Ivan Bunin - Cursed Days

CURSED DAYS

Ivan Bunin in 1918

A Diary of Revolution

TRANSLATED FROM THE RUSSIAN,
WITH AN INTRODUCTION AND NOTES, BY

Thomas Gaiton Marullo

CURSED DAYS. English translation and the special contents of this edition
copyright 1998 by Thomas Gaiton Marullo. First published in 1936 as
Okaiannye dni. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book
or portions thereof in any form. For information, address: Ivan R. Dee,
Publisher, 1332 North Halsted Street, Chicago 60622. Manufactured in the
United States of America and printed on acid-free paper.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Bunin, Ivan Alekseevich, 18701953.
[Okaiannye dni. English]
Cursed days : a diary of Revolution / Ivan Bunin ; translated from the
Russian, with an introduction and notes, by Thomas Gaiton Marullo.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-56663-186-0
1. Bunin, Ivan Alekseevich, 18701953Diaries. 2. Authors,
Russian20th centuryDiaries. 3. Soviet UnionHistory
Revolution, 19171921Personal narratives, Russian. I. Marullo,
Thomas Gaiton. II. Title.
PG3453.B9Z4713 1998
891.78303dc21

[B]

97-52822

To Julia Gauchman, friend and colleague

ON JULY 30, 1925, Vera Muromtseva-Bunina, the wife of the Russian writer Ivan Bunin, wrote in her diary: Ian [her name for her husband] has torn up and burned all his diary manuscripts. I am very angry. I dont want to be seen in my underwear, he told me. Seeing Vera so upset, Bunin confided to her: I have another diary in the form of a notebook. After I die you can do with it what you like.

At the time of this incident, Bunin was fifty-six, Vera was forty-five. They had been living in exile in France for six years, having fled their country in the wake of the Russian Revolution and civil war. Although Bunin had been nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature almost immediately upon his arrival in the West, it was not until 1933 that he would receive this award, the first Russian writer and the first writer in exile ever to be accorded such an honor. As for the diary, Bunin himself published it in 1936 with the title Cursed Days (Okaiannye dni).

Set against the backdrop of Moscow and Odessa in 1918 and 1919, Cursed Days is Bunins scathing account of his last days in Russia. Although banned during the years of Soviet power, it is enjoying a stunning revival in the homeland today. By 1991 no fewer than fifteen separate editions of Cursed Days had been published in the former Soviet Union, including its appearance in a new six-volume edition of Bunins works in 1994.

The work is important for several reasons. Cursed Days is one of the very few anti-Bolshevik diaries to be preserved from the time of the Russian Revolution and civil war. It recreates events with graphic and gripping immediacy. Unlike the works of early Soviets and emigrs and their self-censoring backdrop of memory, myth, and political expediency, Bunins truth reads almost like an aberration.

Cursed Days also links Russian anti-utopian writing of the nineteenth century to its counterpart in the twentieth. Reminiscent of the fiction of Dostoevsky, it features an underground man who does not wish to be an organ stop or to affirm crystal palaces. Bunins diary foreshadowed such libelous memoirs as Evgenia Ginsbergs Journey into the Whirlwind (1967) and Within the Whirlwind (1981), and Nadezhda Mandelstams Hope Against Hope (1970) and Hope Abandoned (1974), the accounts of two courageous women caught up in the Stalinist terror of the 1930s. Cursed Days also preceded the rebellious anti-Soviet tradition that began with Evgeny Zamyatin and Yury Olesha, moved on to Mikhail Bulgakov, and reached an apex with Boris Pasternak and Alexander Solzhenitsyn. One can argue that, in its painful exposs of political and social utopias, Cursed Days, together with Zamyatins We (1924), heralded the anti-utopian writing of George Orwell and Aldous Huxley. Bunin and Zamyatin had correctly understood that the Soviet experiment was destined to self-destruct.

Cursed Days was Bunins only work to feature him in his underwear. For a singular moment in his almost seventy years as a writer, he relinquished his classical and aristocratic stance, and, hauntingly, like Edvard Munchs tormented figure in The Scream (1893), tried to articulate the near despair that was flowing just beneath the surface of his personal, professional, and political poise.

In publishing this first English translation of Cursed Days, I wish to make Bunins account accessible to Western readers so that this gifted writer may also be seen as a perceptive social critic. Unless readers can comprehend his wrenching struggle to make sense of his shattered world, they cannot appreciate his vacillation between hope and despair. To this edition of Cursed Days I also add a codaselections from 1919 articles written by Bunin in Odessa, in which he elaborated certain insights into the Russian Revolution and civil war. With these pieces I hope to complete an otherwise unavailable picture of Bunins last days in his homeland. Bunin himself requested that nothing be forgotten about the trials and horrors of newly bolshevized Russia; and, as Santayana once warned, those who cannot remember the mistakes of the past are condemned to repeat them.

For their invaluable assistance at various stages in the preparation of this book, I wish to thank Linda Gregory and the staffs of the Departments of Reference, Interlibrary Loan, and Micro-texts of the Theodore M. Hesburgh Library at the University of Notre Dame for obtaining many needed materials, for researching footnotes, and for photocopying texts, and to Margaret Jasiewicz, Sherry Reichold, and especially Nancy McMahon for typing correspondence and preparing the manuscript.

Several individuals deserve a special note of gratitude. Truly this book would not have come into being without Professor Klaus Lanzinger, former chairman of the Department of German and Russian Languages and Literatures at the University of Notre Dame; Professor Harry Attridge, former dean of the College of Arts and Letters; Professor Jennifer Warlick, former director of the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts; and Professor Roger Skurski, associate dean of the college, who allowed me to devote a good part of my energy to this project and who provided technical and financial assistance. I am also grateful to Professors Marc Raeff, Andrew Wachtel, and Gary Hamburg for their meticulous reading of the text; Helen Sullivan, who, along with others of the staff of the library of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, unearthed sources, researched additional footnotes, and answered myriad questions; Steven Bordenkircher, Bethany Thomas, and Matthew Welsh, who proved to be quick and ready research assistants; Vladimir Khmelkov, who helped with additional research and who translated many of the articles as well as passages involving the speech of Russian peasants and workers; and finally, my publisher, Ivan Dee, who believed in this project from the beginning and who taught me much about the publishing and scholarly worlds.