Over the past decade, Western interest in Ivan Bunin has undergone a curious revival. Even as aficionados of the writer bemoan the fact that Bunin is little known (and read) in Europe and the United States, publishers on both sides of the Atlantic have been translating his long and short works at an impressive rate. Since 2002 alone, at least three new editions of Bunin's writing have appeared. Such interest on the part of their publishers is laudatory. After all, Bunin had a long and distinguished career as one of Russia's best-known and best-loved writers. His almost 70-year contribution to Russian literature was the longest in the national written canon, surpassing even that of Leo Tolstoy.
Born near Oryol in 1870, Bunin hailed from aristocrats who traced their lineage to the rise of Moscow in the 15th century but who, like so many of their class, had fallen on hard times after the abolition of serfdom in 1861. In his early years, Bunin wrote poems, stories and novellas on the plight of "masters" and "men" in the Russian fin de siecle, winning acclaim as an elected member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and as a three-time recipient of the coveted Pushkin Prize. Sadly, though, Bunin was not fated to enjoy his country's esteem for long. Leaving his homeland in 1920, he spent the last three decades of his life in the West, cursing the Soviet regime with a vehemence that even his fellow emigres found excessive, and, in his writing, exploring human problems rather than sociopolitical ones. Yet during this time, Bunin also gained international recognition for his art. In 1933, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature -- the first Russian writer and the first writer in exile to be accorded this honor.
Initially, Hettlinger treats his readers to stormy scenes of sex, love and death. There are Mitya and Katya, who fight more than fondle, their relationship ending in the Werther-like suicide of the hero. There are the two students -- "rich, healthy, young" -- who frolic in turn-of-the-century Moscow only to have the lad, years later, encounter his beloved as a nun (or nun-like figure) in an abbey. There is the officer Elagin who murders his lover at her own request but who later stands in stoic indifference before those who defend or prosecute him. There is the estate master Petrusha who, after a whirlwind affair with the family maid, Tanya, leaves for Moscow, sadly unaware of historical forces. "That was in February, in the terrible year of 1917," the narrator ends his story. "He was in the countryside for the last time in his life."
Hettlinger saves the best for last. In the hauntingly beautiful "Sukhodol," the anonymous "my sister and I," together with their servant, Natalya, try to make sense of the demise of their aristocratic family and, in a larger context, of the fall of their homeland. Together, they pore over legends, memories, stories and songs to understand why, despite rampant cruelty, madness and the fact that "no one knows under which mounds grandmother and grandfather lie," the estate holds a vise-like grip on its inhabitants, young and old. In the equally stirring "The Scent of Apples," the narrator overrides the hungry borzois, invasive trains and biblical blizzards and floods that destroy his family home by summoning up memories of hunting, feasting and, of course, the scent of apples.
As Hettlinger's translations make abundantly clear, Bunin's characters always do the wrong thing with the wrong person at the wrong time and in the wrong place. That is part of their charm. More alluring and perverse, perhaps, they throw themselves and others off cliffs with abandon. Incorrigible sinners, they never learn from their mistakes. Even as they are doing the deed, they set about planning to do it again. It is small wonder, therefore, that these men and women laugh only when they are most hurt.
At the same time, though, Bunin's characters take every opportunity to rise, phoenix-like, out of the mess they have made of life. They fly as philosophers into the ethers of truth and beauty; they romp as hedonists through the delights of food, sex and sun; they forage as wanderers through memory, nature and culture; they attempt "eternal returns" and resurrect multiple pasts in order to create new realities and worlds by which they can idealize the good, forgive (or forget) the bad and re-enter paradise to enjoy what God has given them -- to eat apples without retribution or punishment!
"What do we know, what do we understand, what can we understand?" Bunin once told the writer Vladimir Zenzinov. "Only this: From the life of humankind, from the centuries of generations, only that which is noble, kind and splendid has remained on this earth. All that is wicked and base, stupid and sordid, does not, in the end, leave a trace. ... And what has remained, what is there now? The best pages of the best books; legends about honor, conscience, self-sacrifice and noble deeds; marvelous songs and status; great and sacred graves; Greek temples, Gothic cathedrals, their heavenly splendid colored glass, the thunderings and wails of their organs; the 'Dies Irae' and 'Death Will Be Set Right by Death.'"
To this august list can be entered the works of Ivan Bunin; to it can also be added the translations of Graham Hettlinger, who shows us, once again, why Bunin should be read.
Thomas Gaiton Marullo teaches Russian literature at the University of Notre Dame. He has written six books on the life, art and times of Ivan Bunin.
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