Synopses & Reviews
Here is Ivan Bunin s great anti-Bolshevik diary of the Russian Revolution, translated into English for the first time. Set against the backdrop of Moscow and Odessa in 1918 and 1919, Cursed Days is a chilling account of the last days of the Russian master in his homeland a work banned during the years of Soviet power. Bunin recreates the time of revolution and civil war with graphic and gripping immediacy. Unlike the works of early Soviets and emigres, with their self-censoring backdrop of memory, myth, and political expediency, Bunin s uncompromising truths are jolting. His pain and suffering in witnessing the takeover of his country by thugs and the chaos of civil war, and his fears for the devastation of patriarchal Russian culture, were with him daily and received vivid expression in his diary. Cursed Days foreshadows the later anti-Soviet memoirs of Nadezhda Mandelstam, Evgenia Ginsberg, and others, and the rebellions of Bulgakov and Paternak. Thomas Marullo s superb translation and annotations reveal Bunin not only as a master of prose (he was the first Russian to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature) but as a perceptive social critic engaged in a wrenching struggle to make sense of his shattered world.
Synopsis
On July 30, 1925, Vera Muromtseva-Bunina, the wife of the Russian writer Ivan Bunin (who was soon to win the Nobel Prize for Literature), wrote in her diary: "Ian (her name for her husband) has torn up and burned all his diary manuscripts. I am very angry. 'I don't want to be seen in my underwear, ' he told me". Seeing Vera so upset, Bunin confided to her: "I have another diary in the form of a notebook..". This is the diary that Bunin published in 1936 with the title Cursed Days. Set against the backdrop of Moscow and Odessa in 1918 and 1919, it is a scathing account of the Bolshevik takeover and of the last days of the Russian master in his homeland. Banned during the years of Soviet power, Cursed Days is now translated into English for the first time, with an introduction and notes by Thomas Gaiton Marullo, Bunin's foremost interpreter in the West. Cursed Days, Thomas Marullo observes in his introduction, foreshadows the later anti-Soviet memoirs of Nadezhda Mandelstam, Evgeniya Ginzburg, and others, and the rebellions of Bulgakov and Pasternak.
Synopsis
The Nobel PrizeDwinning author's great anti-Bolshevik diary of the Russian Revolution, translated into English for the first time, with an Introduction and Notes by Thomas Gaiton Marullo. A harrowing description of the forerunners of the concentration camps and the Gulag. --Marc Raeff