Dark Avenues

“I have been keeping an eye on Bunin’s brilliant

talent. He really is the enemy.”

Andrei Bely

“Your influence is truly beyond words… 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 than yours.”

André Gide

“He was a great stylist who wrote very suggestively.

He didn’t spray us with ideologies or worries.

His writing is pure poetry.”

Andrei Makine

“A most powerful ‘connoisseur of colours’. One could write an entire dissertation on his colour schemes.”

Vladimir Nabokov

“You have, Mr Bunin, thoroughly explored the
soul of vanished Russia, and in doing so you have
most deservedly continued the glorious traditions
of the great Russian literature.”

Professor Wilhelm Nordenson,

at the 1933 Nobel Prize banquet