Ivan Bunin was the first Russian to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. A realist writer with a baroque style, he was considered to be the modern heir of the literary tradition established by Tolstoy and Chekov. Born in 1870 in Voronezh, Central Russia, he began his career working for various newspapers and literary publications until his collections of poetry and short stories made him famous, which enabled him to make a living as a freelance writer. In the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution, he emigrated to France, where he continued writing in exile. The Life of Arseniev was written over more than a decade; a part-translation was put out by Virginia and Leonard Woolf's Hogarth Press in 1933, but Bunin continued working on the novel until 1952, the year before his death.
This is the first English translation of Bunin’s magnum opus as he truly envisioned it. A landmark masterpiece, it follows the life of Alexei Arseniev, born on his father’s estate in the 1870s, from his childhood to his schooldays to his first love, and on to the dawning of writerly and romantic maturity. Tragic, lyrical, imbued with an exhilarating zest for life, The Life of Arseniev shows us a unique, deeply personal snapshot of an old-world Russia now lost forever, capturing it forever in the amber of Bunin’s exquisite prose.
Translated with an introduction by Bryan Karetnyk
