How Ivan Bunin and Vasily Grossman spent the war - He was in the countryside then for the last time in his life

Without planning it I recently read three books by Russian writers from three different strands of Russian literature: Andrei Platonov’s Chevengur (1929 /1972, tr. Robert and Elizabeth Chandler) in the Gogolian and Dostoyevskian strand, Ivan Bunin’s Dark Avenues (1943/1946) following Turgenev and Chekhov, and A Writer at War: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army (2005, ed. and tr. by Anthony Beevor and Luba Vinogradova) for a Tolstoyan.  I will save Chevengur for tomorrow.  The Bunin and Grossman books, however different, had one interesting thing in common.  They were both documents of how these great writers spent World War II.

Grossman spent the war becoming the greatest Soviet war correspondent, and also it turns out acquiring the experience and subject matter to become a great novelist.  A Writer at War would be of the highest interest – the Soviet war from the perspective of an outstanding journalist – if Grossman had never written Life and Fate, but this book would likely not exist without the later novels. 

Surprisingly, the text of A Writer at War is mostly not his published journalism, too filled with propaganda, but rather excerpts from his journals, filled with things that would have gotten him sent to the gulag or worse, whatever his fame, if the wrong people had known he was recording them.  A good chunk of the text, maybe 30%, is actually by the historian Beevor, providing the big picture and tying Grossman’s pieces together. 

As the Soviet army advances, Grossman also becomes a pioneering journalist of the Holocaust.  “The Road to Treblinka” (1944), an early masterpiece, if that is the right word, of its kind is excerpted in A Writer at War, although it is worth reading it in full in The Road: Stories, Journalism, and Essays (2010) if you can stand it, and no judgment from me if you cannot.

Ivan Bunin, in his early seventies, spent the war in southern France, impoverished, helping other Russian émigrés and prisoners as best he could, the 1933 Nobel money long gone, distributed to charities.  He also spent the war writing love stories, three dozen love stories, sensual, nostalgic, sad, beautiful.

Here is the first paragraph of “An Emerald,” a page-long story about a young couple’s attempt to articulate love:

The nocturnal dark-blue blackness of the sky, covered in quietly floating clouds, everywhere white, but beside the high moon pale blue.  If you look closely, it isn’t the clouds floating, it’s the moon, and near it, together with it, a star’s golden tear is shed: the moon glides away into the heights that have no end, and carries the star away with it, ever higher and higher.  (69)

That first sentence is ur-Bunin.  Colors upon colors, even “blackness” modified by another color.  The shorter pieces, sometimes only half a page, are close to prose poems.  “Her lips moving over her white teeth were blue-grey, the bluish down of her upper lip thickened above the corners of her mouth” (245), from “The Camargue,” a page of male gaze with only a hint of story at the end.

Longer stories are more in the line of Turgenev.  Lots of First Love.  But Dark Avenues is a “theme and variations” book, so there is a little bit of everything, jaded lovers, affairs that end in renunciation or violence.  They always end.  I think that is true.  The time is almost always before the Revolution, but not always.  One story, but only one delicate tale of young love, ends like this:

This was in February of the terrible year of 1917.  He was in the countryside then for the last time in his life.  (“Tanya,” 115)

This story is followed by “In Paris,” with the Revolution in the distant past.  There are lots of little connections between the stories.  The end of “In Paris” may be too sad to quote.

Some other last sentences:

Returning to his room, he lay down on the couch and shot himself in the temples with two revolvers. (15)

I don’t remember anything else.  There was nothing else… (183, ellipses in original)

He was beaten with lashes and sent to Siberia, to the mines.  (205)

In some sense Dark Avenues is a relentlessly miserable book.  In other senses, not.  It is an erotic book, explicit for its time, much more so than anything allowed in the Soviet Union at this period since Stalin was something of a Puritan, forgive the anachronism, about sex in art.  Perhaps that was something of a political statement by Bunin.

I have been referring to the recent (2008) Hugh Alpin translation of Dark Avenues, the first English translation of the entire Russian collection.  I have read some of the stories in other collections by other translators, but the Alpin version is the place to go to try to see this masterpiece as a whole.