Bunin on the Revolution

Although there a couple of other candidates* that I haven't read, I have long thought that maybe the best book about day-to-day life in the Russian Revolution would be Ayn Rand's We, the Living—certainly the only Ayn Rand book that can be read by anybody over the age of 19 (reading John Reed's Ten Days that Shook the World, by contrast, would be an ordeal for a reader of any age, possibly exceptingWarren Beatty.

But now I've got another candidate: the journals of Ivan Bunin, edited by Thomas Gailton Marullo and published under the title Cursed Days: A Diary of Revolution.

The enduring portin of Bunin's oeuvre is impressive, but thin: as is so often the case, his Nobel Prize for Literature in 1933 had far more to do with politics than achievement. He was a member of a family of serf-owning gentry and his tone mixes astringency and hauteur in manner bound to arrest attention in troubled times.

Bunin and his wife were in Moscow when the trouble started. They decamped in the summer of 1918, headed for Odessa, then part of a newly-independent Ukraine. When they reached their destination in October (quoting Marullo) “aghast to see how the city had declined..” Yet in Odessa, they became themselves a kind of living museum of a fast-vanishing world. Bunin's contempt for the Bolsheviks and their allies is unbounded; his optimism about the prospects of the emerging counter-revolution come near to sounding gullible—the whole a mix of (Marullo again) “drama and self-pity.” Here he is on May 16/29 1919:

As far as I can make out,l the Bolsheviks are doing poorly both around the Don region and beyond the Volga. May God help us!

I've just finished reading a biography of the poet Polezhaev, and I've been greatly moved—it was painful and sad and sweet (not because of Polezhaev, of course). Yes, I am the last who feels this past, the time of our fathers and forefathers. . . .

It's been drizzling on and off. There's a cloud high in the sky, the sun is peeping out, and birds chirp sweetly in bright yellow-green acacia trees in the courtyard. I keep having snatches of thoughts and memories, of things that are truly gone forever. I remember a small place called Toadstool Forest—a backwoods, a small birch tree, and grass and flowers that were as high as your belt—and how I once ran through them in the same drizzle that we're having now, and also how I breathed the sweetness of the birches and the wheat and the fields; I think of all, all the charm of Russia. .. .

The Muirids were suppressed along with their leader, Kazi-Mullah. Kazi's grandfather had been a fugitive Russian soldier. Kazi himself was an individual of average height, with pockmarks on his face, a thin beard, and eyes that were bright and penetrating. He killed his own father by pouring boiling oil down his throat. Then he sold vodka, proclaimed himself a prophet, and undertook a holy war. . . . . How many rebels and leaders have been like this one!

-- Ivan Bunin, Cursed Days: A Diary of Revolution 166-7

(Thomas Gaiton Marullo trans. 1998; originally published in Russian in 1936)

Despairing of the counter-revolutionary cause, Bunin finally left Odessa and began (at the age of 50) a new life Paris. It was there over the next decade that he most of his best work. Yet even so—and despite the Prize—he spent most of his life as an exile in a state of privation. He showed the same disdain for the Nazis as he had for the Bolsheviks; (they made him drink a bottle of castor oil). He died in 1953 “in a Paris attic flat”(link). It is said that Nabokov thought highly of some of his poetry, less so of his prose.

–
*Other candidates: Mikhail Bulgakov, The White Guard, N. N. Sukhanov, The Russian Revolution.