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Biographical note
Ivan Bunin (1870–1953) was the first Russian writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. His last book of fiction, Dark Avenues, is arguably the most widely read twentieth-century collection of short stories in Russia.Bunin can perhaps be viewed as the sensual celebrant of White Russian decadence, but he has the lyrical power of Turgenev and understands human relations with striking percipience. Highly recommended.
RTÉ
I do not know any other writer whose external world is so closely tied to another, whose sensations are more exact and indispensable, and whose world is more genuine and also more unexpected.
- André Gide,
One of the great achievements of twentieth-century Russian émigré literature, Dark Avenues – translated here for the first time into English in its entirety – took Bunin’s poetic mastery of language to new heights.
Written between 1938 and 1944 and set in the context of the Russian cultural and historical crises of the preceding decades, this collection of short fiction centres around dark, erotic liaisons. Love – in its many varied forms – is the unifying motif in a rich range of narratives, characterized by the evocative, elegiac, elegant prose for which Bunin is renowned.