrage of photos of him in the press. On November 10, 1933, the Paris newspapers came out with huge headlines: "Bunin - the Nobel Prize laureate" giving the whole of the Russian community in France cause for celebration. "You see, up until then we, émigrés, felt like we were at the bottom there. Then all of a sudden our writer has been given an internationally acknowledged prize! And not for some political scribblings, but for real prose! "After having been asked to write a first page column for the Paris Revival newspaper, I stepped out in the middle of the night onto the Place d'Italie and toured the local bistros on my way home, drinking in each and every one of them to the health of Ivan Bunin!" fellow Russian writer Boris Zaitsev wrote. Back in the USSR, though, the reaction was negative: Bunin's triumph was explained there as "an imperialist intrigue".

Dealing with the Prize, Bunin donated 100,000 francs to a literary charity fund, but the process of money distribution caused controversy among his fellow Russian émigré writers. It was during this time that Bunin's relationship with Gippius and Merezhkovsky (a fellow Nobel Prize nominee who'd once suggested that they divide the Prize between the two, should one of them get it, and had been refused) deteriorated. Although reluctant to become involved in politics, Bunin was now feted as both a writer and the embodiment of non-Bolshevik Russian values and traditions. Inevitably, his travels throughout Europe featured prominently on the front pages of the Russian emigre press for the remainder of the decade.

In 1934–1936 The Complete Bunin (in 11 volumes) was published in Berlin by the Petropolis company. 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. 1936 was marred by an incident in Lindau on the Swiss-German border when Bunin, having completed his European voyage, was stopped and unceremoniously searched. The writer (who caught cold and fell ill after the night spent under arrest) responded by writing a letter to the Paris-based Latest News newspaper. The incident caused disbelief and outrage in France. In 1937 Bunin finished his book The Liberation of Tolstoy, held in the highest regard by Leo Tolstoy scholars.

In 1938 Bunin began working on what would later become a celebrated cycle of nostalgic stories with a strong erotic undercurrent and a Proustian ring. The first 11 stories of the cycle were published as Dark Avenues (or Dark Alleys) in New York (1943); the cycle appeared in a full version in 1946 (in France). These stories assumed a more abstract and metaphysical tone which has been identified with his need to find refuge from the "nightmarish reality" of Nazi occupation. Furthermore, Bunin's prose became more introspective, a phenomenon that he attributed to "the fact that the Russian is surrounded by the spectacle of things that were enormous, broad and lasting: the steppes, the sky. In the West everything is cramped and enclosed, and this automatically produces a turning towards the self, inwards."