Bøker av Ivan Bunin

Written between 1938 and 1944 and set in the context of a disintegrating Russian culture, this collection of short fiction centres around dark, erotic liaisons told in prose.

Ivan Bunin was the first Russian to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. For his poetry, he was twice awarded Russia''s highest literary honor, the Pushkin Prize. While Bunin''s prose writing is well known, his poetry-though highly praised by critics and contemporaries such as Blok, Gorky and Nabokov-has been unjustly ignored. This collection of over 100 verse translations is the first English language book of Bunin''s poetry. Spanning a long period of poetic output (1886-1952), this selection includes both published and unpublished poems. In a variety of forms, they cover an astonishing range of topics and reveal a writer with singular artistic precision and deep humanity.

A much neglected literary figure, Ivan Bunin is one of Russia's major writers and ranks with Tolstoy and Chekhov at the forefront of the Russian Realists. Drawing artistic inspiration from his personal experience, these powerful, evocative stories are set in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Russia of his youth, in the countries that he visited and in France, where he spent the last thirty years of his life. In the title story, for example, a family's tour of fashionable European resorts comes to an unexpected end; 'Late Hour' describes an old man's return to the little Russian town in the steppes that he has not seen since his early youth; while 'Mitya's Love' explores the darker emotional reverberations of sexual experience. Throughout his stories there is a sense of the precariousness of existence, an omnipresent awareness of the impermanence of human aspirations and achievements.

At once nostalgic for a bygone more innocent age and foreshadowing the turbulences of the twentieth century, Bunin's narrative is a triumph of bitter realism, shot through with the author's classical style and precision of language.

Graham Hettlinger's brilliant translations of Bunin's stories in Sunstroke (2002) were widely acclaimed. In The Elagin Affair, Mr. Hettlinger continues to acquaint English-language readers with a Bunin they may not have appreciated. The Elagin Affair contains two of the author's greatest novellas, the title piece and "Mitya's Love," as well as a broad range of stories written between 1900 and 1940 and centered on themes of love, loss, and the Russian landscape, including several of Bunin's most haunting stories from his final collection, Dark Avenues.

In Robert Bowie's translation, with annotations and a critical afterword, this collection of Ivan Bunin's work affords readers of English an opportunity for a sustained encounter with the work of a writer often considered the last of the great Russian masters. Bunin serves as a link between Tolstoy, Chekhov and Nabakov.