Summary
Ivan Bunin: Under the hammer and sickle and other stories
The first Russian writer crowned with the Nobel Prize. Dark, troubled times have come again, I'm afraid - for a long time. The wolf changes its fur, but never its temper! Russia is like that: our entire history is one step forward, two steps back, to its primordial being - raw primitivism, the beginning of things. The last classic and the first Russian writer crowned with the Nobel Prize in 1933, Ivan Bunin is a modernist who appeared at the turn of two centuries and two epochs, uniting the best traditions of Russian literature of the 19th century - Pushkin's clarity, Tolstoy's naturalness and Chekhov's brevity - with the literary taste of the emerging "silver age" of Russian literature. After he emigrated to Paris in 1920, he was banned in the Soviet Union, but he became known not only among Russian emigrants and French writers, but was also noticed by D.H. Lawrence and Leonard Wolf, who translated and published his stories in the famous publishing house Hogarth Press. A forerunner of 20th century literary miniatures and a master of the short form, Bunin virtuoso evokes memories from pre-revolutionary Russia, all those timeless features of an era that is gone or dying. This selection, which frames "Russia on the Run" in terms of genre and theme, includes short stories mostly written after 1920, published in Russian magazines in emigration and in his foreign collections of stories and writings.
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