New Translation Revives Nobel Prize Winner's Dreamy Russian Landscapes

COLLECTED STORIES OF IVAN BUNIN

Translated from the Russian by Graham Hettlinger

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Ivan R. Dee. 377 pp. Paperback, $19.95

It is both shameful and understandable that few Americans know the writings of Ivan Bunin. Although he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1933, his works were banned in his native Russia until after his death in 1953, and for decades he labored, sometimes in extreme poverty, in exile in France. Also, his prose is notoriously difficult to translate; as Graham Hettlinger notes in an illuminating introduction to this volume, Bunin is acclaimed for his short stories but always called himself a poet.

Fortunately, Hettlinger's fluid new translations should help us rediscover an author who, like Chekhov, evocatively portrayed the vanishing world of Russia's large estates after the emancipation of the serfs in 1861. Born in 1870, Bunin witnessed as a child the disintegration of his aristocratic family's own estate. After the 1917 Revolution, he fled the Bolsheviks, never to return. Written between 1900 and 1944, almost all of the 35 stories in this collection -- ranging from imagistic sketches and folk legends to tales of obsessive love and eroticism -- are aching recreations of Bunin's homeland.

His prose, unlike Chekhov's, drifts and swirls with images and emotion. Two of the earliest pieces here -- "The Scent of Apples" (1900) and the novella "Sukhodol" (1911) -- have no characters, plot or linear narrative but rather the meandering quality of memory, as one image recalls another. The former sets a nostalgic mood for the book with a dreamy tableau of a country estate and the intoxicating recollection of its "avenue of maples, the delicate smell of the fallen leaves, and the scent of autumn apples."

As the narrator of the seemingly autobiographical "Sukhodol" observes, sometimes dreams and memories are more powerful than reality, a theme that reverberates throughout the collection. A former serf's enthralling stories bring to life the huge estate of Sukhodol, a passionately loved "poetic image of the past." Through the elegiac evocation runs the dark family history of madness and murder, whippings and family quarrels. There is also the Crimean war, a fire and rumors of emancipation, all leading inexorably to ruin.

The vivid imagery becomes allegorical in the masterful "The Gentleman from San Francisco," a condemnation of materialism and hypocrisy that is perhaps Bunin's best-known story. The gentleman remains nameless; he is an archetype of the arrogant and soulless rich who feel entitled to the solicitude of everyone around them.

In his intense love stories, mostly set in Moscow or the Russian countryside, Bunin exposes the inner lives of men stricken by passion. His noblemen wait from childhood for love, but when they find it, they cannot always reconcile the real woman with the one created by their desires. Happiness is followed by betrayal, loss and, in some cases, suicide or murder.

"Mitya's Love," a feverish outpouring, lays bare the emotional life of a young man in love for the first time as he feels in turn exultation and suicidal despair. Dreaming of his beloved, an irritating Moscow actress, he slips into delirious images of a lush landscape, passion and misery.

"Sunstroke" brilliantly moves back and forth between the exterior world and the consciousness of a young lieutenant. As he wanders around a provincial town, he realizes that what he thought was a casual fling has left him unexpectedly in love, his heart "destroyed by sunstroke."

Here, memory is mixed with desire. In "Rusya," a married man's recollection of his first (and only) true love's yellow dress spreading over the grass and her dark body fills him with mortal longing. But it isn't all romance in Bunin's stories. There is vulgarity, revulsion, even rape. Taken together, this piercingly lyrical collection renders fully the passion of the human heart and the power of memories. But what ultimately makes these stories so real and moving is the rich visual detail. *

Lelia Ruckenstein is a critic and the editor, with James A. O'Malley, of "Everything Irish: The History, Literature, Art, Music, People and Places of Ireland, from A to Z."