Collected Stories of Ivan Bunin [Paperback]

Ivan Bunin (Author), Graham Hettlinger (Translator)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1566637589 | ISBN-13: 978-1566637589 | Publication Date: August 31, 2007

"The Gentleman from San Francisco" is easily the best known of Ivan Bunin's stories and has achieved the stature of a masterpiece. But Bunin's other stories and novellas are not to be missed. Over the last several years a great many of them have been freshly and brilliantly translated by Graham Hettlinger. Together, along with four new pieces, they are now published in a one-volume paperback collection of Bunin's greatest writings. In Mr. Hettlinger's renderings readers will see why Bunin was regarded by many of his contemporaries as the rightful successor to Tolstoy and Chekhov as a master of Russian letters.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Russian exile Bunin (1870–1953), who won the Nobel Prize in 1933, becomes stunningly accessible in this beautiful new translation. Bunin, who fled to France in 1920, gives aching, lyrical glimpses into the vanished past of aristocratic Russia, replete with country estates, artsy Moscow life and the rapidly changing social structure that followed the serfs' emancipation in 1861. Spanning 44 years of Bunin's creative work, the stories include The Scent of Apples, written in 1900, wherein, who had previously written poetry, begins translating his lyrical visions into prose, as well as work from his middle years such as Sukhodol, written against the backdrop of WWI and the later losses suffered against the Bolsheviks by the White Army, which Bunin supported. Many of Bunin's post-1920 stories, such as Ida, Sunstroke and The Elagin Affair, explore the lives of Russian and European sophisticates, focusing on their love affairs and their concern with elegant and refined living. His last stories, for instance In Paris and One Familiar Street, explore the alienation of those who cannot forget the worlds they've lost. Though there are murders and love-suicides, plot is really not the focus of these stories, which are marked by an emotional intensity in remembrance that recalls Proust. (Aug.)
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Review

Ivan Bunin...is one of the finest story writers of the twentieth century, a master of tone and experiment. (Gary Saul Morson )

[Bunin is] one of the great literary masters of the twentieth century...[his is a] powerful and pellucid art. (Cynthia Ozick )

Russian exile Bunin (1870-1953), who won the Nobel Prize in 1933, becomes stunningly accessible in this beautiful new translation. (Publishers Weekly )

"The translation is graceful and essentially accurate." (Richard Lourie Wall Street Journal )

Emotional intensity in remembrance that recalls Proust....Stunningly accessible...beautiful new translation. (Publishers Weekly )

Fluid new translations...this piercingly lyrical collection renders fully the passion of the human heart and the power of memories. (LELIA RUCKENSTEIN Washington Post )

Now we have a new and comprehensive volume of [Bunin's] fiction, Collected Stories of Ivan Bunin, beautifully translated by Graham Hettlinger. (New York Sun )

[Hettlinger's translations] are a joy to read. (Slavic and East European Journal )

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 398 pages
• Publisher: Ivan R Dee (August 31, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1566637589
• ISBN-13: 978-1566637589
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 5.8 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #200,543 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars More Bunin is good, November 20, 2008

By 

toronto - See all my reviews

This review is from: Collected Stories of Ivan Bunin (Paperback)

Since more Bunin is by definition good, I was inclined to give this 5 stars right off the bat, but the reader should be warned about false advertising -- the title is "Collected Stories" and it isn't. There are some missing, including "An Unknown Friend" , maybe his best story ever. Bizarre. There are one or two odd things in the translation as well, though it reads generally quite fine. For example, in "Light Breathing" the shocking moment is muted -- it should be "shot her dead", not just "shot her". We have to wait another two paragaphs to learn that she is dead.

But otherwise, go for it

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The best introduction to a very undervalued writer, March 25, 2011

By 

Captain Lebyadkin (St. Petersburg, Russia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Collected Stories of Ivan Bunin (Paperback)

Why has Bunin fallen by the wayside? In his introduction, translator Graham Hettlinger speculates that his style -- with its notoriously long, richly descriptive sentences -- has proven impossible to reproduce in English. My theory is that the reasons for his current obscurity have more to do with literary politics (after all, Gogol is no translator's picnic, either). For much of his own lifetime, Bunin was the most celebrated and successful of the Russian emigre writers. He was seen as the rightful heir to Tolstoy and Chekhov. But times changed, the emigres (Bunin's main audience) dispersed and died off, Bunin himself was financially destroyed by the failure of his last story collection ("Dark Avenues"), and not long after his death in 1953, the West had become fascinated by dissidents like Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn. Beyond that, once Bunin's moment in the spotlight had passed, his own loudly proclaimed opposition to modernist literature and the nostalgic, melancholy tone of much of his work began to seem un-hip.

Fortunately, the tide seems to be slowly turning back in his favor. This collection of 35 stories spans Bunin's entire career, and, though not all of the stories are at the same level, the best of them are clearly the work of a master. Hettlinger opens the collection with the early "The Scent of Apples", a plotless series of seemingly inconsequential images and evocations; here Bunin suggests, as he does in many of his later stories, that the simplest, most trivial experiences are the ones that stay with us the longest. The story is also a good example of Bunin's passionately intense nature writing. No other writer makes the natural world seem so alive. "Sukhodol", the 1911 novella which follows, has been described as "one of the supreme masterpieces of modern fiction". That may sound overwrought, but it's hard to disagree. Here Bunin goes far beyond the simplistic nostalgia of "The Scent of Apples", evoking the life of a minor Russian gentry estate in all its beauty and horror. The lushness of nature is deceptive here -- it masks a world of tragedy and appalling brutality. The central character, the serf Natalya, is Bunin's most heartbreaking female portrait. Her dreams and hopes are wrecked beyond repair, but her innate generosity and selflessness aren't -- nor, Bunin seems to tell us, could they ever be.

I don't think anything else Bunin wrote quite approaches this level, but he wrote plenty that comes close enough. "The Gentleman from San Fransisco", his most famous story, is a powerful symbolic parable about death. Its most obvious influence is Tolstoy's "The Death of Ivan Ilych", but its uncanny, dreamlike atmosphere also reminds me a little of Poe"s "The Masque of the Red Death" (I have no idea whether Bunin knew Poe's story). "Light Breathing" is probably his most touching exploration of one of his favorite themes: how sex and death walk hand in hand. The novella "Mitya's Love" also explores this territory, while evoking the moodiness and irrationality of young love with marvelous immediacy, and not a trace of condescension. "Sunstroke"is the ultimate one-night stand story: Here, the emotional after-effects of a seemingly casual encounter become a physical sensation in themselves.

Hettlinger ends the book with roughly half the "Dark Avenues" collection, which Bunin considered his masterpiece. These stories are united by the aforementioned theme of sex's relationship to death, which Bunin treats here with much more explicit eroticism than he had before. That aspect certainly has its appeal (no point in denying it), but I think that too many of these stories rely on crude melodrama to make their points, and that Hettlinger might have been done better to include more of Bunin's earlier work instead. The best of them, though, are marvelous. "Styopa" is a disturbing tale of sexual domination. "Late Hour" and "Cold Fall" are about people whose memories dominate their existence to such an extent that they almost literally live in the past. "In Paris" tenderly evokes loneliness and longing for connection. In "Calling Cards", a purely animal sexual urge turns into something unexpected once it's been satisfied. "Cleansing Monday", told in a slow, hypnotic style, is about the insurmountable barriers that lie between those who care deeply for one another. "Tanya" is a wonderful depiction of first love. "On One Familiar Street" is as fleeting and brief as the unforgettable affair it describes. "Wolves" is simply the most beautiful three pages you'll ever read.

Hettlinger does a fine job with all these stories, breaking up Bunin's long sentences where needed and avoiding the pitfalls of literalism. True Bunin fanatics will also need to add Robert Bowie's collection Night of Denial: Stories and Novellas (European Classics) and "The Life of Arseniev", his only novel: The Life of Arseniev: Youth (SRLT). Do yourself a favor, and get to know this writer.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Superb writing, unusuall good trNALATION, January 31, 2009

By 

H. Farber (Santa Barbara, CA.) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Collected Stories of Ivan Bunin (Paperback)

Bunin is reputed to be notoriously difficult to translate. Some of his work in English seems stilted and stunted, lacking nuance and sensitivity. Not this translation. The prose is poetic. The translator is either a great author or a great translator, the latter no doubt.
Buy this book if you want to understand why Bunin won the Nobel Prize.