ON JUNE 9, 1918, Ivan Bunin and his wife, Vera Muromtseva-Bunina, arrived in German-occupied Orsha, a small town directly southwest of Smolensk, en route to Odessa. “We are . . . ‘abroad,’ ” Muromtseva-Bunina wrote in her diary. “With tears in his eyes, Ian said, ‘Never have I crossed into a [foreign] country with such a feeling of the border. I am shaking all over! Can it be that I am finally safe from the power of the people, from those pigs!’ ” Muromtseva-Bunina continued: “Ian was deliriously happy when a German punched a Bolshevik in the face. . . .”1
The unfortunate Bolshevik aside, Bunin had more profound causes for relief. Only three days before, he and his wife had escaped the Revolution and civil war that was ravaging Moscow. In Odessa, in the newly established republic of the Ukraine, they hoped to find safety and rest. There they planned to wait out events, hoping to return to Moscow when the Bolsheviks were overthrown and Russia returned to its imperial status.
For Bunin, leaving his country was particularly bittersweet. He realized that whatever trials he had suffered in the twilight of imperial Russia, he also had much to be grateful for. He had established himself as the last “nobleman” in Russian fiction. His works emerged from a literary tradition which, in less than a century, had moved the national written expression to the forefront of world literature and culture. In his own mind and that of many citizens and critics, Bunin was linked irrevocably to Pushkin, Turgenev, and Tolstoy. Works such as The Village (1909–1910) and Dry Valley (1911) were a fitting coda to a corpus that had begun with Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin (1823–1831), embraced Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons (1862), and seemed to reach near perfection with Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1865–1869) and Anna Karenina (1875–1877).
For his thirty-year career as a writer in Russia, Bunin was also thankful. On several occasions he had discussed life with Tolstoy, and he enjoyed a close friendship with Chekhov; as early as 1903 he had won the Pushkin Prize for Literature, an award he would receive twice more before he left Russia; and in 1909 he had been elected to the Academy of Sciences in Saint Petersburg with the title of “honored academician.” In pieces like “The Brothers” (1914), “The Gentleman from San Francisco” (1915), “Nooselike Ears” (1916), and “Chang’s Dreams” (1916), Bunin had shown that he could incisively portray Russian life while plumbing the depths of universal human passions and struggles.
In these pre-Revolutionary years, however, Bunin had also endured enormous suffering and pain from which he bore deep scars. Born in 1870, he had grown up in the diminished circumstances of the post-Emancipation gentry, without a close-knit family, advanced education, or assured career. By age thirty he complained to his brother Yuly that his life was a “joke,”2 and that existence was nothing but a daily and desperate struggle for survival. Blow followed upon blow. His marriage to Anna Nikolaevna Tsakni in 1898 failed in eighteen months; his only son, Kolya, died at the age of five; Chekhov passed away in 1904 and Tolstoy in 1910, leaving Bunin alone to carry on the legacy of “aristocratic” writing in a culture that increasingly rejected “gentry” values.
Most wrenching of all for Bunin, no doubt, was that readers and reviewers misconstrued the meaning of his life and art. He wrote in 1915: “The critics rushed to brand me with labels, to establish the parameters of my talent once and for all. . . . In their view, there was never a writer who was more quiet and fixed in his views than I. . . . I was the ‘singer of fall, of sadness, of noblemen’s nests.’ . . . Later they assigned me tags that were diametrically opposed. First I was a ‘Decadent,’ then a ‘Parnassian’ and a ‘cold master.’ . . . I was a Symbolist, a mystic, a realist, a neorealist, a god-seeker, a naturalist, and God knows what else. The critics plastered me with so many labels that I felt like a suitcase that had traveled the world. . . . The truth, however, was that I was very far from being fixed in my views, and that I was living a life a hundred times more complicated and more penetrating than anything I had yet published.”3
All the pain that Bunin had suffered in his early years was merely a prelude to the anguish brought on by the emerging chaos in his land. Bunin saw that Russia was entering a cataclysmic cycle of reaction, upheaval, and reform, and was rushing headlong toward the “abyss” and the “apocalypse” he had already discovered in civilization.4 There was ample evidence for his rising fears. In 1905 and 1906 Bunin witnessed the peasant revolts near Tula and Oryol and the devastation of his brother’s, Evgeny’s, estate at Ognevka. In some cosmic sense, he feared for the end of “patriarchal” Russia when in 1914 his country entered World War I.
Under the weight of mounting calamities, he wrote to a friend in March 1914: “I am firmly convinced that this Christmas will not be the last bloody one, for I know that people are beasts. . . . But there are thousands of ‘buts’ which are joyful and comforting: the voice of the human heart.” Bunin ended his letter with two visions of hope for a new society. In one, a “great idol” seemingly protects humankind from harm; in the other, the Lamb of God bids his subjects “to rise up and look around.”5
The essential tragedy in Bunin’s life was that his nation elected to follow a demagogue, not God, and that no one cared to hear about the dark side of the Bolshevik victory. Having fled peasant unrest in the provinces, Bunin and his wife arrived at Vera’s parents’ apartment in Moscow (just off the famed Arbat) on October 26, 1917.6 Scarcely ten days later, during the Bolshevik revolt of November 7, Bunin had to stand guard at the apartment for a week with scarcely any sleep or food, behind locked doors, shuttered windows, and gates barricaded by huge beams of wood. This fortress, however, did not insulate him from the anarchy outside: the fires and fighting in the streets; the guns, bombs, and flying shrapnel all assaulted his acute sensibilities. Red Army soldiers finally broke through the door and demanded weapons, though there were none.
It seems almost incredible that no sooner had the chaos in Moscow subsided than Bunin sought to resume his literary life. He attended meetings of the Writers’ Publishing House, the literary circle Wednesday, and the Moscow Artists’ Circle. There he debated the nature of the folk and of contemporary art with such writers as Bely, Bal’mont, Ehrenburg, and Alexei Tolstoy.
Such pretenses at normalcy could not, however, alleviate the increasing difficulties of the Bunins’ situation. That terrible winter of 1917–1918, together with Lenin’s arrival at the Kremlin in March 1918, deepened Bunin’s hatred of bolshevism. Matters did not come to a head, though, until two months later, when he traveled to the provincial cities of Kozlov and Tambov (roughly 260 miles southeast of Moscow) to give a series of literary readings and to procure food and staples that were in short supply in the capital.
Of this trip Muromtseva-Bunina wrote in her diary on May 23, 1918: “Bunin’s journey [to Tambov and Kozlov] gave him a genuine sense of the bolshevism that is spreading throughout Russia, a sense of hopelessness . . . of terror and the abyss. . . . He is firmly convinced that we have to go to the south as soon as possible.”7
On the following day Bunin appealed to Vladimir Friche, who would later become a leading literary critic but who at this time was serving in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for the new Soviet government, for passports to leave the city. Bunin told Friche that he would agree to “all kinds of cooperation”8 with the Bolsheviks if he and his wife were allowed to depart. Friche agreed, possibly because Bunin had earlier interceded on his behalf with the mayor of Moscow, who had wished to banish Friche for distributing underground revolutionary pamphlets.9
Bunin’s victory, though, was a Pyrrhic one. Overjoyed that he was free to leave Moscow, he suddenly realized that he might never again see the city or its cultural and religious landmarks. “Yesterday I passed by the Church of Saint Nikola,” he wrote in his diary on May 21, 1918, “and [having taken in] the still unravaged beauty of this island-type refuge . . . the radiance of the words and music that issued forth from its doors . . . and the lively, shimmering gold of the vestments and candles, [I realized] that all these wonders are the stuff of the human soul, the only things that it lives for. . . . And, having realized this, I cried for a full fifteen minutes . . . shedding tears that were terrible, bitter and sweet.”1
After emotional farewells to Yuly Bunin and to Gorky’s wife, Ekaterina Peshkova, the Bunins left Moscow on June 3, 1918. Their journey was difficult—traveling by hospital train through Orsha, Minsk, and Kiev before reaching Odessa on June 16. “What a terrible trip it was!” Bunin recalled in his Memoirs. “The train was accompanied by an armed guard—in case any new ‘Scythians’ escaping from the front would attack it. During the nights we passed through total darkness; all the stations were unlighted. Indeed, the only thing we met there was streams of vomit and other types of uncleanliness, together with the resounding sounds of cries and songs that were savage, hysterical, and drunken, that is, the ‘music of the Revolution’!”2
Odessa was not new to Bunin. He had visited the city several times in the 1890s and from 1898 to 1900 had lived there with Tsakni. He enjoyed Odessa’s exquisite setting on the northwestern shore of the Black Sea, where he had come to know Chekhov and such other writers as Alexander Kuprin. But in that city he had also experienced sadness and grief. It was there that his little boy had died. It was also in Odessa that, in the wake of the Revolution of 1905, Bunin had witnessed a series of pogroms against the Jews; and it was there that Tsakni had continued to reside after their separation. (The couple was formally divorced only in 1922.) The city had in fact fallen upon hard times even before the outbreak of revolution and civil war, so it scarcely beckoned to the Bunins as a promised land.
Indeed, when the Bunins arrived in Odessa in 1918 they were aghast to see how the city had declined since their earlier visits. Throughout the nineteenth century Odessa had been a bustling center of industry and commerce, almost unrivaled in growth.3 The expansion of Russia’s foreign trade, together with Odessa’s harbor, port, and railroads, made the city second only to Saint Petersburg in the transport of freight. At the turn of the century it was home to nearly five hundred enterprises, employing more than twenty thousand workers in such areas as mining, metallurgy, and food processing.4
Not surprisingly, Odessa’s manufacturing and commercial power also attracted restless workers, students, and sailors. For instance, it became a regional center for the terrorist group “The People’s Will,” whose members ultimately claimed responsibility for the 1881 murder of Tsar Alexander II. Odessa’s workers took part in the 1903 strike that paralyzed southern Russia; and two years later it was the site of pogroms as well as strikes and armed clashes with the police and tsarist troops. During this time, too, Russian sailors mutinied aboard the battleship Potemkin, an event that would become immortalized (with some poetic license) in Sergei Eisenstein’s famous 1925 film. These internal disruptions, the competition of the American grain trade, the poor quality, marketing, and distribution of Odessa’s goods, and, finally, the deterioration of the city’s harbor facilities caused Odessa to be bypassed for other ports on the Black Sea. At best, by 1918 Odessa had become a political refuge to frenzied souls like the Bunins.
When the Bunins arrived there in mid-June, the city had already changed hands twice that year. The Soviets had established power there on January 30, 1918; but German and Austrian troops occupied the city in March, holding it until November. In the ensuing months the Bunins would see Odessa become a “political Babel.”5 The city fell to the Ukrainian nationalist Petlyura, who controlled the city from December 11 to 18, 1918; to British and French troops, who held it until April 6, 1919; to Bolshevik forces, who occupied it for five months; and to General Denikin’s White antirevolutionary forces, who entered Odessa on August 24, 1919. The beleaguered city was ultimately retaken by the Soviets on February 7, 1920; and the Bunins, having signed passage on a boat in the city’s port a day earlier, left Russia forever on February 9, 1920. (Ironically, they were issued passports that allowed them to return to the homeland.) Although the couple knew that the “terrible times [in their homeland] were far from over,” their own suffering of a “thousand days and a thousand nights” had come to an end.6
It is testimony to the Bunins’ resourcefulness and resilience that despite severe political, economic, and social hardships, their life in Odessa exhibited a modicum of civility and grace. The writer Valentin Kataev recalled that Bunin cultivated an affluent and urbane image. He struck one as a “vacationer from the capital, intellectual, refined, and dressed in expensive summer sandals, foreign-made socks, and an ample well-ironed, canvas-like shirt . . . which was girded with a simple but evidently rather expensive leather belt, behind which he sometimes tucked in his hands, in the manner of Tolstoy. . . . If it grew hot, he would suddenly don a splendid panama hat which he had brought back from some distant land, or a linen peaked cap like those that Fet, Polonsky, or perhaps even Tolstoy himself used to wear.”7
Despite the challenging circumstances, Bunin extended this aristocratic aura to his domestic surroundings. The three ground-floor rooms in which he and Vera lived provided a haven from social and political chaos and served as a live-in museum in which the couple sought to preserve the way of life that the Bolsheviks were ruthlessly extirpating. “Our apartment is very beautiful,” Muromtseva-Bunina wrote to her parents in Moscow on December 4, 1918. “It is tastefully furnished, with many antiques. The rooms are large and bright . . . and have many conveniences. . . . I am living in comfort . . . such as I have never enjoyed in peaceful times.”8
Others agreed. As Kataev recalled, visitors to the Bunins’ home saw the house on Knyazheskaya Street as “a striking contrast to the situation in Odessa, in Russia, and in the world.” Ordinarily they were greeted at the door by “a very elegantly dressed maid in French heels, a starched cap, and a small cambric apron with doll-like pockets.” They were then ushered into “lordly rooms which featured massive shining doors, high clean ceilings, exquisitely polished parquet floors, Venetian windows with warm marble sills and brightly gleaming iron latches . . . and a small quantity of the most essential, but very good furniture . . . [all of which] was totally appropriate . . . to an aristocrat, a long-established nobleman, a Russian academician, a man of impeccable taste.”9
This domestic arrangement thus became a physical and spiritual refuge not only for the Bunins but for other Russian writers, professionals, and intellectuals who had fled the Bolsheviks. In Odessa Bunin enjoyed a singular spirit of community and camaraderie which he had not known as a citizen of Russia, nor would he later experience it as an emigré in France. “Never before,” Kataev recalled, “had Odessa attracted such a brilliant society.”1 Bunin’s home was frequented by such White generals as Wrangel, of whom Muromtseva-Bunina wrote in her diary on February 4, 1919, “the more I know him, the better I like him.”2 Others among the elite who came to socialize and to find respite at Bunin’s included politicians such as Kerensky, Rudnyov, Rodzyanko, and Fondaminsky-Bunakov; writers such as Kataev, Voloshin, Teffi, Inber, Olesha, Bagritsky, Paustovsky, Vertinsky, and Alexei Tolstoy; scholars such as Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky and Leonid Grossman; artists such as Nilus; and actors and actresses such as Olga Knipper (Chekhov’s widow).3
At times the ambience of the gatherings in the Bunins’ home was highly charged and political. Participants debated who had lost Russia, how the Revolution would be defeated, what would be the future of post-Soviet Russia. At other times they held a wake for their homeland. As relatives of the deceased, they paid their respects to the corpse and gathered in small groups to console themselves for their loss, to recall happier times, and to shake their heads over the “traitors” who had laid their homeland low. They lamented the plight of family or friends who had remained in the new Soviet state, or committed suicide, or fallen victim to starvation, drugs, despair, and the “Red terror.”
At other times the atmosphere of the gatherings in the Bunin household was strictly academic, out of touch with the mounting anarchy outside. In this case it was not unlike the ambience of the famous Tower, a 1905 Moscow literary salon whose mentor, Vyacheslav Ivanov, tried to disconnect from time and space with his thick carpets and boarded-up windows. The intelligenty of all backgrounds who regularly gathered at Bunin’s read their works and discussed philosophy, literature, and art. Recalling these almost surreal events, Kataev wrote: “It may seem strange, almost incredible that at a time when civil war raged all around . . . there continued in Bunin’s house, behind the mirrorlike windows, a life more imagined than real, a life in which a quite small circle of people discussed questions of literature, poetry, criticism, the reading of the Goncourt brothers in the original . . . the eternal arguments about Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. . . .”4
Bunin’s nineteen months in Odessa was the last time he would ever be so public. He gave readings and lectures, and published a series of articles in which he commented, boldly and insightfully, on the ideas and issues of the time. He advised novice writers about the nature of their craft. He contributed to several newspapers, including Southern Word, a publication founded by members of the White Volunteer Army in Odessa, and for which Bunin served as coeditor for a short period.
When he was not occupied with public literary and political matters, he would roam the streets of Odessa. There, unfailingly, he found stimulation and relief. In the city he could observe a microcosm of the world: the customs and speech of more than one million inhabitants, of whom 39 percent were Russians, 36 percent Jews, 17 percent Ukrainians, and the remainder Greeks, Armenians, and Poles.5 In Odessa Bunin mingled with shopkeepers, peasants, and professionals as he strolled down the city’s tree-lined streets and boulevards, taking in its sweeping vistas and marveling at its churches, buildings, and monuments.
Although Bunin was undeniably a class-conscious aristocrat, he sought out motley crowds whose appearance, sounds, and smells provided stimuli and rich sensory detail for his writing. “Almost every day, in any weather,” Kataev wrote, “Bunin would walk about Odessa for several hours at a time. . . . I once observed Bunin at a soldiers’ street market where he stood in a crowd, notebook in hand, calmly and unhurriedly writing down . . . the ditties that two brothers of the Black Sea fleet were reciting as they did a lively dance, their arms on each other’s shoulders, swinging their wide bell-bottoms. . . . I almost fainted with the sickening smells of sesame oil and garlic; but Bunin paid no attention whatsoever to these and worked calmly, covering page after page with notes. . . . He was incredibly curious, and he always had to know the life about him in all its details, and to see everything with his mercilessly sharp eyes.”6
Apart from these quiet moments, the storms of revolution and war relentlessly pounded the city. Anxiety, hunger, and disease; frequent searches; inflation and financial woes; arrests, executions, and “terrors”; ignorance of events in both Russia and the world; and the anarchy caused by the endless procession of armies into the city made the Bunins’ experience a mental state of “siege” and of “captivity by Hottentots.”7 Terrifying rumors, mostly false, seeped into their otherwise secure home and mind, forcing them to hide money and manuscripts, and spreading a contagion of despair.
The most shattering experience in Odessa, however, was the random bloodlust that Bunin called the “Satan of Cain’s anger”: Russians and others began to annihilate one another with abandon. The Bunins recognized that even Odessa had become a Sodom and Gomorrah; if they were not to succumb to its evil, they must flee the city, never turning back. “Odessa was like an individual who was feverish and infected with typhus,” I. Solokov-Mikitov wrote in his memoirs of the period. “The routed armies of General Denikin were leaving the city in disarray, pillaging and ravaging as they went. . . . Speculators yelled and argued in crowded cafés. . . . Random victims, washed up on the city’s banks by waves of civil war . . . hid in cold attics and cellars. . . . Taverns and dens were filled with deserters and pickpockets. . . . Military patrols roamed through the city, looking like street thieves. . . . People openly sold stolen goods in noisy bazaars.”8
Throughout his stay in Odessa Bunin repeatedly expressed his anguish with a characteristic penchant for drama and self-pity. Memoirists of the time confirmed the rapid decline in his physical and spiritual health. “The first time I saw Bunin in Odessa,” Alexeev wrote, “I was stunned by his drawn and tortured face. His sallow complexion and his flaccid, lifeless cheeks had taken on the hue of an old, fading cypress tree. Bushy eyebrows overhung his eyes from the top; grey swollen bags (the consequence of insomnia) rimmed them from below.”9
He still dressed and played the part of an aristocrat; but, in a manner not unlike that of Uncle Pavel, the obdurate barin in Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, Bunin seemed to be dying from within. As the Soviets gained the upper hand in the final months of 1919, he realized that exile was now the only option for himself and his wife. They had experienced Soviet rule briefly in Moscow and now Odessa; they dared not continue to lead lives at risk. The Soviet press had attacked Bunin for his pro-White leanings; he had suffered several run-ins with local commissars and mobs; and rumors of his impending arrest were common. The Bunins knew that a Soviet “paradise” could never materialize, and that they could not endure a third period of physical and spiritual suffocation. “I always feel that ‘airlessness’ which attends the Bolsheviks,” Muromtseva-Bunina wrote in her diary on April 7, 1919. “I felt it during the first five moments we were in Moscow, when the Bolsheviks were not nearly as savage and bloodthirsty as they were after our departure, but even then I could not breathe. I remember, when we rushed out of their sweet paradise, the great gladness, the joy of light breathing that seized us right away.”1 A modern-day Adam and Eve, they chose to be banished from the Soviet Eden.
Whenever Bunin put pen to paper in Moscow and Odessa in 1918 and 1919, it was to indict his countrymen for their failings and to recall them to their senses before their country self-destructed. In Cursed Days it was one of Bunin’s primary objectives to use the images and ideals of the past to comment insightfully on the issues and problems of the present. The book is thus an artful mix of old and new. It bears an affinity to several medieval genres from Russian literature, and at times recalls historical chronicles whose authors recorded momentous events as they condemned internecine strife, lamented the divine wrath visited upon sins, and begged for mercy and deliverance from pestilence, invaders, and the like. Cursed Days also brings to mind medieval Russian slova or “sermons of solemn narration,” in which homilists extolled virtue and condemned vice, riveting their listeners’ attention with dazzling discourse and rhetoric, and borrowing from the Bible, the teachings of church fathers, and excerpts from literature and secular works. In still other ways Cursed Days recalls the “stamplike” structure of Russian icons in which the depicted individual is starkly situated amidst miniatures that depict episodes from his or her life.
The book also resurrects motifs from nineteenth-century Russian realism, especially the fiction of the Russian Natural School of the late 1830s and 1840s which depicted “slices” of unvarnished city life by means of type, daguerreotype, and exposé. In Cursed Days, Bunin, like the writers of the Natural School, boldly takes to the street. He talks to friends and strangers, eavesdrops on conversations, records data, and seeks to present an exhaustive picture of his subjects and surroundings. Like the nineteenth-century Russian novel, Cursed Days is also epic and encyclopedic: numerous characters, subplots, and “voices”; reflections on timely and eternal questions; the merging of public and private lives; and intrigue rooted in “lacerating” rumors, incessant scandal, and bored and fearful citizens from all social classes and walks of life. Indeed, Cursed Days often appears as the work of a Gogolian or Dostoevskian “madman” who writes “anything that comes to mind.” Internal dialogues and freewheeling digressions on literature, history, and philosophy find expression in a style that is chaotic and high-strung, often defying the rules of grammar and taste, and devolving into sentence fragments punctuated with numerous question marks and exclamation points.
Despite these suggestions of earlier literary styles, Cursed Days has a contemporary feel. The work follows upon Russian revolutionary fiction in espousing a literature of fact. Bunin sidesteps empirical time and space by shattering the linear and logical narratives of Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Chekhov into shardlike fragments, and by interspersing these shreds with selections from verbal, pictorial, musical, and dramatic modern art. He crisscrosses his tale with snatches of conversations, clippings from newspapers, and snippets from songs and hymns, ditties and doggerel. To these fragments he adds jottings from diaries, memories of village and urban life, and citations from writers, intellectuals, military men, and political figures—Russian and non-Russian, present and past. To complete his pictures of social and national life, Bunin uses smatterings of sketches from posters, placards, and banners, intimate dramatic tableaux, scenes of music and dance, the “mass spectacles” of parades, funerals, and revolts, and village and urban flashbacks to the February and October revolutions of 1917.
Cursed Days and Bunin’s writings in Southern Word drive home this theme: Revolutions must be viewed with “genuinely savage hatred” and “genuinely savage contempt.” They promise much, but destroy. To the untrained eye, the Russian Revolution may seem a salvific event. For the first time in memory, Russians appear to be happy, purposeful, and content. They dramatize the “national surge” in parades, banners, and songs. They shout slogans, bidding workers and peasants to throw off their shackles and unite as one. In one fell swoop, newly bolshevized Russians have changed their time and space: they update calendars, introduce time zones, and rename buildings, cities, and streets after Lenin, Trotsky, and others. Nothing, it seems, eludes their reformist touch, even Russian orthography.
And revolutionary Russians are buoyant about the future, certain that prosperity is just over the horizon. Indeed, post-1917 Russians are so enthusiastic about their newfound Soviet beliefs that they invite enemies and nonbelievers alike to join the proletariat. With the brashness that comes with assumed success, they thumb their nose at the West and vow to have their “Bolshevik belly” crush the world.
Bunin records these impressions, but he does not accept them. The key message in both Cursed Days and his writings for Southern Word is that Lenin, Trotsky, and their cohorts are nurturing a perverse dynamic just below the appearance of revolutionary sweetness and light. Metaphorically Bunin believes that the Bolsheviks are lunatics who have taken over the asylum, and who have seized control of Russia for the sole purpose of asserting a Nietzschean “will to power.” Impudent and arrogant, they have cut short a “magnificent, centuries-old life” and replaced it with a “bewildering existence,” destroying all systems of morality and law and advancing their own interests under the guise of the Revolution and of the proletariat they claim to represent.
Before the Revolution, Bunin charges, Bolshevik leaders were pitiful, dull, mangy-looking creatures; since their coup, they demand respect as social engineers and “people of substance.” They have become “commissars” whose vulgar penchant for wine, women, and palaces underscores the chameleonlike quality of their values and beliefs. They vaunt communal ownership but feather their nests; they curse the past but speak incoherently of the future. They pose as saviors but murder their own countrymen and panic at any sign of danger. Like hirelings, they are the first to flee from other predators, abandoning Russia to its fate.
Bunin takes every opportunity to refute Bolshevik claims of a new, so-called “Soviet man” by showing Russian citizens as disordered and diseased. Their eyes are cloudy and drugged; their bodies recall those of skeletons and chickens; their faces are, variously, glossy, wizened, or sallow. The citizens in Cursed Days appear so regressed, physically and spiritually, that they seem “reborn” to lower forms of life. One group, with its slanted eyes, wooden faces, and wild hair, appears to be heir to “Mongol atavism.” A second group recalls ghosts and ghouls—their visages are painted and powdered, their bodies “look all white in the twilight,” and their voices give off plaintive wails. A third group resembles dogs, monkeys, and other animals; a fourth has severe genetic difficulties: vacuous expressions and idiotic smiles.
Collectively these citizens of Moscow and Odessa are the modern-day “humiliated and injured,” who have given up on themselves and life. Despite their newly “empowered” status, they seem even less politically astute than before 1917. Indeed, they bear a haunting resemblance to their medieval ancestors who, also unable to take control of their affairs, invited Viking Varangians to restore order to their land. Bunin charges that contemporary Russians cannot distinguish between friends and foes, nor have they talent or inclination for democratic unions. The new soviets are vicious and inept; commissars mismanage armies, ruin the culture, and dispossess citizens. The smaller, more informal assemblies are also ineffective, bordering on chaotic. Although village communes and workers’ and soldiers’ groups fancy themselves as new “collective societies,” they dispense justice with old-fashioned mob-style cruelty. Illiterate manifestos proliferate, and trivia ignites mob anger. The “legislative bodies” of citizens spit and shove as they utter curses and threats. Hopelessly unable to govern themselves, they do not even try to help their country in an effective, democratic way.
Bunin sees this generalized, brutish ineptitude extended quite naturally from politics to art. He condemns the inability of most Russians to see showmanship as serious art. In his view, modernists and proletarian writers lack integrity and bend with political winds. Bores and masters of scandal, they champion pornography and mock the very best in Russian history, religion, and art. Their “revolutionary” works also play to the Soviet penchant for bread and circuses. An aura of entertainment—“orgies,” “repulsive theatrics,” and “clownish stunts,” Bunin writes—allows the mob to dress up cruel reality in vaudevilles, comedies, and mock high style. The celebrating of revolutionary anniversaries and milestones pillory honor as murderers, hypocrites, and sexually diseased youth become heroes of socialism, proclaiming Soviet salvation to the world.
Such public displays, however, cannot conceal from a thinking person the growing emptiness and horror of bolshevized life. In its vulgarity and sham, Bunin sees that the only forward movement of the new Soviet existence is toward the grave. People are paralyzed and wearied not only by physical deprivation and duress but by a spiritual stress rooted in the expectation of disaster at every turn. In Cursed Days the people yearn for their own end and envy those who have departed this world. “Why bother living?” Bunin asks. “In truth, we should have hanged ourselves a long time ago.”
In the dire plight of his homeland Bunin finds precedents in the ancient, medieval, and modern histories of both Russia and the world. He derides Bolshevik views that Russia is undergoing a “seismic shift to something new and unprecedented.” Rather, he sees his country only as repeating the tragedies of the past. In Bunin’s view, post-1917 Russia resembles ancient Egypt and Israel: Russians are like Pharaoh’s people who endure plagues for their obstinacy, and like faithless Hebrews who, having worshiped false gods, are condemned to “live outside the walls of a destroyed and profaned Zion.”
Bunin also shows revolutionary Russia returning to its tortured medieval past. As he sees it, the new Soviet homeland has refitted itself for the Mongol yoke. Lenin is a new Mamai, his followers modern Tatars who soak the earth in blood and force the homeland to regress to a pagan (read: Asian) bazaar filled with “loathsome dark faces” and “Eastern cries and speech.” For Bunin, the new sedition and strife has allowed the dark side of l’âme russe to resurface and renew its reign, entrenching the national penchant for “savagery and tears” and for “always moving forward in circles.”
Bunin believes that “revolutionary” Russia also bears the scars of more modern times. It mirrors, for example, the “glorious revolution” of Cromwell, and the French upheaval of 1789. Then as now, he decries the cruelty of “idealists and dreamers,” the “animal self-satisfaction” of its citizens, the heavy hand of its institutions, the lying of its literary “charlatans” and “degenerates,” the “absolute absurdity” implicit in its demand for “freedom, brotherhood, equality—and death!”
“Who is the enemy?” Bunin asks, and more often than not he replies, “It is us.” He is particularly harsh with three groups: professionals, gentry and youth, and the folk themselves. The first group, the Russian writers, intellectuals, and professionals who often lived abroad or divorced themselves from reality, Bunin accuses of looking slavishly to the West as a panacea for their country’s ills. At home they did little but complain about Russia’s backwardness, rouse anger among its citizens, and “kick the government for the umpteenth time.” Even when they posed as champions of enlightenment, Bunin claims, this group only pretended to represent the people. Publicly they acclaimed the folk and the masses; privately they scorned them. They knew the “people” only from legend, literature, or fleeting conversation, and praised them in the abstract—as “icons” who inexplicably exhibited “great grace, novelty, and originality of future forms.” Most Russian writers, intellectuals, and professionals, Bunin charges, regarded their purported “radicalism” not as food for thought but as sustenance to assuage their own inner emptiness. The modus operandi of this group was to look vacuously upon national existence with “muddled mysticism,” even as they closed their eyes to “smashed skulls” and placed “laurel wreaths on lice-covered heads.”
Bunin’s second group guilty of the homeland’s fall is the educated Russian public, in particular its gentry and youth. Russians have refused to admit the flaws of their national character and to see post-Emancipatory Russia in the throes of death. The reasons for such blindness, he believes, are inertia, self-interest, fear, and a juvenile unwillingness to confront the challenges and complexities of their situation. Before the Revolution, Bunin asserts, the gentry lived lives of genteel abandon: frivolous and haphazard, cheerful and carefree. An “old Russian disease” infected the gentry’s minds and hearts: they despised work and routine, and hid from life in the “depths” of their souls. They paid only lip service to their heritage and sought their well-being in money, not memory. Russian noblemen, Bunin insists, were so stirred by the romantic wish to do something special that they never did anything at all. They longed and languished, seeking rescue from “frogs with magic rings.”
It pained Bunin that the gentry scorned the literature of their “grandfathers” and “fathers,” and that only the output of “declassé” and “professional” writers captured their imagination. Such writers, he charges, did considerable damage to their readers. They distanced themselves from the folk and projected only “ideas” and bitterness at life. They were creatures of fashion and ideology. It was nothing to them to extol the peasant rebels of the past and the “heroic” Russian people of the present in pulp fiction or “puff pieces.” When it suited, they illustrated their “love of the folk” with stories and clichés that were illiterate and false.
Russian adolescents too had espoused a literary approach to life. In Bunin’s view they had identified too comfortably with such fictional heroes as Pushkin’s Onegin, Lermontov’s Pechorin, and Turgenev’s Bazarov. Forgetting that these youthful characters were frozen in time and space, the youth adopted their self-styled superfluousness as their own. Russian novels were, however, not the only items that had captured their adolescent minds and hearts. Pre-1917 Russian youth also used songs about Sten’ka Razin and readings from Marx and other radicals to concoct a sham faith in the folk and a genuine hatred for all groups but their own indulgent one.
Finally, Bunin indicts the folk themselves for his country’s ills. The Russian masses, Bunin asserts, are not the “Christ-loving peasants” who peopled the fiction of Turgenev and Tolstoy, with their messianic message for the world and their thirst for beauty, justice, and good. They are instead the spiritual brothers of Rasputin who view both life and death as cheap. However unfairly, Bunin saw the “masses” as anti-Semitic, spiteful, and coarse. Without the slightest hesitation they might murder, rape, and carouse one day, and on the next bow before icons and journey to monasteries in “bouts of frenzied sentimentality.” For such behavior, Bunin asserts, the folk deserved not a revolution but hangings, beatings, or, at the very least, a “swift kick in the pants.”
Despite his torment, Bunin does not succumb to total despair. The darkness of his outlook in Cursed Days is infused with periodic rays of light. Bunin believes he is one of a few Russians whom the new Soviet state has tried unsuccessfully to destroy. Everyone else, Bunin claims, is a robot or a zombie who has crossed a fatal line into nonexistence. But his soul still transcends time and space and joins family and loved ones from afar, expressing agony and fear, love and hope for their fate. He not only hopes against hope for a Bolshevik defeat, and for someone to put an end to his “cursed days”; he also believes he has sufficient passion and courage to fight the Soviets with a time-honored weapon—the pen, which he, as an “old world” Russian writer, wields in behalf of tradition and truth.
Bright spots in nature and in humankind are balm to Bunin’s soul and revive his faith in miracles. Such signs, he believes, point to the cyclic, broad, and enduring nature of Russian life. He never tires of repeating that the history of his homeland has been violent and bleak; but in moments of crisis his country has invariably drawn on its spiritual and cultural riches to rise like a phoenix from the ashes. Yes, Bunin is anxious for the fate of Russia, but he does not consign his patriarchal homeland to oblivion. Like the prophet Isaiah centuries before, he believes that new shoots will sprout from its charred stump. “I will never accept that Russia has been destroyed,” he told Muromtseva-Bunina several weeks before they emigrated.2 Bunin never doubted that the Bolshevik experiment in his homeland would meet an ignoble end. He was firmly convinced that “socialism contradicts and is completely unsuited to the human soul.” “In twenty-five years,” he predicted, “. . . Russia would be host to a powerful surge of religious feeling, and . . . the passion for individualism would rise from the ashes of communism.”3 He was wrong only in his timing.
For all his suffering in Moscow and Odessa in 1918 and 1919, Bunin always took satisfaction in having been an intimate witness to the Russian Revolution and the civil war, and in possessing the talent to record events for posterity. Similar “recording” would be repeated by writers who remained in Russia under Soviet rule. Nothing could have stopped Bunin from seeking and telling the truth. Indeed, writing Cursed Days and for Southern Word, he could have claimed spiritual kinship with Zamyatin’s hero, D-503, in his 1924 diary-novel We, when D-503 continues to record his impressions of a new utopian state even after he is strapped to a hospital bed and undergoes the “great operation” targeted for enemies of the regime. Bunin would have agreed with the last and prophetic lines of his fictional successor: “And I hope that we win. More than that, I am certain we shall win. For Reason must prevail.”4
1. Grin, Ustami, vol. 1, 173.
2. See Bunin’s letter to Yuly Bunin, written in February 1900, as quoted in A. Baboreko, I. A. Bunin. Materialy dlia biografii (s 1870 po 1917) (Moscow, 1983), 78.
3. I. Bunin, “Avtobiograficheskaia zametka,” Sobranie sochinenii v deviati tomakh, vol. 9 (Moscow, 1965), 264–265.
4. See, for instance, Bunin’s letter to N. Cheremnov, written on October 15, 1914, as quoted in V. Afanas’ev, “Ot ‘Derevni’ k ‘Gospodinu iz San-Frantsisko’ (Proza I. A. Bunina 1910–14 gg.),” Uchenye zapiski Moskovskogo gosudarstvennogo pedagogicheskogo instituta, No. 222 (1964), 137. Also see I. Bunin, “Iz predisloviia k frantsuzskomu izdaniiu ‘Gospodina iz San-Frantsisko’,” in I. Bunin, Sobranie sochenii v odinadtsati tomakh, vol. 1 (Paris, 1936), 78.
5. I. Gazer, “Pis’ma L. Andreeva i. I. Bunina,” Voprosy literatury, No. 7 (1969), 192.
6. A plaque now marks the building where the Bunins stayed.
7. Grin, Ustami, 170–171.
8. See Bunin’s diary excerpt dated May 19, 1918, in A. Baboreko, “Novoe o Bunine,” Problemy realizma, No. 7 (Vologda, 1980), 157.
9. See I. Bunin, “Tretii Tolstoi,” Vospominaniia (Paris, 1950), 223.
1. Baboreko, “Novoe,” 157–158.
2. Bunin, “Tretii Tolstoi,” 223.
3. P. Herlihy, Odessa: A History, 1794–1914 (Cambridge, 1986), 1.
4. Ibid., 195.
5. E. Mawdsley, The Russian Civil War (Boston, 1987), 129.
6. See Ivan and Vera Bunin’s diary excerpts, written in early February 1920, in Grin, Ustami, 336–348. Also see Bunin’s 1923 story, “The End” (“Konets”), in I. Bunin, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 5 (1966), 59–67.
The Bunins had to face the distinct possibility that only one of them would be able to leave for the West. Muromtseva-Bunina wrote in her diary on June 16, 1925: “I recalled that when we were in Odessa, I had told Ian that if we both couldn’t get on a boat, he should save himself without me. . . . But he said firmly that he would go nowhere without me, even if he were threatened by death.” See Grin, Ustami, vol. 2, 143.
7. V. Kataev, Sviatoi kolodets. Trava zabven’ia (Moscow, 1969), 166–167.
8. Bahoreko, “Novoe,” 161.
9. Kataev, Sviatoi, 183.
1. Ibid., 168.
2. Grin, Ustami, vol. 1, 207.
3. About Knipper, Muromtseva-Bunina wrote in her diary on November 13, 1919: “Yesterday Knipper visited us. She made a strange impression. She was very sweet and friendly; she spoke intelligently, but I got the idea that she had nothing in her soul, that she was like a house without a foundation . . . without a cellar stocked with provisions and good wine. . . . The Bolsheviks have been very courteous to her, so she does not see them as we do.” See Grin, Ustami, 319.
4. Kataev, Sviatoi, 193.
5. At this time Odessa had one of the largest concentrations of urban Jews in the world. See Herlihy, Odessa, 124. Also see P. Kenez, Civil War in South Russia, 1919–1920 (Berkeley, 1977), 180.
6. Kataev, Sviatoi, 195–196.
7. See Burin’s diary excerpt dated August 8, 1919, in Grin, Ustami, 295.
8. Baboreko, “Novoe,” 168–169.
9. G. Alexcev, “Zhivye vstrechi,” Vremia (August 22, 1921), 2.
1. Grin, Ustami, 225.
2. See Muromtseva-Bunina’s diary excerpt of December 26, 1919, in Grin, Ustami, 325.
3. See Muromtseva-Bunina’s diary excerpt of January 28, 1919, in Grin, Ustami, 207.
4. E. Zamyatin, We (New York, 1952), 218.