Between Tolstoy and Nabokov: Ivan Bunin Revisited

The literary life of the Russian émigrés between the two wars was carried on at a pitch of high intellectual sophistication, but it was never well-recognized beyond its linguistic borders. In the English-speaking world it is now remembered, if at all, almost exclusively through the writings of Vladimir Nabokov. In his autobiography, Speak, Memory (1967), and in The Gift (1938), the last and largest of his Russian novels, Nabokov left a vivid record of the Russian expatriates, with their "material indigence and intellectual luxury," "bastards and ghosts" passing unnoticed amongst "perfectly unimportant strangers, spectral Germans and Frenchmen in more or less illusory cities."¹

Of those émigré ghosts, it was not Nabokov who at the time best succeeded in substantiating himself to outsiders—only two of his Russian novels had been translated by the late 1950s, when Lolita (1955) made him famous—but Ivan Bunin, the short-story writer. It was Bunin whom the more conservative émigrés put forward as "their" candidate for the Nobel Prize, which he was awarded in 1933. He partly owed that success to the high-selling and well-received volume of his stories which had been published in 1922 by the Hogarth Press, in a translation on which D. H. Lawrence worked in collaboration with Leonard Woolf and S. S. Koteliansky. Bunin, who as a young man in Russia had known both Tolstoy and Chekhov, liked to think of himself as "the last of the Mohicans," the guardian of the classic Russian prose tradition against the Soviet writers on one flank and the antic modernizers, led by Nabokov, on the other.

In the last fifteen years, there has been a modest Bunin revival, capped by the two new translations under review. Though they may not prove that Bunin was a major talent, they do show that he remains a figure of considerable interest. The debates in Western Marxism about the nature of art after the revolution now generally known through Benjamin, Adorno, and others, were not a matter of theory to Bunin; he lived and wrote through them. He was influenced not only by Tolstoy's novels but also by the utopian doctrines Tolstoy preached after he turned his back on high art, doctrines which in their essence were an attempt to end the guilt of civilization by closing the chasm between culture and labor. Bunin's early stories dramatize that guilt, and his longing for a cultural revolution that would cure it. But when Lenin realized that longing, Bunin never wrote so well again. Yet even then he achieved some instructive failures, and the best of his early stories still live, kept in motion by the tension between Bunin's pride in his noble origins and his passion for self-abasement. The Anglophone writer he most resembles is his translator, Lawrence, another late disciple of the nineteenth-century gospel of work (passed down to him by Ruskin and Hardy). Bunin shares with Lawrence a sense of the novelist as laborer, and with it a taste for the earth, its textures and odors. If Nabokov with his butterfly-net can stand as the image for that playful side of modernism which still flaunted the dandyish poses of aestheticism, Bunin, like Lawrence, carries forward the more Victorian idea of artist as worker—an idea which finds its exemplary image in the sepia photographs of the old bearded Tolstoy, dressed in peasant clothes, a plough strapped to his chest, his bare feet pressed to the earth.

Literary history, like every other kind, is written by the victors, and non-specialist readers in English probably come across Bunin's name only in Nabokov's paragraph on him in Speak, Memory, where Nabokov has some wicked fun with Bunin's precarious dignity. Flush with self-esteem and full...