Ivan Bunin

Ivan Alekseyevich Bunin (1870–1953) was a Russian novelist, poet, and short story writer descended from an impoverished noble family in Voronezh. A close friend of Anton Chekhov and Leo Tolstoy, Bunin was celebrated in pre-revolutionary Russia for his exquisite nature poetry and evocative novellas of decaying gentry life such as The Village (1910) and the philosophical masterpiece The Gentleman from San Francisco (1915).

An uncompromising opponent of the Bolshevik takeover, Bunin fled Russia in 1920, settling in Grasse, France. In exile, he authored his autobiographical novel The Life of Arseniev and the erotic love stories of Dark Avenues (1943). In 1933, Bunin became the first Russian author to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, awarded for the strict artistry with which he carried on the classical Russian traditions in prose writing.