Which Russian writer did Bunin not like? A typical Bunin and his not always literary hobbies
7. I.BUNIN. BIRTHDAY – REVIEW
The review was compiled by me personally based on the analysis of various literary sources.
On October 22, 1870, Russian writer and poet, Nobel Prize winner in literature Ivan Bunin (1870-1953) was born.
In the World RATING-1 I. Bunin takes 67th place
IN RANKING-3 "Russian Writers" - 10th place
IN THE RANKING-6 "Prose Writers of the Silver Age" - 1st place
IN THE RANKING-12 "Prose writers of the 20-30s of the XX century." - 2nd place
IN THE RANKING-52 "Prose Writers-Emigrants" - 1st place
In RATING-73 “Russian novel of the 20th century”, I. Bunin’s work “The Life of Arsenyev” takes 23rd place
I. Review information about the life and work of I. Bunin
II.1 N. Berberova about I. Bunin
II.2 I. Odoevtseva about I. Bunin
II.3 V. Veresaev about I. Bunin
II.4 V. Yanovsky about I. Bunin
II.5 V. Kataev about I. Bunin
II.6 Yu. Aikhenvald about I. Bunin
II.7 N. Gumilev about I. Bunin
III. I. BUNIN ABOUT WRITERS
III.1 I. Bunin about K. Balmont
III.2 I. Bunin about M. Voloshin
III.3 I. Bunin about A. Blok
III.4 I. Bunin about V. Khlebnikov
III.5 I. Bunin about V. Mayakovsky
III.6 I. Bunin about S. Yesenin
I. OVERVIEW INFORMATION ABOUT THE LIFE AND WORK OF I. BUNIN
I did not receive a systematic education. True, the elder brother Julius, who graduated from the university with flying colors, went through the entire gymnasium course with his younger brother. They studied languages, psychology, philosophy, social and natural sciences. It was Julius who had a great influence on the formation of Bunin’s tastes and views.
Born in Voronezh into a noble family. He spent his childhood and youth on an impoverished estate in the Oryol province. Bunin began writing early. Wrote essays, sketches, poems. In May 1887, the magazine "Rodina" published the poem "Beggar" by 16-year-old Vanya Bunin. From that time on, his more or less constant literary activity began, in which there was a place for both poetry and prose.
Despite the imitation, there was some special intonation in Bunin’s poems.
This became more noticeable with the release of the poetry collection “Falling Leaves” in 1901, which was enthusiastically received by both readers and critics. Bunin's first stories immediately earned recognition from the famous writers of that time: Chekhov, Gorky, Andreev, and Kuprin.
In 1898, Bunin married a Greek woman, Anna Tsakni, having previously experienced a strong love and subsequent strong disappointment with Varvara Pashchenko. However, by Ivan Alekseevich’s own admission, he never loved Tsakni.
In the 1910s Bunin travels a lot, going abroad. He visits Leo Tolstoy, meets Chekhov, actively collaborates with the Gorky publishing house "Znanie", and meets the niece of the Chairman of the First Duma A.S. Muromtsev, Vera Muromtseva.
And although in fact Vera Nikolaevna became “Mrs. Bunina” already in 1906, they were able to officially register their marriage only in July 1922 in France.
Only by this time did Bunin manage to obtain a divorce from Anna Tsakni.
Vera Nikolaevna was devoted to Ivan Alekseevich until the end of his life, becoming his faithful assistant in all matters. Possessing great spiritual strength, helping to steadfastly endure all the hardships and hardships of emigration, After the resounding success of his stories in print, the story “The Village” appears, which immediately became famous, Bunin’s first major work.
Bunin, perhaps one of the few Russian writers of that time, was not afraid to tell the unpleasant truth about the Russian village and the downtroddenness of the Russian peasant. In parallel with the rural theme, the writer developed in his stories the lyrical theme, which had previously appeared in poetry. In pre-revolutionary Russia, Bunin, as they say, “rested on his laurels” - he was awarded the Pushkin Prize three times; in 1909 he was elected academician in the category of fine literature, becoming the youngest academician of the Russian Academy.
In 1920, Bunin and Vera Nikolaevna, who did not accept either the revolution or the Bolshevik power, emigrated from Russia, “having drunk the untold cup of mental suffering,” as Bunin later wrote in his biography. On March 28 they arrived in Paris. In the middle
In the 1920s, the Bunins moved to the small resort town of Grasse in the south of France, where they settled in the Belvedere villa, and later settled in the Janet villa. Here they were destined to live most of their lives, to survive the Second World War.
In 1927, in Grasse, Bunin met the Russian poetess Galina Kuznetsova, who was vacationing there with her husband. Bunin was fascinated by the young woman, and she, in turn, was delighted with him (and Bunin knew how to charm women!). Their romance received wide publicity. The insulted husband left, Vera Nikolaevna suffered from jealousy. And here the incredible happened - Ivan Alekseevich managed to convince his wife that his relationship with Galina was purely platonic, and they had nothing more than a relationship between a teacher and a student. Vera Nikolaevna, incredible as it may seem, believed. She believed it because she couldn’t imagine her life without Ian.
As a result, Galina settled with the Bunins and became a “member of the family.” For fifteen years Kuznetsova shared a common home with Bunin, playing the role of an adopted daughter and experiencing all the joys and troubles with them. This love of Ivan Alekseevich was both happy and painfully difficult. She also turned out to be immensely dramatic. In 1942, Kuznetsova left Bunin, becoming interested in the opera singer Margot Stepun.
Ivan Alekseevich was shocked, he was depressed not only by the betrayal of his beloved woman, but also by whom she cheated with! “How she (G.) poisoned my life - she’s still poisoning me! 15 years! Weakness, lack of will...”, he wrote in his diary on April 18, 1942. This friendship between Galina and Margot was like a bleeding wound for Bunin for the rest of his life.
But despite all the adversities and endless hardships, Bunin’s prose gained new heights. The books “Rose of Jericho”, “Mitya’s Love”, collections of stories “Sunstroke” and “Tree of God” were published abroad. And in 1930, the autobiographical novel “The Life of Arsenyev” was published - a fusion of memoirs, memoirs and lyrical-philosophical prose.
On November 10, 1933, newspapers in Paris came out with huge headlines “Bunin - Nobel laureate.” For the first time since the existence of this prize, the award for literature was presented to a Russian writer. However, this money did not last long.
Of the 700 thousand francs received, 126 thousand were immediately distributed to those in need. Bunin's all-Russian fame grew into worldwide fame. Every Russian in Paris, even those who had not read a single line of Bunin, took this as a personal holiday. The Russian people experienced the sweetest of feelings - a noble sense of national pride. Being awarded the Nobel Prize was a huge event for the writer himself. Recognition came, and with it (albeit for a very short period, the Bunins were extremely impractical) material security.
In 1937, Bunin completed the book “The Liberation of Tolstoy,” which, according to experts, became one of the best books in all literature about Lev Nikolaevich. And in 1943, “Dark Alleys” was published in New York - the pinnacle of the writer’s lyrical prose, a true encyclopedia of love. In “Dark Alleys” you can find everything - sublime experiences, conflicting feelings, and violent passions. But what was closest to Bunin was pure, bright love, similar to the harmony of earth and sky.
In “Dark Alleys” it is, as a rule, short, and sometimes instantaneous, but its light illuminates the hero’s entire life. Some critics of that time accused Bunin's "Dark Alleys" of either pornography or senile voluptuousness. Ivan Alekseevich was offended by this. Until the end of his life he had to defend his favorite book from the “Pharisees.”
Two writers played a certain role in Bunin’s life: Maxim Gorky and Leo Tolstoy. At first, Gorky helped Bunin, considering him “the first writer in Rus'.” In response, Bunin dedicated the poem “Falling Leaves” to Gorky, although, as he later admitted, he dedicated it at his, Gorky’s, “shameless request.” They separated because they were too different people: Gorky is a man of high social temperament and at the same time able to adapt to circumstances and make compromises. Bunin is not a public person, and he is also uncompromising and proud.
As for Leo Tolstoy, Bunin revered him as a deity. And endlessly compared myself to him. And I always remembered the words Tolstoy said to him: “Don’t expect much from life... there is no happiness in life, there are only lightnings of it - appreciate them, live by them...” On the table of the dying Bunin lay a volume of Tolstoy. He reread War and Peace 50 times...
...It is difficult to communicate with a person when there are too many taboo topics that cannot be touched upon. It was impossible to talk with Bunin about the Symbolists, about his own poems, about Russian politics, about death, about modern art, about Nabokov’s novels... you can’t count everything. He “pulverized” the Symbolists; he treated his own poems jealously and did not allow judgments about them; in Russian politics, before his visit to the Soviet ambassador, he had reactionary views, and after drinking Stalin’s health, he completely reconciled himself with his power; he was afraid of death, angry that it existed; did not understand art and music at all; Nabokov's name infuriated him.
And how many other people were abnormal for Bunin! Tsvetaeva with her lifelong shower of wild words and sounds in poetry, who ended her life in a noose after returning to Soviet Russia; the wild drunkard Balmont, who shortly before his death fell into a ferocious erotic madness; morphine addict and sadistic erotomaniac Bryusov; drunken tragedian Andreev... There is nothing to say about Bely’s monkey furies, and about the unfortunate Blok too: his paternal grandfather died in a psychiatric hospital, his father was “strange on the verge of mental illness,” his mother “was repeatedly treated in a hospital for the mentally ill”...
The writer devoted the last years of his life to working on a book about Chekhov. Unfortunately, this work remained unfinished.
At two o'clock in the morning from November 7 to 8, 1953, already a very old man, Ivan Alekseevich Bunin died quietly.
The funeral service was solemn - in the Russian church on Daru Street in Paris with a large crowd of people. All newspapers - both Russian and French - published extensive obituaries.
And the funeral itself took place much later, on January 30, 1954 (before that, the ashes were in a temporary crypt). Ivan Alekseevich was buried in the Russian cemetery of Saint-Genevieve des Bois near Paris. Next to Bunin, after seven and a half years, his faithful and selfless life partner, Vera Nikolaevna Bunina, found her peace.
II. WRITERS AND CRITICS about I. BUNIN
II.1 N.BERBEROVA about I.BUNIN
His sense of taste never failed him. And if he had not been born thirty years late, he would have been one of our greats of our great past. I see him between Turgenev and Chekhov, born in the year 1840.
Y. Olesha understood Bunin when he wrote: “He... is an evil, gloomy writer. He has... a longing for lost youth, for the fading of sensuality. His reasoning about the soul... sometimes seems simply stupid. One’s own fear of death, envy of the young and rich, even some kind of servility...” Cruel, but perhaps fair. In emigration, no one dared to write about Bunin like that. But many of the “young people” thought of him that way.
II.2 I. ODOEVTSEVA about I. BUNIN
Bunin could sometimes be very unpleasant without even noticing it. He really didn’t seem to give himself the trouble to consider those around him. Everything depended on his mood. But he changed his moods with amazing speed and often in the course of one evening was either sad, then cheerful, then angry, then complacent. He was very nervous and impressionable, which explained the change in his mood. He himself admitted that under the influence of the moment he was capable of the most extravagant acts, which he later regretted.
I have never seen any vindictiveness, envy, or pettiness in Bunin. On the contrary, he was kind and generous. Bunin was capable of almost heroic deeds, which he proved more than once during the occupation, when, risking his life, he sheltered Jews.
You won’t become a Russian writer with strong, healthy nerves. French - why not, but not Russian. Healthy Russians with strong nerves became engineers, doctors, lawyers, and in the worst case, journalists and critics. But never as writers. There was no place for them in this area. Aggravated, upset, broken nerves - often like Dostoevsky or Gogol - are almost clinical cases. But in no one did the spark of God burn so brightly in them, no one rose to such spiritual heights as they did, no one exalted literature as much as they did - no one brought so much consolation to readers.
But both Dostoevsky and Gogol were very often intolerant not only with strangers, but also in their own families. Bunin, in the circle of loved ones and family, was distinguished by his complaisance and good nature. Although he quarreled with his family, he easily and quickly made peace with them, forgiving real or imagined grievances. And he himself admitted that he was sometimes too touchy.
I like "Dark Alleys". But I was surprised by the number of suicides and murders in them. It seems to me that this is some kind of youthful, overly romantic understanding of love. Just a little - ah! and she hangs herself, or he shoots himself, or kills her. I tell him this very carefully. He shrugs his shoulders angrily: “Is that so?” Do you think it's immature, romantic? Well, that means you have never truly loved. You have no concept of love. Don’t you already know that seventeen and seventy years old love the same? Haven't you realized yet that love and death are inextricably linked?
Every time I experienced a love disaster - and there were many of these love disasters in my life, or rather, almost every love of mine was a disaster - I was close to suicide. Even when there was no catastrophe, but just another quarrel or separation. I wanted to commit suicide because of Varvara Panchenko.
Because of Anya, my first wife, too, although I didn’t really love her. But when she left me, I literally went crazy. For months. Day and night I thought about death. Even with Vera Nikolaevna... After all, I was still married, and my first wife, out of spite, did not want to divorce me. I was afraid that Vera Nikolaevna would refuse. He won’t dare to connect his life with me. After all, this was before the First World War.
The secular conventions and prejudices of Anna Karenina were still alive. And she is Muromtseva, the daughter of a famous professor, the niece of the chairman of the First Duma. But I couldn’t imagine life without her. If she hadn’t made up her mind and refused me, I would certainly have... - he falls silent for a minute, looking out the window. “And now again,” his voice sounds tired and sad. - Recently. You know... Yes, I know.
Although I can’t call it “recently”. Fifteen years is a very long time for me.
Bunin's views on futurists, decadents and abstractionists - he lumps them all together - have long been well known to me. - Your Block is good! Just a stage buffoon. In a night tavern after the gypsies - why - you can listen. But this has nothing to do with poetry. Absolutely not.
These - albeit musical - verses are not even a descent into the underworld, into hell, but into the dirty underground, into the basement of the “Stray Dog”, where “drunkards with the eyes of rabbits - in vino veritas scream,” shout, like in a circus: “Bravo, red ! Bravo, Blok! After all, your Blok is just a redhead from the circus, just a clown, a farce buffoon, from his own shameful “Balaganchik”. I don’t even try to explain that Blok hated Stray Dog and never visited it.
He looks at me mockingly. – Pushkin said: poetry, God forgive me, must be stupid. And I say - the prose, God forgive me, must be boring. Real, great prose. There are so many boring pages in Anna Karenina, and in War and Peace! But they are necessary, they are beautiful. Your Dostoevsky has no boring pages. They are not found in pulp or detective novels.
For me, there is no more captivating female image than Anna Karenina.
I never could and now still cannot remember her without emotion. And about my love for her. And Natasha Rostova? There can be no comparison between them. At the beginning, Natasha, of course, is charming and charming. But all this charm, all this charm turns into a birthing machine. In the end, Natasha is just disgusting. Sloppy, bare-haired, wearing a hood, with a soiled diaper in her hands.
And forever either pregnant or breastfeeding the next newborn. Pregnancy and everything connected with it have always disgusted me. Tolstoy’s passion for procreation - after all, he himself had seventeen children - I cannot understand, despite all my admiration for him. It only makes me disgusted. As, however, I am sure, in most men.
Chekhov knows how to show the ocean in a drop of water, the Sahara desert in a grain of sand, and give an entire landscape in one phrase. But he, too, was constantly busy with nature, carrying with him a little book in which he wrote down his observations of it. And so wonderfully at night, wisps of fog walk like ghosts. But it was in vain that he undertook to write about the nobles. He knew neither nobles nor noble life. There were no cherry orchards in Russia. And his plays are all nonsense, nonsense, no matter how they are inflated. He is no playwright...
- Modesty? Just think, it’s also a virtue! A virtue for a writer? Yes, I just don’t believe that humble writers exist. Pretense is one thing! Chekhov was delicate, modest, like a red girl - this is Tolstoy’s opinion. But in fact, he looked down on everyone, and did not want to talk to his brother, the artist, or his friends. He despised them all. Except maybe Levitan. Even though Levitan was a Jew, he was climbing the mountain very fast.
However, Chekhov did not develop a friendship with him either - he described him in “The Jumper”. It’s not worth talking about the other writers - everyone considered and considers themselves geniuses. Everyone is gnawing at envy, all are wolves. They're just pretending to be sheep. Everyone is bursting with conceit.
My sister Masha learned my poems by heart, but apart from them, she didn’t read anything. She considered me the second Pushkin - no worse than Pushkin. Apart from me and Pushkin, there was no poet for her. For her I was not only a poet, but something like a deity. Surprisingly, she, despite her lack of education, was a lovely romantic Russian girl. Not only did she feel my poems, but she also didn’t judge them stupidly.
She had an innate taste. When she was sixteen years old, I was even slightly in love - like Goethe, like Chateaubriand, like Byron - with my sister. It was a vague, unexpected attraction. Perhaps, if I had not read the biographies of Goethe and Chateaubriand, it would not have occurred to me even now that my love for Masha resembled falling in love. And after reading, I even became proud of the commonality with great writers. And I almost believed that I, too, “had unnatural feelings for my sister.” Although in fact my feelings were completely natural - just brotherly tenderness tinged with romanticism, similar to falling in love.
I have been writing poetry since childhood. But later I realized that you can’t make a living from poetry; prose is more profitable. Poems are glory. Prose is money. I desperately needed money. We fell into greater and greater poverty. After all, I was a real young nobleman, I didn’t know how to do anything, I couldn’t enter any service. It was not a good idea to become a scribe. Instead of a scribe, I became a writer.
II.3 V. VERESAEV about I. BUNIN
Bunin was thin, slender, blond, with a wedge beard, elegant manners, grumpy and arrogant lips, hemorrhoidal complexion, small eyes. But one day I had to see: suddenly these eyes lit up with a wonderful blue light, as if coming from inside the eyes, and he himself became inexpressibly beautiful. The tragedy of his writing life was that, despite his enormous talent, he was known only in a narrow circle of literature lovers. He never had the wide popularity that Gorky, Leonid Andreev, Kuprin, and Bunin enjoyed, for example.
What was amazing in Bunin was what I had to observe in some other major artists: the combination of a completely lousy person with an unshakably honest and demanding artist. An incident with him already during his emigration, told to me by Dr. Yushkevich, when Bunin, having received the Nobel Prize, refused to pay a bankrupt banker 30 thousand francs, which he lent to him, having offered him without any documents at a time when Bunin was in poverty. And next to this, no expectation of the largest fees or the loudest fame could force him to write even one line that contradicts his artistic conscience. Everything he wrote was marked by the deepest artistic adequacy and chastity.
He was charming with superiors, comradely sweet with equals, arrogant and harsh with inferior, aspiring writers who turned to him for advice. They jumped out of him as if from a bathhouse - he gave them such devastating, scathing reviews. In this respect, he was the complete opposite of Gorky or Korolenko, who treated aspiring writers with the most careful attention. It seems that there is not a single writer who was introduced into literature by Bunin. But he vigorously pushed forward young writers who surrounded him with worship and slavishly imitated him, such as the poet Nikolai Meshkov, the fiction writer I.G. Shklyar and others. With his equals he was very restrained in negative comments about their work, and in his silence everyone could feel a kind of approval. Sometimes he suddenly broke through, and then he was merciless.
II.4 V. YANOVSKY about I. BUNIN
It should be remembered that Bunin was Merezhkovsky’s competitor for the Nobel Prize, and this could not give rise to good feelings towards him. Bunin looked into this living room less and less. It was not at all difficult to find fault with Bunin, who was intellectually defenseless. As soon as the speech touched on abstract concepts, he, without noticing it, lost ground under his feet. He was best at oral reminiscences and improvisations - not about Gorky or Blok, but about restaurants, about sterlet, about sleeping cars on the St. Petersburg-Warsaw railway. It was in such “objective” images that Bunin’s strength and charm lay. In addition, of course, personal charm! He will lightly touch his interlocutor’s hand with his white, hard, coldish finger and, as if with utmost attention and respect, tell the next joke... And the interlocutor imagines that
Bunin only talks to him so kindly, so heartfeltly. Yes, the magic of a look, intonation, touch, gesture...
Fate played a cruel joke on Bunin, mentally wounding him for the rest of his life... Bunin, dressed elegantly and decently from his youth, walked around the literary palace, but was stubbornly proclaimed a half-naked impostor. This happened back in Russia, with the fireworks of Andreev, Gorky, Blok, Bryusov. The bitter experience of non-recognition left Ivan Alekseevich with deep ulcers: it is enough just to touch such a sore to provoke a rude, cruel response. The names of Gorky, Andreev, Blok, Bryusov gave rise to a spontaneous stream of abuse from him.
It was clear how much and for a long time he suffered in the shadow of the lucky ones of that era. He had bitter, caustic words about all his contemporaries, like a former servant taking revenge on his bar tormentors. He insisted that he always despised Gorky and his works. Ridiculed, but an independent renegade, he now took revenge on his tormentors and took revenge. It is easy to see that it was the Russian catastrophe, emigration, that brought him to first place. Among the epigones abroad, he was truly the most successful.
So, Bunin easily took first place in old prose; young, inspired by the European experience, she decided only in the mid-30s and still had to educate her reader. But Bunin’s poems caused a smile even among the editors of Sovremennye Zapiski.
Bunin was interested in Montparnasse's sex life; in this sense, he was a completely Western man - without shudders, sermons and repentance. However, he considered it appropriate to limit the freedom of women. Bunin's family life was quite difficult. Vera Nikolaevna, describing in detail the gray youth of “Yan”, did not touch upon his later adventures, at least, she did not publish this. Besides Kuznetsova - then a young, healthy, red-cheeked woman with an upturned nose - besides Galina Nikolaevna, Zurov also lived in the Bunins' house. The latter was noted by Ivan Alekseevich as a “consonant” author, and he was discharged from the Baltic states.
Gradually, under the influence of various living conditions, instead of gratitude, Zurov began to feel almost hatred for his benefactor. Kuznetsova, it seems, was Ivan Alekseevich’s last prize in the romantic sense. Then she was beautiful with a slightly rough beauty. And when Galina Nikolaevna left with Margarita Stepun, Bunin, in essence, became very bored.
Bunin did not like anything in modern prose, emigrant or European. He praised only Aldanov. Bunin, of course, scolded Alexei Tolstoy, but he valued his (spontaneous) “talent” highly. I think that Bunin had deeply provincial taste, although he seriously loved L. Tolstoy.
II.5 V.KATAEV about I.BUNIN
Many described Bunin's appearance. In my opinion, Andrei Bely did the best job: the profile of a condor, as if tear-stained eyes, and so on. It was in Odessa. My friend and I brought our first poems to Bunin to get his opinion. A forty-year-old gentleman appeared before us - dry, bilious, dapper - with the aura of an honorary academician in the category of belles lettres. Later I realized that it was not so much gall as hemorrhoidal, but this is not significant. Well made tailored trousers. English yellow low shoes with thick soles. Eternals. The beard is dark brown, a writer's beard, but more well-groomed and pointed than Chekhov's. French. No wonder Chekhov jokingly called him Mr. Bukishon. The pince-nez is like Chekhov's, steel, but not on the nose, but folded in half and stuffed into the outer side pocket of a semi-sports jacket.
Obeying Bunin’s motionless gaze, we placed our writings in his outstretched hands. Vovka put in a book of decadent poems he had just printed at his own expense, and I put in a general notebook. Tightly squeezing our essays with his grasping fingers, Bunin ordered us to appear in two weeks. Exactly two weeks later - minute by minute - we again stood on the stone slabs of the familiar terrace. “I read your poems,” he said sternly, like a doctor, addressing mainly Vovka. –
So what? It's hard to say anything positive. Personally, this kind of poetry is alien to me. This time leading us to the steps of the terrace, Bunin said goodbye to us, shaking our hands: first to Vovka, then to me. And then a miracle happened. The first miracle in my life. When Vovka Dietrichstein had already begun to walk down the steps, Bunin lightly held me by the sleeve of my jacket and said quietly, as if to himself: “Come one of these days in the morning, we’ll talk.”
You can easily imagine the state in which I was during those four or five days, which with incredible difficulty I forced myself to skip for the sake of decency, so as not to run to Bunin the next day. Finally I came to him. Bunin no longer seemed so strict to me. There was more Chekhov in his goatee than last time. We sat down on two beech Viennese chairs, bent, light and sonorous, like musical instruments, and he put my oilcloth notebook on the table, smoothed it with a dry palm and said: “Well, sir.”
...But how did all this happen? What do we have in common? Why do I love him so passionately? After all, just recently I had not even heard his name. He knew the names of Kuprin, Andreev, Gorky well, but he had heard absolutely nothing about Bunin. And suddenly one day, completely unexpectedly, he became a deity for me.
Bunin was leafing through my notebook. He dwelled on some poems, rereading them several times to himself, sometimes making short remarks about some inaccuracy or illiteracy, but all this was short, inoffensive, businesslike. And it was impossible to understand whether he liked the poems or not. I think then Bunin was looking in my poems for where it was true. The rest didn't matter to him.
At the top of the pages he put a bird, apparently meaning that the poems were wow, at least “true.” There were only two such poems, marked with a bird, in the entire notebook, and I became despondent, believing that I had failed forever in Bunin’s eyes and that I would not become a good poet, especially since he did not say anything encouraging to me at parting. Thus, the usual remarks of an indifferent person: “Nothing”, “Write”, “Observe nature”, “Poetry is daily work”.
For several days then I ran around among my acquaintances, talking about my visit to Bunin; My story made no noticeable impression on almost anyone.
I repeat: my Bunin was little known. Only my comrades - young poets, to whom I already officially belonged at that time - became interested in my story. True, most of them did not recognize Bunin as a poet at all, which drove me into despair and even some kind of childish rage.
But on the other hand, everyone was in awe of him as an honorary academician and, having learned that Bunin, known for his merciless severity, awarded two of my fifteen poems with an incentive bird, at first they did not want to believe it, but they were imbued with some interest in me, although they openly shrugged their shoulders. They didn't recognize me either. In general, at that time no one recognized anyone. This was a sign of good literary tone.
I feverishly expected a new meeting with Bunin, but just at that time the war began, he left, and only four years later I saw him again, encountering him on those inconvenient steps of the spiral staircase that led a little down to the office of the Odessa List ", where I remember receiving a fee for published poems. – How long have you been in Odessa? I asked this question out of embarrassment, since I already knew about his flight from Bolshevik Moscow to Odessa.
This was some kind of new, frightening Bunin for me, almost an emigrant, or, perhaps, already quite an emigrant, who fully and in all depths felt the collapse, the death of the former Russia, the disintegration of all ties. Everything is over. He remained in Russia, engulfed in a terrible, merciless revolution for him. It was strange for me, a Russian officer, a Knight of St. George, to walk through a Russian city occupied by an enemy army, next to a Russian academician, a famous writer, who voluntarily fled here from Soviet Russia, succumbing to general panic and fleeing from who knows what in the occupied south.
- When was the last time we saw each other? - asked Bunin. - In July the fourteenth. “July the fourteenth,” he said thoughtfully. - Four years. War. Revolution. A month of Sundays. “Then I came to your dacha, but didn’t find you anymore.” – Yes, I left for Moscow the day after the declaration of war. I got out with great difficulty. Everything was packed with military trains. I was afraid of Romania, the Turkish fleet... Thus began my two-year communication with Bunin until the day when he finally finally and forever left his homeland. Now they - Bunin and his wife Vera Nikolaevna, having fled from the Bolsheviks, as they put it then - “from the Soviet Union”, were sitting in the dacha along with other Moscow refugees, waiting for the time when Soviet power would finally burst and it would be possible to return home.
With the tenacity of a maniac, I thought about Bunin, about his new poems and prose, brought from Soviet Russia, from mysterious revolutionary Moscow. This was some other Bunin, still unknown to me, new, completely different from the one I knew inside and out. If the poet’s poems are some semblance of his soul, and this is undoubtedly the case, in the case, of course, that the poet is genuine, then the soul of my Bunin, that Bunin, to whom I walked along the Bolshefontansky shore, was writhing in hellish flames, and if Bunin did not groan, only because he still hoped for the imminent end of the revolution.
Now he was not only a poet of loneliness, a singer of the Russian village and the impoverishment of the nobility, but also the author of stories of amazing power and novelty, “The Gentleman from San Francisco,” “Chang’s Dreams,” “Easy Breathing,” which immediately made him almost the first Russian prose writer. Even my friends - young and not so young Odessa poets - one fine day, as if on command, recognized him as an indisputable authority: Niva published Bunin's works as its supplement, which immediately made him a classic.
The day before, I brought Bunin - at his request - everything I had written so far: about thirty poems and several stories, partly handwritten, partly in the form of newspaper and magazine clippings stuck with paste on sheets of stationery paper. The result was quite an impressive package. “Come tomorrow morning, we’ll talk,” said Bunin.
I came and sat on the steps, waiting for him to leave the rooms. He came out and sat down next to me. It was the first time I saw him so quiet and thoughtful. He was silent for quite a long time, and then said - slowly, with concentration - words that I cannot forget to this day, adding: “I don’t throw my words to the wind.” I didn't dare believe my ears. It seemed to me that everything that was happening to me was unreal. Sitting next to me on the steps in a linen blouse was not at all the same Bunin - unpleasantly bilious, dry, arrogant - as those around him considered him. On this day, his soul seemed to open up to me for a moment - sad, very lonely, easily vulnerable, independent, fearless and at the same time surprisingly tender.
I was amazed that this same Bunin, the lucky one and the darling of fate - as it seemed to me then - was so deeply dissatisfied with his position in literature, or rather, with his position among the writers of his time. In fact: to a wide circle of readers he was little noticeable among the noisy crowd of - as he bitterly put it - the “literary bazaar”. He was overshadowed by stars of the first magnitude, whose names were on everyone’s lips: Korolenko, Kuprin, Gorky, Leonid Andreev, Merezhkovsky, Fyodor Sologub - and many other “powers of thought.” He was not a master of thoughts.
Alexander Blok, Balmont, Bryusov, Gippius, Gumilev, Akhmatova reigned in poetry, and finally - whether they wanted it or not - Igor Severyanin, whose name was known not only to all high school students, students, students, young officers, but even many clerks, paramedics, traveling salesmen , cadets, who at the same time had no idea that such a Russian writer existed: Ivan Bunin.
Bunin was known and appreciated - until recently - by very few true experts and lovers of Russian literature, who understood that he now writes much better than all modern writers. Criticism - especially at the beginning of his literary career - wrote rarely, little about Bunin, since his works did not provide material for “problem” articles or a reason for a literary scandal.
One could conclude that of all modern Russian literature, he unconditionally recognizes only Leo Tolstoy as superior to himself. He considers Chekhov, so to speak, a writer of his own level, maybe even a little higher... but not much. And the rest... What about the rest? Kuprin is talented, even very talented, but often sloppy.
Tolstoy said well about Leonid Andreev: “He scares me, but I’m not afraid.” Gorky and Korolenko, in essence, are not artists, but publicists, which in no way detracts from their great talents, but... real poetry has degenerated. Balmont, Bryusov, Bely - nothing more than Moscow home-grown decadence, a cross between French and Nizhny Novgorod, “oh, close your pale legs”, “I want to be impudent, I want to be brave, I want to rip your clothes off”, “he laughed in a rough bass voice, launched into the sky pineapple..." and other nonsense; Akhmatova is a provincial young lady who finds herself in the capital; Alexander Blok - fictional, bookish German poetry; about the lackey “poets” of Igor Severyanin - they came up with such a disgusting word! - and there’s nothing to say; and the futurists are just criminal types, escaped convicts...
Once Bunin, when I asked what literary movement he considered himself to be, said: “Oh, what nonsense all these movements are!” The critics declared me to be everything: a decadent, a symbolist, a mystic, a realist, a neo-realist, a God-seeker, a naturalist, and you never know what other labels they stuck on me, so in the end I became like a chest, who has traveled around the world, covered in colorful, loud stickers. But can this even in the slightest degree explain the essence of me as an artist? Not in any way! I am me, the one and only, like every person living on earth, which is the very essence of the question. “He looked at me sideways, like Chekhov.” “And you, dear sir, will face the same fate.” You will be covered with labels all over, like a suitcase. Mark my words!
He had every opportunity to leave Odessa, which was dangerous for him, abroad many times, especially since - as I already said - he was easy-going and loved to wander around different cities and countries. However, he was stuck in Odessa: he did not want to become an emigrant, cut off by a slice; stubbornly hoped for a miracle - for the end of the Bolsheviks, the death of Soviet power and a return to Moscow to the ringing of the Kremlin bells. In which? It is unlikely that he clearly understood this. To the old, familiar Moscow? This is probably why he remained in Odessa when, in the spring of 1919, it was occupied by units of the Red Army and Soviet power was established for several months.
By this time, Bunin was already so compromised by his counter-revolutionary views, which, by the way, he did not hide, that he could have been shot without any discussion and probably would have been shot if not for his old friend, the Odessa artist Nilus, who lived in the same house where they lived and Bunins, in the attic described in “Chang’s Dreams”, not in a simple attic, but in an attic “warm, fragrant with cigars, covered with carpets, lined with antique furniture, hung with paintings and brocade fabrics...”.
So, if this same Nilus had not shown frantic energy - he telegraphed Lunacharsky to Moscow, almost on his knees begged the chairman of the Odessa Revolutionary Committee - then it is still unknown how the matter would have ended. One way or another, Nilus received a special, so-called “safe conduct letter” for the life, property and personal integrity of Academician Bunin, which was pinned with buttons to the lacquered, rich door of the mansion on Knyazheskaya Street.
I continued to visit Bunin, although it was clear that our roads diverged further and further. I continued to love him passionately. I don’t want to add: as an artist. I loved him completely, and as a person, as a person too. I did not feel any noticeable cooling in his attitude towards me, although I noticed that more and more often he was looking very intently at me, as if wanting to understand the obscure soul of a modern young man infected with the revolution, to read his innermost thoughts .
In the fall, power changed again. The city was occupied by Denikin's troops. And then one dark, rainy city morning - so Parisian! - I read to Bunin my last, just carefully corrected and completely rewritten story about a young man. Bunin listened in silence, leaning his elbows on the lacquer table, and I fearfully expected signs of irritation or—what better—outright anger on his face. “I tried to apply your principle of symphonic prose here,” I said, having finished reading. He looked at me and said bitterly, as if answering his thoughts: -
Well. This was to be expected. I don't see myself here anymore. You are leaving me for Leonid Andreev.
I hate your Dostoevsky! – he suddenly exclaimed with passion. - A disgusting writer with all his heaps, the terrifying sloppiness of some deliberate, unnatural, made-up language that no one has ever spoken or speaks, with annoying, tedious repetitions, lengthiness, tongue-tiedness...
He always grabs you by the ears and pokes, pokes, pokes your nose into this impossible abomination he has invented, some kind of spiritual vomit. And besides, how mannered, contrived, unnatural it all is. The Legend of the Great Inquisitor! - Bunin exclaimed with an expression of disgust and laughed. - This is where everything that happened to Russia came from: decadence, modernism, revolution, young people like you, infected to the marrow of their bones with Dostoevschina - without a path in life, confused, mentally and physically crippled by the war, not knowing where to put their strengths, abilities, sometimes remarkable, even enormous talents...
Maybe he was the first in the world to talk about the lost generation. But our Russian – my – generation was not lost. It did not die, although it could have died. The war crippled him, but the Great Revolution saved and healed him. Whatever I am, I owe my life and my creativity to the Revolution. Only Her alone. I am the son of the Revolution. Maybe a bad son. But still a son.
These were the last months before we were separated forever. Here are some of Bunin’s thoughts at that time, which struck me with their lack of general acceptance: – You know, for all his genius, Leo Tolstoy is not always impeccable as an artist. He has a lot of raw, unnecessary things. I would like to one day take, for example, his “Anna Karenina” and rewrite it again. Not to write in your own way, but to rewrite - if I may put it this way - rewrite it completely, removing all the lengths, omitting something, here and there making the phrases more precise, elegant, but, of course, nowhere adding a single one of your own letters, leaving everything Tolstoy completely intact.
Maybe I will do this someday, of course, as an experience, exclusively for myself, not for publication. Although I am deeply convinced that Tolstoy, edited in this way by a real, great artist, will be read with even greater pleasure and will additionally gain those readers who cannot always master his novels precisely because of their insufficient stylistic processing. One can imagine what a storm of the most contradictory feelings such thoughts expressed by my teacher aroused in my weak, young soul. Talk about Dostoevsky and Tolstoy in a similar way! It drove me crazy...
...I wanted to cry in despair, thinking about the terrible tragedy that Bunin experienced, about the irreparable mistake he made by leaving his homeland forever. And I couldn’t get out of my mind the phrase that Nilus told me: “What is Ivan’s circulation?” Five hundred, eight hundred copies. “We would publish it in hundreds of thousands,” I almost groaned. - Understand how scary it is: a great writer who has no readers. Why did he go abroad? For what? “For the sake of freedom, independence,” Nilus said sternly. I understood: Bunin exchanged the two most precious things - the Motherland and the Revolution - for the lentil stew of the so-called freedom and so-called independence, which he had been striving for all his life.
I learned to see the world from Bunin and from Mayakovsky... But the world was different. Bunin was deeply convinced that he was a completely independent, pure artist, depicter, who had nothing to do with “social contrasts” or “the fight against tyranny and violence, with the defense of the oppressed and disadvantaged” and certainly had nothing to do with the Revolution , more precisely, not accepting her in any way, even directly hostile to her. It was just a childish illusion, an impulse towards imaginary artistic independence.
Bunin wanted to be completely free from any obligations in relation to the society in which he lived, in relation to his homeland. He thought that by going into exile, he had achieved his goal. Abroad, he seemed to himself completely free to write whatever he wanted, not subject to either state censorship or the court of society.
Neither the French state, nor Parisian society, nor the Catholic Church cared anything about Bunin. He wrote whatever he wanted, unrestrained by any moral obligations, even sometimes by simple decency. He grew as an artist and by the end of his life reached the highest degree of plastic perfection. But the lack of moral pressure from the outside led to the fact that Bunin the artist stopped choosing points of application of his abilities and his mental strength.
For him, artistic creativity ceased to be a struggle and turned into a simple habit of depicting, into gymnastics of the imagination. I remembered his words, once told to me, that everything can be depicted in words, but still there is a limit that even the greatest poet cannot overcome. There is always something “inexpressible in words.” And we must come to terms with this. Maybe this is true. But the fact is that Bunin set this limit and limiter for himself too early.
At one time, it also seemed to me that he had reached complete and final perfection in depicting the most intimate subtleties of the world around us, nature. He, of course, in this respect surpassed both Polonsky and Fet, but still - without even suspecting it - he was already in some ways inferior to Annensky, and then to Pasternak and Mandelstam of the last period, who moved the scale of visual mastery another notch.
One day, wanting to put an end to the past forever, Bunin resolutely shaved off his mustache and beard, fearlessly exposing his senile chin and energetic mouth, and already in this updated form, in a tailcoat with a starched plastron on his wide chest, received a Nobel laureate diploma from the hands of the Swedish king, a gold medal and a small briefcase of yellow embossed leather, specially painted with paints in the “Russe style”, which Bunin, by the way, could not stomach...
Bunin is buried in the Russian emigrant cemetery in Paris. Bunin’s grave turned out to be completely different from what Bunin himself imagined, in the middle of his life, while still living in Russia: “A grave slab, an iron board, growing into the ground in the thick grass... I’ll come to lie down under the same slab - and I’ll lie down quietly, on the edge " And not the one he saw already in exile: “Blaze, play with hundred-colored power, unquenchable star, over my distant grave, forgotten by God forever!”
II.6 Y. AIKHENVALD about I. BUNIN
Against the background of Russian modernism, Bunin's poetry stands out as good old. She continues the eternal Pushkin tradition and in her pure and strict outlines provides an example of nobility and simplicity. Happily old-fashioned and orthodox, the author has no need for "free verse"; he feels at ease, he is not cramped in all these iambs and trochees that the good old time denied us.
He accepted the inheritance. He does not care about new forms, since the old is far from being exhausted, and for poetry it is the last words that are not at all valuable. And what is dear about Bunin is that he is only a poet. He does not theorize, does not classify himself as a member of any school, he has no theory of literature: he simply writes beautiful poetry. And he writes them when he has something to say and when he wants to say it. Behind his poems one senses something else, something more: himself. He has behind the poems, behind the soul.
Its lines are of tried and tested ancient coinage; his handwriting is the clearest in modern literature; his drawing is compressed and concentrated. Bunin draws from the unperturbed Kastalsky key. Both from the inside and the outside, his best poems evade prose just in time (sometimes he does not have time to evade); rather, he makes prose poetic; rather, he conquers it and transforms it into poetry, rather than creating poetry as something different and special from it.
His verse seemed to have lost its independence, its isolation from everyday speech, but through this it did not become vulgar. Bunin often breaks his line in the middle, ending a sentence where the verse did not end; but as a result, something natural and living arises, and the indissoluble integrity of our word is not sacrificed to versification.
Not as a condemnation, but as a great praise to him, it must be said that even the rhymed poems are his. give the impression of whites: he does not boast of rhyme, although he wields it boldly and uniquely - but it is not the center of beauty in his art. Reading Bunin, we are convinced how much poetry there is in our prose and how the ordinary is akin to the sublime. He extracts beauty from everyday life and knows how to find new signs of old objects.
The poet's soul speaks in verse. And you still can’t say better poetry. That is why others will already think in advance that the prose of Bunin, a great poet, is less than his poems. But that's not true. And even many readers rank them lower than his stories.
But since Bunin, in general, with amazing art, elevates prose to the rank of poetry, does not deny prose, but only exalts it and clothes it in a unique beauty, one of the highest advantages of his poems and his stories is the absence of a fundamental difference between them.
Both are two faces of the same essence. Both here and here the author is a realist, even a naturalist, who does not disdain anything, does not run away from rudeness, but is capable of rising to the most romantic heights, always a truthful and honest depicter of fact, extracting depth, meaning, and all the prospects of existence from the very facts . When you read, for example, his “Cup of Life,” you equally perceive the beauty of both its lines and poetry. In this book - the usual for Bunin.
All the same extraordinary thoughtfulness and refinement of presentation, strict beauty of verbal coinage, consistent style, submissive to the subtle curves and shades of the author's intention. Still the same calm, perhaps somewhat arrogant power of talent, which feels equally at ease in the closest everyday life, in a Russian village or the provincial town of Streletsk, and in the lush exoticism of Ceylon.
II.7 N. GUMILEV about I. BUNIN
Poetry should hypnotize - this is its power. But the methods of this hypnotization are different, they depend on the conditions of each country and era.
Thus, at the beginning of the 19th century, when, under the still fresh memory of the revolution, France strove for the ideal of a universal state, French poetry gravitated towards antiquity, as the foundation of the culture of all civilized peoples.
Germany, dreaming of unification, resurrected its native folklore. England, having paid tribute to self-adoration in the person of Coleridge and Wordsworth, found expression of social temperament in the heroic poetry of Byron.
Heine - with his sarcasm, the Parnassians - with their exoticism, Pushkin, Lermontov - with the new possibilities of the Russian language.
When the intense moment in the life of nations passed, and everything more or less leveled out, the symbolists entered the field of action, wanting to hypnotize not with their themes, but with the very way they were conveyed.
They tired the attention either with peculiar suggestive repetitions (Edgar Poe), or with the deliberate obscurity of the main theme (Mallarmé), or with flickering images (Balmont), or with archaic words and expressions (Vyacheslav Ivanov) and, having achieved this, inspired the required feeling.
Symbolic art will reign supreme until then; until the modern ferment of thought becomes established or, on the contrary, intensifies so much that it can be harmonized poetically.
That is why Bunin’s poems, like other epigones of naturalism, must be considered fakes, first of all, because they are boring and do not hypnotize. Everything about them is clear and nothing is beautiful. Reading Bunin's poems, it seems that you are reading prose. The successful details of the landscapes are not interconnected by lyrical uplift. Thoughts are stingy and rarely go beyond a simple trick. There are major flaws in the verse and in the Russian language.
If we try to restore Bunin’s spiritual appearance from his poems, the picture will turn out even sadder: reluctance or inability to delve deeper into oneself, dreaminess, wingless in the absence of imagination, observation without passion for what is observed, and the absence of temperament, which alone makes a person a poet.
III. I. BUNIN ABOUT WRITERS
III.1 I. BUNIN about K. BALMONT
Balmont was generally an amazing person. A man who sometimes delighted many with his “childishness”, his unexpected naive laughter, which, however, was always with some demonic cunning, a man in whose nature there was quite a bit of feigned tenderness, “sweetness”, to use his language, but not a little at all. the other - wild riot, brutal pugnacity, public insolence. This was a man who, all his life, was truly exhausted by narcissism and was intoxicated with himself. And one more thing: despite all this, he was a rather calculating person.
Once upon a time in Bryusov’s magazine, in “Scales,” he called me, to please Bryusov, “a small stream, capable only of babbling.” Later, when times changed, he suddenly became merciful to me, - he said, after reading my story “Mr. from San Francisco”: “Bunin, you have a sense of the ship!” And even later, in my Nobel days, he compared me at a meeting in Paris no longer with a stream, but with a lion: he read a sonnet in my honor, in which, of course, he did not forget himself - the sonnet began like this: I am a tiger, you - a lion!
III.2 I. BUNIN about M. VOLOSHIN
Voloshin was one of the most prominent poets of Russia in the pre-revolutionary and revolutionary years and combined in his poems many very typical features of most of these poets: their aestheticism, snobbery, symbolism, their passion for European poetry of the end of the last and beginning of this century, their political “change of milestones” ( depending on what was more profitable at one time or another); He also had another sin: too literary glorification of the most terrible, most brutal atrocities of the Russian revolution.
I personally knew Voloshin from quite a long time ago, but it was not close to our last meetings in Odessa, in the winter and spring of 1919. I remember his first poems - judging by them, it was difficult to imagine that over the years his poetic talent would become so stronger and develop so externally and internally. I remember our first meeting in Moscow. He was already then a prominent employee of “Libra”, “Golden Fleece”.
Even then, his appearance, his manner of holding himself, talking, and reading were very carefully “made.” He was short, very stocky, with broad and straight shoulders, small arms and legs, a short neck, a large head, dark brown hair, curly hair and a beard: out of all this, despite his pince-nez, he deftly made something quite picturesque in the manner of a Russian peasant and an ancient Greek, something bullish and at the same time tough-looking.
Having lived in Paris, among the attic poets and artists, he wore a wide-brimmed black hat, a velvet jacket and cape, and in dealing with people he acquired the old French liveliness, sociability, courtesy, a kind of funny grace, in general something very refined, cutesy and “charming,” although the makings of all this were indeed inherent in his nature. Like almost all of his contemporaries who were poets, he always read his poems with the greatest eagerness, everywhere, anywhere and in any quantity, at the slightest desire of those around him.
Starting to read, he immediately raised his thick shoulders, his already high chest, on which almost female breasts were visible under the blouse, made the face of an Olympian, a thunderer, and began to howl powerfully and languidly. Having finished, he immediately threw off this formidable and important mask: immediately again a charming and insinuating smile, a soft, salon-like shimmering voice, a kind of joyful readiness to lie like a carpet at the feet of the interlocutor - and a cautious, but tireless voluptuousness of appetite, if it was at a party , over tea or dinner...
I remember meeting him at the end of 1905, also in Moscow. Then almost all the prominent Moscow and St. Petersburg poets suddenly turned out to be passionate revolutionaries - with great assistance, by the way, from Gorky and his newspaper Borba, in which Lenin himself participated.
His books - companions (according to him) were: Pushkin and Lermontov from the age of five, from the age of seven Dostoevsky and Edgar Allan Poe; from thirteen Hugo and Dickens; from sixteen Schiller, Heine, Byron; from twenty-four French poets and Anatole France; books of recent years: Bagavat-Gita, Mallarmé, Paul Claudel, Henri de Regnier, Villiers de Lille Adan - India and France...
...Voloshin sometimes spends the night with us. We have a certain supply of lard and alcohol, he eats greedily and with pleasure and talks and talks and talks about the most lofty and tragic topics. By the way, from his speeches about the Freemasons it is clear that he is a Freemason - and how could he, with his curiosity and other character traits, miss the opportunity to get into such a community?...
... I warned him more than once: do not run to the Bolsheviks, they know very well who you were with yesterday. The answer is the same as the artists: “Art is timeless, outside politics, I will participate in decoration only as a poet and as an artist.” - “In decoration of what? Your own gallows? - Still, I ran. And the next day in Izvestia: “Voloshin is coming to us, every bastard is now in a hurry to cling to us...” Voloshin wants to write a letter to the editor, full of noble indignation. Naturally, the letter was not published... Now he has been dead for a long time. Of course, he was neither a revolutionary nor a Bolshevik, but, I repeat, he still behaved very strangely...
III.3 I. BUNIN about A. BLOK
After the February Revolution, the tsarist period of Russian history ended, power passed to the Provisional Government, all the tsarist ministers were arrested, imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress, and for some reason the Provisional Government invited Blok to the “Extraordinary Commission” to investigate the activities of these ministers, and Blok, receiving 600 rubles per month salary, a sum at that time still significant, began to go for interrogations, sometimes interrogated himself and obscenely mocked in his diary, as it became known later, those who were interrogated.
And then the “Great October Revolution” happened, the Bolsheviks put the ministers of the Provisional Government in the same fortress, and Blok went over to the Bolsheviks, became Lunacharsky’s personal secretary, after which he wrote the brochure “The Intelligentsia and the Revolution”, and began to demand: “Listen, listen, music revolution! and composed "The Twelve".
Moscow writers organized a meeting to read and analyze The Twelve, and I went to this meeting. It was read by someone, I don’t remember who exactly, who was sitting next to Ilya Ehrenburg and Tolstoy. And since the glory of this work, which for some reason was called a poem, very quickly became completely undeniable, when the reader finished, at first reverent silence reigned, then soft exclamations were heard: “Amazing! Amazing!" I took the text of “The Twelve” and, leafing through it, said something like this: “Gentlemen, you know what has been happening in Russia, to the disgrace of all humanity, for a whole year now.”
There is no name for the senseless atrocities that the Russian people have been committing since the beginning of February last year, since the February revolution, which is still called completely shamelessly “bloodless.” The number of killed and tortured people, almost entirely innocent, has probably already reached a million; a whole sea of tears of widows and orphans is flooding the Russian land. Isn’t it strange to you that on days like these Blok shouts at us: “Listen, listen to the music of the revolution!” and writes “The Twelve,” and in his pamphlet “Intellectuals and Revolution” assures us that the Russian people were absolutely right when they shot at the cathedrals in the Kremlin last October. As for “The Twelve,” this work is truly amazing, but only in the sense of how bad it is in all respects.
Blok is an unbearably poetic poet, like Balmont, he almost never has a single word in simplicity, everything is beautiful and eloquent beyond all measure, he does not know, does not feel that everything can be vulgarized by high style. “The Twelve” is a set of poems, ditties, sometimes tragic, sometimes dancing, but in general claiming to be something eminently Russian and folk.
And all this, first of all, is damn boring with its endless chattiness and monotony. Blok decided to reproduce the people's language, people's feelings, but what came out was something completely popular, inept, vulgar beyond all measure. And “in the end” Blok is fooling the public with absolutely nonsense, I said in conclusion. Carried away by Katka, Blok completely forgot his original idea of “shooting at Holy Rus'” and “shooting” at Katka, so the story with her, with Vanka, with the reckless drivers turned out to be the main content of “The Twelve”.
Blok came to his senses only at the end of his “poem” and, in order to recover, he suffered from anything: here again was a “sovereign step” and some hungry dog - again a dog! - and pathological blasphemy: some sweet Jesus dancing (with a bloody flag, and at the same time in a white corolla of roses) ahead of these cattle, robbers and murderers: So they walk with a sovereign step - Behind is a hungry dog, Ahead - with a bloody flag , With a gentle tread above the storm, A scattering of pearls in the snow, In a white corolla of roses - Jesus Christ is ahead!
Blok’s other famous work about the Russian people, entitled “Scythians,” was also quite strange, written (“created,” as his admirers invariably say) immediately after “The Twelve.” But finally, the entire Russian people, as if to please the cross-eyed Lenin, are declared Asians “with slanted and greedy eyes.” Here, addressing the Europeans, Blok speaks on behalf of Russia no less arrogantly than he spoke on its behalf, for example, Yesenin (“I will stretch out my tongue like a comet, I will stretch my legs to Egypt”), and day and night the Kremlin now speaks not only to all of Europe, but and America, which greatly helped the “Scythians” escape from Hitler. “Scythians” is a crude counterfeit of Pushkin (“Slanderers of Russia”). The self-praise of the “Scythians” is also not original: this is our primordial: “We’ll throw our hats!”
But what is most remarkable is that just during the “creation” of the “Scythians”, the entire Russian army, which defended it from the Germans, and truly “darkness and darkness of Scythians” collapsed completely and as shamefully as never before in the entire existence of Russia. ", as if so formidable and powerful, - “Try to fight us!” - they fled from the front as fast as they could, and just a month after that the Bolsheviks signed the famous “obscene peace” of Brest-Litovsk...
III.4 I. BUNIN about V. KHLEBNIKOV
I sometimes met Khlebnikov, whose name was Victor, although he changed it to some Velimir, even before the revolution (before the February). He was a rather gloomy fellow, silent, either drunk or pretending to be drunk. Now not only in Russia, but sometimes also in exile they talk about his genius. This, of course, is also very stupid, but he had elementary deposits of some wild artistic talent.
He was known as a famous futurist, and also a madman. However, was he really crazy? He, of course, was by no means normal, but he still played the role of a madman, speculating on his madness. Khlebnikov, “thanks to his everyday carelessness,” was in dire need. He found himself a patron of the arts, the famous baker Filippov, who began to support him, fulfilling all his whims, and Khlebnikov settled in a luxurious room at the Lux Hotel on Tverskaya and decorated the outside of his door with a colorful homemade poster: on this poster the sun was drawn on the paws, and At the bottom there was a signature: “Chairman of the Globe. Takes from twelve in the afternoon to half past twelve in the afternoon.” A very popular game of playing crazy. And then the madman burst out, to please the Bolsheviks, with quite reasonable and profitable verses.
III.5 I. BUNIN about V. MAYAKOVSKY
I was in St. Petersburg for the last time - for the last time in my life! - at the beginning of April 1917, during Lenin’s passage. I was then, by the way, at the opening of an exhibition of Finnish paintings. “The whole of St. Petersburg” gathered there, led by our then ministers of the Provisional Government and famous Duma deputies. And then I attended a banquet in honor of the Finns.
Mayakovsky prevailed over everyone. I sat at dinner with Gorky and the Finnish artist Gallen. And Mayakovsky began by suddenly coming up to us, pushing a chair between us and beginning to eat from our plates and drink from our glasses; Gallen looked at him with all his eyes - the way he would probably look at a horse if, for example, it were brought into this banquet hall. Gorky laughed. I moved away. – Do you hate me very much? – Mayakovsky asked me cheerfully. I replied that no: “It would be too much honor for you!”
He opened his trough-shaped mouth to say something else, but then Miliukov, our then Minister of Foreign Affairs, rose for an official toast, and Mayakovsky rushed to him, to the middle of the table. And then he jumped up on a chair and shouted something so obscenely that Miliukov was taken aback. A second later, having recovered, he again proclaimed: “Gentlemen!” But Mayakovsky screamed louder than ever.
And Miliukov spread his hands and sat down. But then the French ambassador stood up. Obviously, he was quite sure that the Russian hooligan would give up in front of him. No matter how it is! Mayakovsky instantly drowned him out with an even louder roar. But not only that, a wild and senseless frenzy immediately began in the hall: Mayakovsky’s associates also screamed and began to hit the floor with their boots, fists on the table, began to laugh, howl, squeal, and grunt. Mayakovsky was prophetically nicknamed Idiot Polyfemovich back in high school.
I think that Mayakovsky will remain in the history of literature of the Bolshevik years as the lowest, most cynical and harmful servant of Soviet cannibalism in terms of literary praise of him and thereby his influence on the Soviet mob - this does not count, of course, only Gorky, whose propaganda with his world celebrity, with his great and primitive literary abilities, which could not be more suitable for the tastes of the crowd, with the enormous power of acting, with the Homeric deceit and unparalleled tirelessness in it, provided such terrible criminal assistance to Bolshevism truly “on a planetary scale.” And Soviet Moscow, not only with great generosity, but even with idiotic excess, repaid Mayakovsky for all his praise of her, for all his help in corrupting the Soviet people, in reducing their morals and tastes.
Mayakovsky is exalted in Moscow not only as a great poet. In connection with the recent twenty-year anniversary of his suicide, the Moscow Literary Gazette stated that “Mayakovsky’s name is embodied in steamships, schools, tanks, streets, theaters, etc. The poet’s name is borne by: a square in the center of Moscow, a metro station, an alley, a library, a museum , a district in Georgia, a village in Armenia, a settlement in the Kaluga region, a mountain peak in the Pamirs, a literary club in Leningrad, streets in fifteen cities, five theaters, three city parks, schools, collective farms..."
Mayakovsky became famous to some extent even before Lenin; he stood out among all those swindlers and hooligans who were called futurists. All his scandalous antics at that time were very flat, very cheap, all similar to the antics of Burliuk, Kruchenykh and others. But he surpassed them all in terms of rudeness and insolence. Here is his famous yellow jacket and savagely painted face, but how evil and gloomy this face is! Here he is, according to the recollections of one of his then friends, going out onto the stage to read his verses to the audience who had gathered to make fun of him: he comes out with his hands in his pants pockets, with a cigarette clutched in the corner of his contemptuously twisted mouth. He is tall, stately and strong in appearance, his facial features are sharp and large, he reads, now intensifying his voice to a roar, now lazily muttering to himself; Having finished reading, he addresses the audience with a prosaic speech: “Those who want to get punched in the face are pleased to stand in line.”
And so Vladimir Mayakovsky surpassed even the most notorious Soviet villains and scoundrels in those years. He wrote:
@To the young man pondering his life,
The decider - to make life from someone,
I will say without hesitation:
Make it from Comrade Dzerzhinsky!@
He called on Russian youths to become executioners! And along with such calls, Mayakovsky did not forget to praise the creators of the RCP themselves, personally: “The Party and Lenin - who is more valuable than mother history?” And now his fame as a great poet is growing and growing, his poetic creations are published in “huge editions on personal orders from the Kremlin”, magazines pay him for every line, even one word, the fees are the highest, and he business travels to “vile” capitalist countries, visited America, came to Paris several times and each time had a rather long stay there, ordered linen and suits from the best Parisian houses, and chose restaurants that were also the most capitalist.
Gorky, it seems, was the first to christen him a “great poet”: he invited him to his dacha in Mustamäki to read his poem “The Flute-Spine” in a small but very select society, and when Mayakovsky finished this poem, I shook his hand with tears: “Great, strong... Great poet!”
III.6 I. BUNIN about S. Yesenin
Yesenin spoke very accurately about himself - about how to break into people, he taught his friend Mariengof on this matter. Mariengof was no less a scoundrel than he, he was the greatest scoundrel, it was he who once wrote such a line about the Mother of God, the most vile of which cannot be imagined, equal in vileness only to what Babel once wrote about Her.
And so Yesenin nevertheless taught him: “So, from the bay of floundering, there is no need to meddle in literature, Tolya, here we must conduct the most subtle politics. Look, White: he has gray hair and is bald, and he even walks in front of his cook with inspiration. And it’s also very harmless to pretend to be a fool.
We love a fool very much. Do you know how I climbed Parnassus? He got up in an undershirt, in a shirt embroidered like a towel, with accordion-shaped tops. Everyone is wearing their lorgnettes at me - “oh, how wonderful, oh, how brilliant!” - And I blush like a girl, I don’t look anyone in the eye out of shyness... Then they dragged me around the salons, and I sang obscene ditties to them along with the talyanka...
Klyuev is like that too. He pretended to be a painter. He came to Gorodetsky from the back door, asking if he needed something to paint, and let the cook read poetry, and the cook now goes to the master, and the master calls the poet-painter into the room, and the poet insists: “Where can we go?” I’ll dirty the upper room, the master’s armchair, I’ll leave the waxed floor... The master offers to sit down - Klyuev breaks down again, hesitates: no, we’ll stand...”
There was once an article about Yesenin by Vladislav Khodasevich in Sovremennye Zapiski: Khodasevich said in this article that Yesenin, among other ways to seduce girls, had this: he invited the girl he had planned to watch the executions in the Cheka, - I, they say, I can easily arrange this for you. “The authorities, the Cheka, patronized the gang that Yesenin was surrounded by, said Khodasevich: it was useful to the Bolsheviks, as it brought confusion and disgrace into Russian literature...”
Why did the Russian emigration forgive him everything? Because, you see, he is a daring Russian little head, because every now and then he feigned sobs, mourning his bitter fate, although the latter is far from new, for what “little boy” sent from the Odessa port to Sakhalin is also not mourned himself with the greatest self-admiration? “I stabbed my mother, killed my father, and deprived my little sister of her innocence...”
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They are called one of the most difficult personalities in Russian literature of the early 20th century. A nobleman, a snob and an esthete, he despised almost all contemporary writers. In his diary, he left very peculiar (to put it mildly!) reviews about them, which have long become Internet memes.
We decided to remember what Maxim Gorky, Alexander Kuprin, Alexey Tolstoy and other classics thought about Bunin and his work.
Take Bunin out of Russian literature, and it will fade, lose the iridescent shine and starry radiance of his lonely wandering soul.
Quiet, fleeting and always tenderly beautiful sadness, graceful, thoughtful love, melancholic, but light, clear “sadness of days gone by” and, in particular, the mysterious charm of nature, the charm of its colors, flowers, smells - these are the main motifs of Mr. Bunin’s poetry . And we must give justice to the talented poet, with rare artistic subtlety he knows how to convey his mood with unique, characteristic techniques, which subsequently makes the reader imbued with this mood of the poet and experience, feel it.
Bunin's mastery is an extremely important example for our literature - how to handle the Russian language, how to see a subject and depict it plastically. We learn from him the mastery of words, imagery and realism.
Our great literature, born of the Russian people, gave birth to our glorious writer, now welcomed by us, I. A. Bunin. He came from the Russian depths, he is bloodily, spiritually connected with his native land and his native sky, with Russian nature - with open spaces, with fields, distances, with the Russian sun and free wind, with snow and impassability, with smoking huts and manorial estates, with dry and sonorous country roads, with sunny rains, with storms, with apple orchards, with barns, with thunderstorms... - with all the beauty and richness of our native land. All this is in him, all this is absorbed by him, sharply and firmly taken and poured into creativity - with the most wonderful instrument, with an accurate and measured word - with his native speech. This word connects him with the spiritual depths of the people, with his native literature.
“Know how to take care...” Bunin managed to save it - and capture it, imperishably. These are the true collectors of Russia, its imperishables: our writers and among them - Bunin, recognized even in foreign countries for his wonderful gift.
Through our literature, born of Russia, through Russia-born Bunin, Russia itself, captured in writing, is recognized by the world.
Zinaida Gippius
Bunin in general, as a person (and as a writer), is one of the irreconcilables. This is his wonderful feature. In part, it is the reason for his closeness, secrecy, conciseness, self-collection.
Is he kind? Don't know. Maybe kinder than the kind; It’s not for nothing that such streaks, such rays of tenderness break out from him... But somehow this question does not come to him. In any case, not soft, not brittle. It is enough to look at his dry, thin figure, at his sharp, calm face with sharp (really sharp) eyes to say: perhaps this man can be merciless, almost cruel... and more towards himself than towards others .
I don’t like him: a cold, cruel, arrogant gentleman. I don’t love him, but I love his wife very much.
When I met him, he was painfully preoccupied with his own aging. From the very first words we spoke to each other, he noted with pleasure that he stood straighter than me, although he was thirty years older. He was enjoying the Nobel Prize he had just received and, I remember, invited me to some expensive and fashionable Parisian restaurant for an intimate conversation. Unfortunately, I cannot stand restaurants and cafes, especially Parisian ones - crowds of hurrying lackeys, gypsies, vermouth mixtures, coffee, snacks, musicians wandering from table to table and the like... Intimate conversations, confessions in the Dostoevsky style are also not my thing . Bunin, an active elderly gentleman with a rich and unchaste vocabulary, was puzzled by my indifference to hazel grouse, which I had tried enough of in childhood, and irritated by my refusal to talk about eschatological topics. By the end of lunch we were already unbearably bored with each other. “You will die in terrible agony and in complete solitude,” Bunin noted bitterly as we headed to the hangers... I wanted to help Bunin put on his raglan, but he stopped me with a proud movement of his palm. Continuing to struggle politely - he was now trying to help me - we floated out into the pale overcast of a Parisian winter day. My companion was about to button his collar, when suddenly his pleasant face twisted into an expression of bewilderment and annoyance. Warily opening his coat, he began to rummage somewhere in his armpit. I came to his aid, and with our joint efforts we pulled out my long scarf, which the girl had mistakenly stuffed into the sleeve of his coat. The scarf came out very gradually, it was some kind of unwinding of a mummy, and we quietly revolved around each other, to the raunchy amusement of the three panel whores. Having completed this operation, we silently continued our way to the corner, where we shook hands and parted.
On October 22, 1870, one of the four Russian Nobel Prize laureates in literature, Ivan Bunin, was born. His sayings and aphorisms are still retold as legends. 7 witticisms of the great master, or, as he called himself - the kilometer
Bunin and the modernists
The peak of Bunin's causticity and oratorical skill fell on contemporary modernists of all stripes. Bunin did not tolerate posing, let alone anything else, and in the Silver Age they did not disdain posing. The writer constantly made fun of “all you decadents” and sometimes said:
“Shouldn’t we invent some kind of nonsense so that nothing can be understood, so that the beginning is at the end and the end at the beginning. You know how they write now... I assure you that most of our critics would be completely delighted, and in magazines articles would sympathetically indicate that “Bunin is looking for new paths.” Well, it wouldn’t have happened without “new paths”! I vouch for you for “new paths.”
He parodied Zinaida Gippius immensely and could not forget her one line from the review.
“She’s an inventor, she wants something that doesn’t exist in the world,” said Bunin, half-closing his eyes and, not without mannerisms, moving his hand away, as if pushing something away, in imitation of Gippius’s manner of reading.”
“But you’re not interested, you think that I’m not a writer, but a describer... I, my dear, won’t forget this until my death!” - Bunin Gippius once said.
Bunin and Tolstoy
Tolstoy was an authority for Bunin, and none of his contemporaries can remember caustic statements about him. And although Bunin said that the end of Anna Karenina was written poorly, his respect for this author was immeasurable.
Bunin believed that those pages in Anna Karenina, where Vronsky at night, at a snow-covered station, unexpectedly approaches Anna and speaks about his love for the first time, are “the most poetic in all Russian literature.”
And at the end of his life, when he was seriously ill, as Georgy Adamovich recalls, such a dialogue took place.
“Bunin was especially weak that day. He didn’t open his eyes, didn’t raise his head from the pillow, spoke hoarsely, abruptly, with long pauses. Here, however, he sat up heavily, leaned on his elbow and looked at me gloomily, almost angrily:
- Do I remember? What are you really? Who do you take me for? Who can forget this? I will die, and then on my deathbed I will repeat the entire chapter to you almost word for word... And you ask if I remember!”
Bunin and Dostoevsky
Bunin could not stand Dostoevsky. "Seer of the spirit!" - Bunin was indignant. Seer of the spirit. What nonsense!"
“More than once he said that Dostoevsky was a “very bad writer,” he got angry when people objected to him, waved his hand, turned away, making it clear that there was no point in arguing. I, they say, know a lot about my business better than all of you.
“Yes,” she exclaimed with agony. “No,” he objected with a shudder... That’s all your Dostoevsky!
- Ivan Alekseevich, fear God, Dostoevsky doesn’t have this anywhere!
- Why not? I read it yesterday... Well, no, it could be so! Everything is made up, and very badly made up."
Of course, although Bunin could not “organically” tolerate the heroes of Fyodor Mikhailovich, he recognized Dostoevsky’s well-known skill. Descriptive...
“This poor, dank, dark Petersburg, rain, slush, holey galoshes, stairs with cats, this hungry Raskolnikov, with burning eyes and an ax in his bosom, rising to the old woman-pawnbroker... this is amazing!”
Bunin and war
Bunin and mediocrity
In his diaries, Bunin emerges as an even sharper and sharper-tongued person than in the memoirs of his contemporaries. Just look at his reviews of books he has read or not read:
“I started reading to N. Lvov - it’s terrible. A pathetic and mediocre provincial girl. I started re-reading Ertel’s “Mineral Waters” - it’s terrible! A mixture of Turgenev, Boborykin, even Nemirovich-Danchenko and sometimes Chirikov. Eternal irony over the heroes, the language is vulgar. I re-read “Cruel Stories” "Villiers de Lisle Adan. The fool and plebeian Bryusov admires. The stories are popular fiction, sophistication, beauty, cruelty, etc. - a mixture of E. Poe and Wilde, it’s a shame to read."
And, of course, about Gippius, with whom Bunin loved to talk and in whom he recognized intelligence: “Gippius finished reading. An unusually nasty little soul, not a single living word, various inventions dead-beat into stupid doggerel. There is not an iota of poetic nature in her.”
Bunin and Nobel
In 1934, Bunin was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. There is a wonderful legend about this event that Merezhkovsky, also nominated for this prize, offered Bunin to come to an agreement, make a deal - and, if one of them received this prize, to honestly divide it in half. To which Bunin replied: “I will not share my prize for literature with anyone.” And, indeed, I got it after learning about it in the cinema.
Here’s what Bunin’s wife Vera Nikolaevna wrote about this proposal: “Merezhkovsky suggests that Ian write letters to each other and have them certified by a notary, that if one of them receives the Nobel Prize, he will give the other 200,000 francs. I don’t know, but there’s something in this something terribly low - a notary, and why 200,000? After all, if someone gets it, then he will have to help others. And this whole method is very humiliating..."
Bunin and revolution
Bunin did not accept the revolution and wrote a lot about his attitude towards it in his diaries and “Cursed Days”. His reflections on Russia are tragic, filled with biblical references and powerful metaphors.
"...Satan of Cain's malice, bloodthirstiness and the wildest arbitrariness breathed on Russia precisely in those days when brotherhood, equality and freedom were proclaimed. Then a frenzy, acute insanity immediately set in."
“Our children and grandchildren will not be able to even imagine the Russia in which we once (that is, yesterday) lived, which we did not appreciate, did not understand - all this power, complexity, wealth, happiness...”
But it breaks through gloomy thoughts and optimism, however, only about the distant future:
“The day will come when our children, mentally contemplating the shame and horror of our days, will forgive Russia a lot for the fact that Cain was not the only one who ruled in the darkness of these days, that Abel was among her sons.”
“I could never look at Ivan Alekseevich, talk to him, listen to him without a nagging feeling that I should look at him enough, I should listen to him enough, precisely because this is one of the last rays of some wonderful Russian day...” .
G. Adamovich
“...Interest in Bunin, when he was not published, was simply pointless for most readers. That’s how I didn’t read Bunin before the war, because in Voronezh, where I lived then, it was impossible to get hold of Bunin. In any case, those people I knew did not have it.<…>
Bunin is a writer of enormous talent, a Russian writer, and, of course, he should have a large readership in Russia. I think that Bunin’s readership significantly exceeds the circulation of his books.
In terms of painting, in terms of the feeling of the word (and Bunin’s is amazing), his stories written in exile are perhaps no weaker than his previous works. But no matter how important this side of artistic creativity is, the main thing still remains what the thing is written for. But this main thing in many stories does not seem significant (I mean the emigrant period).
Did Bunin influence me? I don't think so. But I’m not sure, since at one time I was definitely influenced by Sholokhov, and Sholokhov, undoubtedly, was strongly influenced by Bunin. But I realized this later, when I read Bunin.”
G. Ya. Baklanov, 1969
“Bunin is a rare phenomenon. In our literature, in language, this is the peak above which no one can rise.
Bunin’s strength also lies in the fact that he cannot be imitated. And if you can learn from him, then only love for your native land, knowledge of nature, an amazing ability not to repeat anyone and not to outdo yourself - this also applies to the emigrant period. And most importantly - people, Russian people whom he knew, loved, with whom he did not part and left us as a legacy.”
S. A. Voronin
“Take Bunin out of Russian literature, and it will fade, lose the rainbow shine and starry radiance of his lonely wandering soul.”
M. Gorky
“Quiet, fleeting and always tenderly beautiful sadness, graceful, thoughtful love, melancholic, but light, clear “sadness of days gone by” and, in particular, the mysterious charm of nature, the charm of its colors, flowers, smells - these are the main motives of Mr. Bunina. And we must give justice to the talented poet; with rare artistic subtlety, he knows how to convey his mood with unique techniques, characteristic of him alone, which subsequently makes the reader imbued with this mood of the poet and experience, feel it.”
A. I. Kuprin
“I see... the inspired beauty of your stories, the renewal of Russian art through your efforts, which you managed to enrich even more in both form and content.”
Romain Rolland
“Bunin’s mastery is an extremely important example for our literature - how to handle the Russian language, how to see a subject and depict it plastically. We learn from him the mastery of words, imagery and realism.”
A. N. Tolstoy
“Bunin’s prose is not so much the prose of a poet as the prose of an artist - there is too much painting in it.”
Yu. V. Trifonov
“Our great literature, born of the Russian people, gave birth to our glorious writer, now welcomed by us, I. A. Bunin. He came from the Russian depths, he is bloodily, spiritually connected with his native land and his native sky, with Russian nature - with open spaces, with fields, distances, with the Russian sun and free wind, with snow and impassability, with smoking huts and manorial estates, with dry and sonorous country roads, with sunny rains, with storms, with apple orchards, with barns, with thunderstorms... - with all the beauty and richness of our native land. All this is in him, all this is absorbed by him, sharply and firmly taken and poured into creativity - with the most wonderful instrument, with an accurate and measured word - with his native speech. This word connects him with the spiritual depths of the people, with his native literature.
“Know how to take care...” Bunin managed to save it - and capture it, imperishably. These are the true collectors of Russia, its imperishables: our writers and among them - Bunin, recognized even in foreign countries for his wonderful gift.
Through our literature, born of Russia, through Russia-born Bunin, Russia itself, captured in writing, is recognized by the world.”
Ivan Bunin. Diary 1917-1918 Damned days.
“May 5 (April 22), 1918
Bad writers almost always end a story lyrically, with an exclamation or an ellipsis.”
Mood. In those “Cursed Days”, Russia was collapsing before Bunin’s eyes and a disgusting mood prevailed. He also counted himself among the “bad writers” and, apparently, did not notice this himself when in the novel “The Life of Arsenyev” (1930) he added ellipses and exclamations in abundance. In some chapters of the novel, ellipses appear after almost every paragraph, and exclamation marks not only end the chapter, but are often placed in the middle of paragraphs.
The normal course is that youthful enthusiasm of a feeling or an unfinished thought cannot be conveyed to the reader except through an exclamation or an ellipsis. And curses are generally not pronounced without pathos. For example:
“...What infernal nonsense! What kind of people are we, damned three times and a million times!”
“...There is no one more material than our people. All the gardens will be cut down. Even when eating and drinking, they do not pursue taste - just to get drunk. Women prepare food with irritation. And how, in essence, they do not tolerate authority or coercion! Try introducing compulsory training! You have to rule them with a revolver at your temple...”
“...Everyone has a fierce aversion to all work.”
“...the “Minister of Labor” appeared for the first time - and then all of Russia stopped working...”
Normal course: why work when you can kill and rob. This is why revolutions are made.
Bunin is harsh, harsh and yet right in almost everything - and now, a hundred years later, we observe the same traits in our people. They would only have “bread and circuses!”, like Roman slaves, and work less. It would be better not to work at all.
“...The faces of the boors who immediately filled Moscow are amazingly bestial and vile!.. Eight months of fear, slavery, humiliation, insults... The cannibals destroyed Moscow!”
Bunin has no joy from everything he has experienced, seen and heard: “The soul is so dead and dull that it is overcome by despair.”
Bunin reads a newspaper, and it contains Lenin’s speech at the Congress of Soviets. Bunin’s reaction after reading: “Oh, what an animal this is!” Surov, Ivan Alekseevich, stern...
Bunin recorded many human abominations of those years. I admit honestly: reading “Cursed Days” is very difficult. I will no longer list all the writer’s observations and impressions from those cruel days. Those interested can read it themselves if they wish.
Bunin does not favor his literary contemporaries either: “...How wild is the cult of Pushkin among the new and modern poets, among these plebeians, fools, tactless, deceitful - in every feature diametrically opposed to Pushkin. And what could they say about him, except “sunny” and similar vulgarities!
Bunin read fifty pages of Dostoevsky’s story “The Village of Stepanchikovo and Its Inhabitants” and here is his review: “... Monstrous!... everything says the same thing! The most vulgar chatter, popular in its literary quality!...All my life about one thing, “about the vile, about the vile”!
Until the end of his days, Bunin could not stand Dostoevsky and, on every suitable occasion, would tear him to smithereens.
In Chekhov’s Notebook, Bunin suddenly discovered “So much nonsense, ridiculous names... He kept digging up human abominations! He undoubtedly had this nasty tendency.”
There was, there was, Ivan Alekseevich! Just like you, in "Cursed Days".
But just yesterday Ivan Alekseevich and Anton Pavlovich were friends.
Mayakovsky, according to Bunin, behaves “with some kind of boorish independence” and at the same time flaunts “Stoeros-like directness of judgment.” From somewhere Ivan Alekseevich found out that “Mayakovsky was called in the gymnasium Idiot Polyfemovich.” And I wrote it down in my diary. Now we know how the future proletarian poet was called names in the gymnasium.
And here is Aikhenvald Yu.I. (Russian literary critic) seriously talks about such an insignificant event as the fact that Andrei Bely and Alexander Blok, “the gentle knight of the Beautiful Lady,” became Bolsheviks. It’s bitter for Bunin to listen to this: “Just think, how important it is, what two sons of bitches, two complete fools, have become or haven’t become!”
Blok openly joined the Bolsheviks and for this Bunin called him a “stupid man.”
“...I read excerpts from Nietzsche - how Andreev, Balmont, etc. rob him. Chulkov's story "The Lady with the Snake". A vile mixture of Hamsun, Chekhov and one’s own stupidity and mediocrity...”
Plagiarism is not new. Russian writers have always imitated, borrowed styles and copied reams of other people's pages.
How to live in an environment of general moral decay and devastation? Bunin gives an answer to this question:
“...People are saved only by the weakness of their abilities - the weakness of imagination, attention, thought, otherwise it would be impossible to live.
Tolstoy once said to himself:
- The trouble is that my imagination is much more vivid than others...
I have this problem too.”
That's right. My life experience has long told me that it is easier to live for those who do not think about the future, who cannot calculate the consequences of their decisions, who generally live without straining themselves mentally.
Life is always easier for an abnormal person. What is the demand from him?
