Ivan Bunin: Russian Requiem, 1885-1920: A Portrait from Letters, Diaries, and Fiction

One of the last of Russia's gentry writers, Ivan Bunin (1870-1953) detested modernism, yet his voice seems oddly modern and prescient. Bunin heaped scorn on the Bolsheviks (``a real gallery of convicts''); he saw the Soviets new revolutionary order as repulsive, a dark wasteland; and he thought Russia was racing headlong to self-destruction or universal apocalypse. Unlike Tolstoy and Turgenev, this Nobel Prize-winning writer refused to sentimentalize the spiritual virtue of the peasantry or to argue that noblemen should follow the lead of the common folk. Marullo, professor of Russian literature at the University of Notre Dame, has interwoven excerpts from Bunin's letters, diaries and fiction, the writings of family, friends and critics, and recollections of Bunin's wife Vera Muromtseva, who joined him in exile in France in 1920. The vagabond writer's sense of alienation and his desperate search for meaning come through forcefully in his diatribes and laments. Photos. (May)