“It’s so sad! The cranes have flown away!” - Bunin turns memory into prose

The Ivan Bunin that Graham Hettlinger translates in Collected Stories is a nostalgist.  His longing for a vanished Russian was reinforced but not caused by the Russian Revolution and Bunin’s emigration.  He had lost his Russia a long time ago.

The first story in the book, “The Scent of Apples” (1900) is openly nostalgic.  “The early days of a lovely autumn come back to me.”  This is barely a story, but more a series of childhood experiences, of sensory impressions.

You dress slowly, winder in the garden, find a cold, wet apple that’s been forgotten among the leaves.  For some reason it’s remarkably delicious; it seems unlike any other apple.  (13)

I remind myself that “The Scent of Apples” is the single representative in the collection of the first twenty years of Bunin’s writing, and may be a freak.  But it sure sounds like the later writer, and it feels like a poet’s prose.

And so I see myself once more in the country.  Deep fall.  Cloudy, dove-grey days.  (15)

The sky, in Bunin, is perpetually dove-grey, at least in the north.  Look at the language in “Caucasus” (1937), about adulterous lovers who sneak away to the south for an idyll (this is an unusual Bunin story in that catastrophe strikes not the lovers but the husband):

The plain went on and on in all its emptiness: burial mounds and native graves under the dry, killing sun; the sky itself like a cloud of dust, the rising ghosts of mountains…

Fireflies drifted like topaz in the murky dark; the songs of tree toads rang like small glass bells…

How wonderfully the falling water flashed, scattering itself like glass among the stones at that secret hour when the late moon comes from behind the mountains and the woods like a divinity, and looks down watchfully.  (284)

This is the lushness of the sexual idyll, contrasted with the plain despair of the husband: “Then he went back to his room, lay down on the couch, put a pistol to each of his temples, and fired.”

The language is not always so poetical.  Bunin has other modes of intensification, always grounded in material things, though.  “He ate half-sour pickles with dill and downed four shots of vodka, thinking he’d willingly die tomorrow if some miracle would let him bring her back, let him spend one more day with her just so he could tell her everything” (“Sunstroke,” 193).  Suffering, with pickles.  This is another story where a love affair, the sexual act, makes the entire world more sensorially interesting to the character.  He now perceives what he had not, not just in himself but all around him.  “How terrible and savage everything mundane and ordinary becomes when the heart’s been destroyed – yes, he understood that now – destroyed by sunstroke, destroyed by too much happiness and love” (194).  All of the description enacts the word “everything” in prose.

A number of pieces are less than a page, sketches or anecdotes, a brief setup leading to a kind of punch line, for example:

“Sir,” he shouts into the dirt.  “Sir, the cranes!”  He waves his arms in despair.  “It’s so sad!  The cranes have flown away!”  And shaking his head, he chokes on drunken tears.  (“Cranes,” 1930, 110)

And for a moment, it is sad, ridiculous, but sad.

Ivan Bunin stops time - But already it was passing, the fall of 1916

Ivan Bunin was a prolific short story writer for most of his life.  Early on he was best known as a poet.  He wrote novels, a book about Chekhov, a book about Tolstoy – he wrote a lot.  And here I have Graham Hettlinger’s Collected Stories (2007), 360 pages of short fiction, from which I will generalize.  What errors I will make!

In my defense, a century of English translations of Bunin keep returning to the same stories, and Hettlinger presumably selected this set for a reason.  Hettlinger skips Bunin’s first decade, and then after “The Scent of Apples” skips the next decade.  About a third of the book is from the 1946 collection Dark Avenues.  Most of the rest is from the 1920s.

Here is what I see:

1. Bunin writes in the tradition of Turgenev and Chekhov.  He is if anything at times too derivative of Chekhov, although his style is less plain.  His stories are mostly set in a Russia – “The Gentleman from San Francisco” is an aberration – that is instantly recognizable as that of Turgenev etc., just updated a bit.  Country estates, students home from Moscow or St. Petersburg.

And love affairs, first loves – as per the 1860 Turgenev novella, First Love – first sex, often followed by catastrophe.  If first sexual encounters led to suicide as often as they do in Bunin, there would be many fewer people on Earth.

I don’t want to count, but I will bet that a majority of the stories in this book are variations on this theme.  The novella “Mitya’s Love” (1924), then “Sunstroke” (1925), this time a one night stand between a soldier and a married woman, then “The Elagin Affair” (1925), with a soldier and a femme fatale actress – Bunin’s writes the story over and over.  He is in his seventies, barely scraping by in Nazi-occupied France, and he writes the story over and over.

2.  I said he updates Chekhov’s Russia “a bit,” and I mean it seriously.  Bunin left Russia for France in 1920 and never returned.  I assumed that many of the stories written after that date would be set in the world of the Russian émigrés in Paris, much as Vladimir Nabokov’s stories are set in Russian Berlin, the world in which he lived.  Oh no.  A single story, “In Paris” (1940), is about Russians in exile, a general and a waitress at a Russian restaurant.  It’s a lovely, sad story, about a kind of first love.

Every other story is set in Russia before the Revolution, and generally before the war.  It was surprising to see Bunin end the half-page sketch “The Eve” (1930), about the passengers on a train, end with “But already it was passing, the fall of 1916.”  It was almost shocking when “Tanya” (1940), another heart-breaking version of “first love” ends:

That was in February, in the terrible year of 1917.  He was in the countryside for the last time in his life.

At least the reason this particular mismatched couple cannot stay together is not their fault.

In the stories written in the 1920s, this did not stand out so much, but as the chronology pushed along, as Bunin wrote surrounded by a second war, it began to seem pretty strange.  “Cleansing Monday” (1944) is, aside from the “first love / single sexual encounter leads to etc.” story, a marvelous portrait of Moscow, with the young couple enjoying everything: “boxes of chocolates, new books by Hofmannsthal, Schnitzler, Tetmajer, and Przybyszewski,” a lecture by Andrey Bely “which he delivered in song as he ran and danced around the stage,” a performance by Stanislavski, and a range of restaurants.  Those blini!  They visit the grave of Chekhov; they read medieval Russian chronicles.  And they visit churches.  There is more religious language and imagery in this story than usual.  It ends in a church.

May 12, 1944, is the date attached to this story.  It may well be some kind of patriotic response to the war, but the Moscow Bunin describes is long gone, destroyed by the Soviets, not the Nazis.

This frozen quality of Bunin, the obsession with late adolescence circa 1910, began to overwhelm whatever else was in the stories.

But maybe this is an effect created by the translator.

Quietude and calm settled on the island - Ivan Bunin's "Death on Capri"

“The Gentleman from San Francisco” (1915) is Ivan Bunin’s most famous story at this point, I think, although I do not remember ever seeing it anthologized anywhere.  The title character, never named “– no one really learned his name in Naples or Capri –” is taking his wife and adult daughter on a long tour of Europe.  Grown rich on the back of Chinese labor, “he decided it was time to rest.”

The first seven pages of the nineteen page story are set on the ocean liner and in Naples.  It takes another six pages to move the characters from Naples to Capri, and to get them settled in at their hotel.  The tone throughout is lightly ironic, mildly satirical, and observant:

During one of the stops he rose up on the couch, and saw a wretched mass of little stone houses with mildewed walls stacked on top of one another at the water’s edge below a rocky slope, saw boats and piles of rags, tin cans, brown nets – and fell into despair, remembering that this was the authentic Italy to which he’d come in order to enjoy himself.

In the gentleman’s defense, the sea between Naples and Capri is rough and he is seasick.  Even Italy loses its savor when seasick.  They land: “The earth smells sweet in Italy after rain, and the scent of every island is distinct.”  That’s more like it.

Let me add up those pages.  Bunin has six pages to go.  What is this story going to be about?  Will the gentleman learn a lesson about what it means to live, toe really live (“He hadn’t lived before – he had only existed”)?  Will he have an epiphany of some kind?

Not exactly.  Reading the newspaper before dinner (“a few sentences about the endless Balkan War”) he instead has a stroke, and dies.  Most of the remaining pages are about what happens in a nice Italian hotel when a guest dies.  The family members appear, but as problems to be managed.  Soon enough, they are all, alive or dead, back on the ocean liner, bound for home.  “Quietude and calm settled on the island in its wake.”  Then comes a paragraph as startling as any in the story:

Two thousand years ago that island was inhabited by a man who somehow held power over millions of people.  He gratified his lust in ways that are repugnant beyond words, and carried out immeasurable atrocities against his subjects.

Why the change of scale?  Why has Emperor Tiberius appeared in the story?  Because tourist to Capri visit “the ruins of his stone house on one of the island’s highest peaks.”  The trip is arduous enough to require a good night’s sleep, and now that “the dead old man from San Francisco – who’d planned to make the trip with all the others, but wound up only frightening them with an unpleasant reminded about mortality – had now been sent away to Naples, the guests slept very soundly.”

The long last paragraph is like something out of Kipling, with a lot of detail – well, not a Kipling level of detail – about the ocean liner’s engines and driveshafts, and about the dancing in the ballroom, where no one thinks or knows about “what lay deep, deep below them, in the blackness of the hold.”

The only hint that the story is written by a Russian is the appearance on Capri of “a few disheveled, bearded Russian who had settled on the island, all of them wearing glasses and looking absent-minded, the collars raised on their threadbare coats.”  One of these Capri Russians is presumably the author.  I mean of course the only hint in the English version, translated by Graham Hettlinger.