ON JULY 30, 1925, Vera Muromtseva-Bunina, the wife of the Russian writer Ivan Bunin, wrote in her diary: “Ian [her name for her husband] has torn up and burned all his diary manuscripts. I am very angry. ‘I don’t want to be seen in my underwear,’ he told me.” Seeing Vera so upset, Bunin confided to her: “I have another diary in the form of a notebook. After I die you can do with it what you like.”1
At the time of this incident, Bunin was fifty-six, Vera was forty-five. They had been living in exile in France for six years, having fled their country in the wake of the Russian Revolution and civil war. Although Bunin had been nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature almost immediately upon his arrival in the West, it was not until 1933 that he would receive this award, the first Russian writer and the first writer in exile ever to be accorded such an honor. As for the diary, Bunin himself published it in 1936 with the title Cursed Days (Okaiannye dni).
Set against the backdrop of Moscow and Odessa in 1918 and 1919, Cursed Days is Bunin’s scathing account of his last days in Russia. Although banned during the years of Soviet power, it is enjoying a stunning revival in the homeland today. By 1991 no fewer than fifteen separate editions of Cursed Days had been published in the former Soviet Union, including its appearance in a new six-volume edition of Bunin’s works in 1994.
The work is important for several reasons. Cursed Days is one of the very few anti-Bolshevik diaries to be preserved from the time of the Russian Revolution and civil war. It recreates events with graphic and gripping immediacy. Unlike the works of early Soviets and emigrés and their self-censoring backdrop of memory, myth, and political expediency, Bunin’s truth reads almost like an aberration.2
Cursed Days also links Russian anti-utopian writing of the nineteenth century to its counterpart in the twentieth. Reminiscent of the fiction of Dostoevsky, it features an “underground man” who does not wish to be an “organ stop” or to affirm “crystal palaces.” Bunin’s diary foreshadowed such “libelous” memoirs as Evgenia Ginsberg’s Journey into the Whirlwind (1967) and Within the Whirlwind (1981), and Nadezhda Mandelstam’s Hope Against Hope (1970) and Hope Abandoned (1974), the accounts of two courageous women caught up in the Stalinist terror of the 1930s. Cursed Days also preceded the “rebellious” anti-Soviet tradition that began with Evgeny Zamyatin and Yury Olesha, moved on to Mikhail Bulgakov, and reached an apex with Boris Pasternak and Alexander Solzhenitsyn. One can argue that, in its painful exposés of political and social utopias, Cursed Days, together with Zamyatin’s We (1924), heralded the anti-utopian writing of George Orwell and Aldous Huxley. Bunin and Zamyatin had correctly understood that the Soviet experiment was destined to self-destruct.
Cursed Days was Bunin’s only work to feature him in his “underwear.” For a singular moment in his almost seventy years as a writer, he relinquished his classical and aristocratic stance, and, hauntingly, like Edvard Munch’s tormented figure in “The Scream” (1893), tried to articulate the near despair that was flowing just beneath the surface of his personal, professional, and political poise.
In publishing this first English translation of Cursed Days, I wish to make Bunin’s account accessible to Western readers so that this gifted writer may also be seen as a perceptive social critic. Unless readers can comprehend his wrenching struggle to make sense of his shattered world, they cannot appreciate his vacillation between hope and despair. To this edition of Cursed Days I also add a “coda”—selections from 1919 articles written by Bunin in Odessa, in which he elaborated certain insights into the Russian Revolution and civil war.3 With these pieces I hope to complete an otherwise unavailable picture of Bunin’s last days in his homeland. Bunin himself requested that “nothing be forgotten” about the trials and horrors of newly bolshevized Russia; and, as Santayana once warned, those who cannot remember the mistakes of the past are condemned to repeat them.
For their invaluable assistance at various stages in the preparation of this book, I wish to thank Linda Gregory and the staffs of the Departments of Reference, Interlibrary Loan, and Micro-texts of the Theodore M. Hesburgh Library at the University of Notre Dame for obtaining many needed materials, for researching footnotes, and for photocopying texts, and to Margaret Jasiewicz, Sherry Reichold, and especially Nancy McMahon for typing correspondence and preparing the manuscript.
Several individuals deserve a special note of gratitude. Truly this book would not have come into being without Professor Klaus Lanzinger, former chairman of the Department of German and Russian Languages and Literatures at the University of Notre Dame; Professor Harry Attridge, former dean of the College of Arts and Letters; Professor Jennifer Warlick, former director of the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts; and Professor Roger Skurski, associate dean of the college, who allowed me to devote a good part of my energy to this project and who provided technical and financial assistance. I am also grateful to Professors Marc Raeff, Andrew Wachtel, and Gary Hamburg for their meticulous reading of the text; Helen Sullivan, who, along with others of the staff of the library of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, unearthed sources, researched additional footnotes, and answered myriad questions; Steven Bordenkircher, Bethany Thomas, and Matthew Welsh, who proved to be quick and ready research assistants; Vladimir Khmelkov, who helped with additional research and who translated many of the articles as well as passages involving the speech of Russian peasants and workers; and finally, my publisher, Ivan Dee, who believed in this project from the beginning and who taught me much about the publishing and scholarly worlds.
I also wish to recognize my wife, Gloria Gibbs Marullo, and my longtime colleague and friend, Sister Mary Colleen Dillon, S.N.D., of the Sisters of Notre Dame of Covington, Kentucky, both of whom read the manuscript innumerable times, kept me physically and spiritually whole during its writing, and learned more about Ivan Bunin than they really cared to. My cats, Gonzaga (“Gonzo”), Bernadette Marie, and Margaret Mary, and my other felines, Ignatius and Augustine, who both departed this life in spring 1997, provided affection and support when Bunin and I had exhausted the goodwill and cheer of everyone else.
Finally, I wish to express my gratitude to Julia Gauchman, also on the staff of the library at the University of Illinois, for her generous and expert assistance not only in the preparation of this volume but also in my other works on Bunin. She has been a supporting force in my growth as a scholar, and it is to her that I dedicate this work as a token of my heartfelt affection and esteem.
T. G. M.
Notre Dame, Indiana
February 1998
1. M. Grin, Ustami Buninykh, vol. 2 (Frankfurt, 1981), 145–146.
2. On June 21, 1952, Bunin wrote to Mark Aldanov: “[A friend] once told me that Cursed Days was the one book that had something to say about the Bolsheviks.” See R. Fedoulova, “Lettres d’Ivan Bunin à Mark Aldanov (1948–1953),” Cahiers du monde russe et sovietique, vol. 23, Nos. 3–4 (1982), 490.
3. The citations from Bunin’s articles in The Southern Word are found in Skorb’ zemli rodnoi. Sbornik statei 1919 goda (New York, 1920), 44–50; B. Lipin, “Bunin v ‘Iuzhnom slove’,” Zvezda, No. 9 (1993), 125–141; and P. Shirmakov, “Vozvrashenie Bunina,” Svetskaia priroda i chelovek, No. 3 (1991), 62–66. The text for Cursed Days is taken from the 1935–1936 eleven-volume edition of Bunin’s collected works published in Berlin.