Recollections

In this edited translation of famed writer Ivan Bunin’s Recollections translator Thomas Gaiton Marullo provides an intimate look at leading political, social, cultural, and literary figures from late imperial Russia, through the First World War and the revolutions of 1905 and 1917 to the birth of the Russian diaspora and the rise of the Soviet state.

Through engaging, colorful, and often idiosyncratic vignettes, Bunin (1870-1953) details his admiration for Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov, Sergei Rachmaninov, and Fyodor Chaliapin. He shares his love-hate relationships with Maxim Gorky, Alexei Tolstoy, and Alexander Kuprin. In addition, Marullo’s translation reveals Bunin’s hatred of avant-gardists, particularly Vladimir Mayakovsky, as well as his thoughts and experiences on war, revolution, and exile. Bunin’s work led, in the end, to his bittersweet reception of the Nobel Prize in Literature (1933) in Stockholm, making him the first Russian and the first writer in exile ever to receive this award. Recollections reveals the author’s feelings toward this unprecedented event.

Bunin’s Recollections stands not only as a stark summa of his passage through literature and life but also as an equally bold apologia as to his place in both.

Thomas Gaiton Marullo is Professor of Russian and Russian Literature at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author, most recently, of Fyodor Dostoevsky--The Gathering Storm (1846-1847).