Purchase: Dark Avenues (Oneworld Modern Classics) (Oneworld Classics)

Ivan Bunin is a largely forgotten writer who should be far more noticed in our reading of the Russian canon. He fled Russia after the revolution of 1917, eventually settling in France where he continued a largely celebrated writing career. In 1933 he became the first Russian winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, a remarkable fact for a writer who is now so little read. Hopefully this collection will change that. Dark Avenues, written between 1938 and 1944, is a masterpiece. Each short story is crafted into being a meal in itself; it is definitely a collection where one might just as easily read one story and feel replete enough to put it down as read through all forty-odd at once.

Dark Avenues circles around the themes of love, passion, sex and all the evils that can stem from them. By many other authors, it would be likely that many of these stories would come out overly erotic to the point of being gaudy and lewd, and yet Bunin approaches them with such tact that the erotisism is gentle and not in the least overt. Largely tragic in conclusion, Bunin has a remarkable way of making the reader empathise by forcing them to think. We are never given the full story painted on the page, rather Bunin give the reader hints and gets us to do the painting. In this way he can make a short story become far longer in the heads of the reader. It is perhaps through that we get the replete feeling of having eaten a morsel but it turned out to be a slap up three-courser.

For instance, The Caucasus is a story telling of a couple who have eloped on a holiday together, ever knowing that soon the woman’s husband will find them and they will be forever apart. The last paragraph finishes the story in this manner:

He searched for her in Gelendzhik, in Gagry, in Sochi. The day after his arrival in Sochi, he bathed in the sea in the morning, then shaved, put on clean linen, a snow-white tunic, had lunch at his hotel on the terrace of the restaurant, drank a bottle of champagne, had coffee with chartreuse, unhurriedly smoked a cigar. Returning to his room, he lay down on the couch and shot himself in the temples with two revolvers.
- The Caucasus

A heartbroken man committing suicide upon realising that his wife was not merely going away to convalesce. But two revolvers? The mind keeps chewing it over, and suddenly you are in the story yourself, working over the details, searching for overlooked clues and tricks.

The images that Bunin employs are masterful also. It is no wonder that Nabokov called him “A most powerful ‘connoisseur of colours’” as he manages to paint a vision of ‘vanished Russia’ that would rival most painters. The Russian girls are beautiful yet doleful in grey, the French elegant in black, and the simplistic perfection has to be experienced to be believed.

To be able to translate all Bunin’s techniques into English so that they carry this amount of weight can only serve to highlight Hugh Aplin’s skill, and as such he must be given time here, as he does not even have a foreword in the collection itself. There does not appear to be anywhere that the language comes across as lumpy and obviously translated, and from reading the Extra Material by Andrei Rogatchevski towards the close of the collection, I did not have the impression that the general content had been changed in any major way.

Oneworld Classics, 350PP.,  £9.99,
978-1-84749-047-6