Ivan BuninReviews

Ishte shkrimtari i parë rus që u laureua me çmimin “Nobel” në vitin 1933, novelist, poet dhe shkrimtar i mirënjohur.

Ivan Bunini ishte mjeshtër i fjalës, i përshkrimit të natyrës, shkrimtari që krijoi tablo të ashpra dhe të vërteta të jetës së fshatit në të kaluarën, krijoi një sërë figurash të Rusisë së pararevolucionit.

Mjeshtëria e fjalës, përsosmëria e formës së tregimeve, pasuruan thesarin e letërsisë ruse.

Njohja me Çehovin ka qenë e rëndësishme për Buninin, nga i cili mësoi lakonizmin, aq sa tregimet e fundit arritën gjysmë faqe. Ka shkruar romanin: “Jeta e Arsenjevit”; tregimet “Goditje dielli”; etj. Bunini la një trashëgimi të madhe edhe si poet

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Иван Алексеевич Бунин е руски писател, поет и преводач. Той е първият руски автор, получил Нобеловата награда за литература през 1933. Първоначално пише публицистика и поезия, по-късно проза, най-вече къси разкази. Емигрира от Русия през 1919 и се установява във Франция.

Най-значимите му творби са повестите „Село“ (1909 – 1910), „Суходол“ (1911), които образуват своеобразна дилогия, обединена от обща тема – съдбата на Русия и руския национален характер. Последната му художествена книга „Тъмни алеи“ (1943) е смятана за най-четения сборник с къси разкази в Русия през 20 век.

With this sturdy collection of short stories, it is easy to get the feel for the darker side of Bunin’s work. In it are a slew of great short-short pieces of sexual epiphany so startling and real that they each seem like gems of experience, encapsulated in brief encounters.

Bunin is a master of description like his predecessors, but he does it in his own way. He does not shy away from showing people as they are. One gets a sense of place from his work that makes all of his characters feel real. His mastery lies in the details he builds up around these miserable and joyous people. Many of the characters bleed into one another – one gets a sense of an aristocratic man, engaging in many many fateful encounters with prostitutes and other women of good faith, falling in and out of love over and over again, and carrying away a tremendous burden of having betrayed them all.

Bunin, it seems was a man overburdened with love. He must have loved women and loved the world, to depict them both with so much devotion and splendor. Of course there are real women characters in his fiction too, I think, and not just the stock of the genre trade. They breathe and live their own lives and enact their form of revenge on the male characters, and entice and speak their minds. All in all a lot of them are more engaging than the male counterparts. But in the end the perspective is old-fashioned and male.

The whole collection is infused with energy – even though there is very little explicitness in its pages, it steams and is steeped in this tension throughout. It goes to show that Ivan Bunin uses these scenarios as a canvas for his immaculate skill as a painter of words, that he cooks up these shallow schemes and semi-plots as a mere ploy to get to the beauty and the livid imagery he has stored up in his head. One cannot help but admire the way he has transcended the confines of Chekhov’s strict guidelines of short story writing. The starkness of Chekhov’s descriptions becomes all too evident. But you cannot really emulate Bunin successfully. His resemblance to Chekhov is like a Melville’s to Hemingway.

Good but repetitive. Maybe I'd have been better spacing the stories out once a year for the next twenty to get more enjoyment out of it.

Энциклопедия очень жестокой, беспощадной, изломанной и трагичной любви...
После прочтения этой книги возникает лишь один вопрос: "Есть ли на свете счастливая любовь?". Та, про которую можно сказать "Жили они долги и счастливо, и умерли в один день."?
Для себя могу выделить четыре рассказа, после которых я откладывала книгу и размышляла о том, что же именно я сейчас прочитала: "Кавказ", "Галя Ганская", "Генрих", "Часовня".

La saison de l'amitié :-)

Interesting individually, these stories, and some will stay with me but many will be forgotten. Quite atmospheric.

England D H Lawrence France Guy de Maupassant Russia

This book kills you a little.

Li alguns contos de Búnin há alguns anos, em uma coleção de laureados pelo prêmio Nobel, mas só me interessei por ele quando li Insolação na Antologia do Conto Russo. Não só os contos mais famosos, como O Cavalheiro de São Fracisco, mas outros, como Cáucaso ou em Paris, tem descrições de força e beleza incríveis. Os contos de Búnin são impressionantemente evocativos.

Although only a short read (135 p.) I found it hard to plough through this one. There's no real plotline, rather it's a snapshot of brutal rural Russian life in the lead-up to the Revolution. The cold and the hunger; the ignorant and superstitious conversations of the peasants; the landowners starting to be afraid of their workers...

Certainly the descriptions bring this era to life:
'After the blizzards, harsh winds blew across the hardened, grey, icy crust on the fields and tore away the last brown leaves from the shelterless oak thickets in the gullies...icy, slippery mounds grew up around the ice holes; paths were trampled through the snowdrifts- and the humdrum life of winter set in. Epidemics began in the village: smallpox, fever, scarlatina...Around the ice holes from which the whole of Durnovka drank, above the stinking, dark, bottle-coloured water, peasant women stood for days on end, bent over and with their skirts tucked up above their grey-blue, bare knees...It was getting dark at three o'clock, and shaggy dogs sat on roofs that were almost the same level as the snowdrifts.'

Sometimes our lead characters -two brothers in their fifties- muse on the meaning of life:
'My life ought to be described. But what was there to describe? Nothing. Nothing or nothing worthwhile. After all, he himself remembered almost nothing of that life. He'd completely forgotten his childhood, for example; just from time to time some summer's day would come to him, some episode...Ask him now: do you remember your mother? - and he'd reply: I remember some bent old woman...she dried dung, stoked the stove, drank in secret, grumbled...And nothing more.'

Perhaps should be evaluated more as a piece of poetry in prose form than a narrative

I gave up about 3/4 of the way through this collection of short stories, because they were just getting to be too much the same. Bunin, a Russian writer who fled after the revolution, wrote this collection in the south of France during the Nazi era "to escape to a different world" as the interesting biographical and critical notes at the end of this edition say. The stories, which mostly take place in the prerevolutionary era (although some take place post-revolution, in French exile), all focus on love, mostly the loss of love, some purely "romantic," others more physical; some trite, some moving, some irritatingly sexist. But what kept me going was Bunin's wonderful depictions of the varied beauties of the Russian countryside, and the often decaying houses and estates within it. Apparently he first set out to be a poet, and these sections are the highlights, for me, of the stories.

Sort of Guy Maupassant meets Ivan Turgenev. This collection of stories from Ivan Bunin includes his best known work 'The Gentleman from San Francisco'. The book includes about 15 short stories. Some of the stories are of the older style, like Turgenev and other Russian prose writers talking about riding carriages across versts of road stopping to change horses and arriving at country estates to hunt and bring out the samovar if you know what I mean. Many others show the more contemporary aspect of Bunin (relatively speaking, he was born in the 19th century) such as steamer ships, corsets, modern travel, and more. His writing style never lagged, it kept good pace, and easily switched from character motivation to plot facts to dialogue. I would recommend this for fans of Bulgakov or Murakami.

Bunin, Ivan Alekseevich, 1870-1953 > Diaries/Authors, Russian > 20th century > Diaries/Soviet Union > History > Revolution, 1917-1921/> Personal narratives, Russian

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