Ivan Bunin: Google Doodle celebrates the first Russian Nobel Prize for Literature winner’s 150th birthday

Google Doodle celebrates the 150th birthday of the first Russian writer awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature Ivan Bunin (Ива́н Бу́нин) on October 22, 2020.

Who was Ivan Bunin (Ива́н Бу́нин)?

Ivan Alekseyevich Bunin (Ива́н Алексе́евич Бу́нин) was born on 22 October 1870 in the western Russian city of Voronezh. He was a Russian poet, novelist, and translator.

Ivan Bunin’s early childhood, spent in Butyrky Khutor and later in Ozerky (of Yelets county, Lipetskaya Oblast), was a happy one: the boy was surrounded by intelligent and loving individuals. Youthful Bunin’s susceptibility and astuteness to the subtleties of nature were remarkable. Bunin’s experiences of rural life profoundly affected his writing.

Ivan Bunin’s first home tutor was an ex-student named Romashkov. In 1881 Ivan was shipped off a public school in Yelets, however never finished the course: he was removed in March 1886 for failing to re-visitation of the school after the Christmas holidays because of the family’s financial challenges.

In May 1887, Ivan Bunin (Ива́н Бу́нин) published his first poem “Village Paupers” (Деревенские нищие) in the Saint Petersburg literary magazine Rodina (Motherland). In 1891 his first short story “Country Sketch (Деревенский эскиз) appeared in the Nikolay Mikhaylovsky-edited journal Russkoye Bogatstvo.

In Spring 1889, Bunin followed his brother to Kharkov, where he became a government clerk, at that point an assistant editor of a local paper, librarian, and court statistician.

In January 1889, Ivan Bunin (Ива́н Бу́нин)moved to Oryol to work on the local Orlovsky Vestnik newspaper, first as an editorial assistant and later as de facto editor; this empowered him to publish his short stories, poems and audits in the paper’s literary section. There he met Varvara Pashchenko and fell passionately enamored with her.

In August 1892 the couple moved to Poltava and settled in the home of Yuly Bunin. The last helped his more youthful brother to get a new line of work in the local zemstvo administration.

Ivan Bunin’s debut book of poetry Poems. 1887–1891 was published in 1891 in Oryol. Some of his articles, papers, and short stories, published before local papers, started to feature in the Saint Petersburg periodicals.

In 1895, Ivan Bunin (Ива́н Бу́нин) visited the Russian capital for the first time. There he was to meet the Narodniks Nikolay Mikhaylovsky and Sergey Krivenko, Anton Chekhov (with whom he started a correspondence and became close friends)), Alexander Ertel, and the poets Konstantin Balmont and Valery Bryusov.

In 1901, Ivan Bunin was awarded his first the prestigious Academy of Sciences’ Pushkin Prize for Falling Leaves (Листопад, 1901), Bunin’s third book of poetry.

In 1910, Ivan Bunin (Ива́н Бу́нин) published The Village (Деревня), a depressing depiction of Russian country life, which he portrayed as full of idiocy, brutality, and violence. The nearest Bunin came to fame was in 1911–1912 when The Village and Dry Valley came out.

A rival of the Russian Revolution, Ivan Bunin (Ива́н Бу́нин) left the nation in 1920, eventually settling in France, where he kept on publishing novels and poetry for the rest of his life.

The quick reason for the award was the autobiographical novel The Life of Arseniev ((Жизнь Аpсеньева), yet Bunin’s heritage is a lot more extensive in scope.

In 1925–1926 Cursed Days (Окаянные дни), Ivan Bunin’s diary of the years 1918–1920 began to show up in the Paris-based Vozrozhdenye newspaper (its last version was published by Petropolis in 1936).

Ivan Bunin (Ива́н Бу́нин) became the first Russian to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, which was awarded to him in 1933 “for following through and developing with chastity and artfulness the traditions of Russian classic prose.” Bunin for his part praised the Swedish Academy for honoring a writer in exile.

In 1938, Ivan Bunin (Ива́н Бу́нин) started working on what might later become a celebrated cycle of nostalgic stories with a strong sensual propensity and a Proustian ring. The first eleven stories of it came out as Dark Avenues (or Dark Alleys, Тёмные аллеи) in New York (1943); the cycle appeared in a full version in 1946 in France.

During the 1950s, Ivan Bunin became the first of the Russian writers estranged abroad to be published authoritatively in the USSR. In 1965, The Complete Bunin turned out in Moscow in nine volumes. Some of his more controversial books, outstandingly Cursed Days, stayed restricted in the Soviet Union until the late 1980s.

Most popular for his short novels The Village (1910) and Dry Valley (1912), his autobiographical novel The Life of Arseniev (1933, 1939), the book of short stories Dark Avenues (1946), and his 1917–1918 diary (Cursed Days, 1926), Ivan Bunin was a respected figure among anti-communist white emigres, European pundits, and a considerable lot of his fellow writers, who saw him as a genuine beneficiary to the tradition of authenticity in Russian literature set up by Tolstoy and Chekhov.

Ivan Bunin (Ива́н Бу́нин) was noted for the exacting artistry with which he carried on the classical Russian traditions in the writing of prose and poetry. The texture of his poems and stories sometimes referred to as “Bunin brocade”, is viewed as one of the richest in the language.

Ivan Alekseyevich Bunin passed on in a Paris attic flat in the early hours of 8 November 1953. Heart failure, cardiac asthma, and pulmonary sclerosis were referred to as the reasons for death.

On October 22, 2020, Google observes Ivan Bunin’s 150th Birthday with Google Doodle.