cover image Ivan Bunin: From the Other Shore, 1920-1933: A Protrait from Letters, Diaries, and Fiction

Ivan Bunin: From the Other Shore, 1920-1933: A Protrait from Letters, Diaries, and Fiction

. Ivan R. Dee Publisher, $35 (348pp) ISBN 978-1-56663-083-2

Viewed by some as a major 20th-century voice, by others as a backward-looking aristocrat, Russian emigre writer Ivan Bunin (1870-1953) was the moral and artistic spokesman for a generation of expatriates who awaited bolshevism's collapse so they could return home. He arrived destitute in Paris with his common-law wife, Vera Muromtseva, in 1920, and, as this volume closes in 1933, won the Nobel Prize. Bunin's dire prophecies of Soviet tyranny and mass murder were more than fulfilled. A sequel to Ivan Bunin: Russian Requiem, this collage of letters, diary and memoir excerpts and stories as well as commentary by Bunin's contemporaries provides tantalizing glimpses of Russian emigre circles in 1920s Paris that include Igor Stravinsky, Marc Chagall, Anna Pavlova and Evgeny Zamyatin. Marullo is an associate professor of Russian at the University of Notre Dame. Photos not seen by PW. (June)