The Gentleman from San Francisco and Other Stories
by Ivan Aleksejevitsj Bunin
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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 show more 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. show lessTags
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Member Reviews
Sort of Guy Maupassant meets Ivan Turgenev. This collection of stories from Ivan Bunin includes his best known work 'The Gentleman from San Francisco'. The book includes about 15 short stories. Some of the stories are of the older style, like Turgenev and other Russian prose writers talking about riding carriages across versts of road stopping to change horses and arriving at country estates to hunt and bring out the samovar if you know what I mean. Many others show the more contemporary aspect of Bunin (relatively speaking, he was born in the 19th century) such as steamer ships, corsets, modern travel, and more. His writing style never lagged, it kept good pace, and easily switched from character motivation to plot facts to dialogue. I show more would recommend this for fans of Bulgakov or Murakami. show less
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Russian Literature
184 works; 32 members
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Author Information
249+ Works 1,985 Members
Ivan A. Bunin was little known in the United States until he received the Nobel Prize for literature, the first Russian writer to do so. By then he had decades of extensive literary activity behind him. In the intensely group-oriented literary milieu of turn-of-the-century Russia, Bunin largely remained a loner, working within the realist show more tradition in prose but enriching it with a powerful lyric element. He traveled abroad a great deal and used exotic locales as settings for many of his works. An outspoken opponent of the Bolsheviks, he emigrated to Paris and ironically, years after his death, he became celebrated in the Soviet Union as a major writer. Bunin's themes are diverse, ranging from a changing Russia to the universal human experience. Born into an impoverished rural-gentry family, he often wrote about the decline and passing of a way of life. Sometimes his depiction of provincial Russia is elegiac; at other times it is violent and tragic, as in the novella Dry Valley (1911]). A number of his works, such as the remarkable short story "The Gentleman from San Francisco" (1915), may be read as allegories of human encounter with the transcendent. In later years, Bunin grew increasingly preoccupied with problems of sexual attraction and death, evidenced in his last collection of stories, Dark Avenues (1930). In 1933 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Bunin died in 1953. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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- Canonical title
- The Gentleman from San Francisco and Other Stories
- Original publication date
- 1916
Classifications
- Genres
- General Fiction, Fiction and Literature
- DDC/MDS
- 891.73 — Literature & rhetoric Literatures of other languages East Indo-European and Celtic literatures Russian and East Slavic languages Russian fiction
- LCC
- PG3453 .B9 .A27 — Language and Literature Slavic languages and literatures. Baltic languages. Albanian language Slavic. Baltic. Albanian Russian literature Individual authors and works 1870-1917
- BISAC
Statistics
- Members
- 261
- Popularity
- 124,032
- Reviews
- 1
- Rating
- (3.87)
- Languages
- 7 — Czech, English, Estonian, French, German, Italian, Norwegian (Bokmål)
- Media
- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 25
- ASINs
- 10
