Dark Avenues

With this sturdy collection of short stories, it is easy to get the feel for the darker side of Bunin’s work. In it are a slew of great short-short pieces of sexual epiphany so startling and real that they each seem like gems of experience, encapsulated in brief encounters.

Bunin is a master of description like his predecessors, but he does it in his own way. He does not shy away from showing people as they are. One gets a sense of place from his work that makes all of his characters feel real. His mastery lies in the details he builds up around these miserable and joyous people. Many of the characters bleed into one another – one gets a sense of an aristocratic man, engaging in many many fateful encounters with prostitutes and other show more women of good faith, falling in and out of love over and over again, and carrying away a tremendous burden of having betrayed them all.

Bunin, it seems was a man overburdened with love. He must have loved women and loved the world, to depict them both with so much devotion and splendor. Of course there are real women characters in his fiction too, I think, and not just the stock of the genre trade. They breathe and live their own lives and enact their form of revenge on the male characters, and entice and speak their minds. All in all a lot of them are more engaging than the male counterparts. But in the end the perspective is old-fashioned and male.

The whole collection is infused with energy – even though there is very little explicitness in its pages, it steams and is steeped in this tension throughout. It goes to show that Ivan Bunin uses these scenarios as a canvas for his immaculate skill as a painter of words, that he cooks up these shallow schemes and semi-plots as a mere ploy to get to the beauty and the livid imagery he has stored up in his head. One cannot help but admire the way he has transcended the confines of Chekhov’s strict guidelines of short story writing. The starkness of Chekhov’s descriptions becomes all too evident. But you cannot really emulate Bunin successfully. His resemblance to Chekhov is like a Melville’s to Hemingway. show less

Энциклопедия очень жестокой, беспощадной, изломанной и трагичной любви...
После прочтения этой книги возникает лишь один вопрос: "Есть ли на свете счастливая любовь?". Та, про которую можно сказать "Жили они долги и счастливо, и умерли в один день."?
Для себя могу выделить четыре рассказа, после которых я откладывала книгу и размышляла о том, что же именно я сейчас прочитала: "Кавказ", "Галя Ганская", "Генрих", show more "Часовня". show less

Good but repetitive. Maybe I'd have been better spacing the stories out once a year for the next twenty to get more enjoyment out of it.

I gave up about 3/4 of the way through this collection of short stories, because they were just getting to be too much the same. Bunin, a Russian writer who fled after the revolution, wrote this collection in the south of France during the Nazi era "to escape to a different world" as the interesting biographical and critical notes at the end of this edition say. The stories, which mostly take place in the prerevolutionary era (although some take place post-revolution, in French exile), all focus on love, mostly the loss of love, some purely "romantic," others more physical; some trite, some moving, some irritatingly sexist. But what kept me going was Bunin's wonderful depictions of the varied beauties of the Russian countryside, and the show more often decaying houses and estates within it. Apparently he first set out to be a poet, and these sections are the highlights, for me, of the stories. show less

Interesting individually, these stories, and some will stay with me but many will be forgotten. Quite atmospheric.