Ivan Bunin — writer (nobel) with roots in the Russian Empire
Ivan Alekseyevich Bunin was born on 22 October (10 October, Old Style) 1870 in Voronezh, and grew up on his family's estate in the Voronezh province; the family belonged to the old landed nobility. He published his first poem at seventeen, in 1887, worked as a newspaper reporter and published his first book of poems in 1891.
His poems and his translation of Longfellow's Song of Hiawatha won him the Pushkin Prize of the Academy of Sciences; he had asked Anton Chekhov to put his work forward for it. A second Pushkin Prize followed in 1909, and he was elected to the Russian Academy. His first full-length work, The Village (1910), a bleak portrait of country life, made him widely known, and Dry Valley (1912) drew on the history of his own family. Before the First World War he travelled in Ceylon, Palestine, Egypt and Turkey.
After the Revolution of 1917 he moved from Petrograd to Moscow and then to Odessa, where he lived for about a year and a half. The diary he kept from 1918 to 1920 became Cursed Days. He and Vera Muromtseva sailed from Odessa to Constantinople, most sources say in early 1920, others in 1919, and reached Paris by way of Sofia and Belgrade. He settled in France, living mostly at Grasse, near Cannes, and wrote for the Russian émigré press.
In 1933 he became the first Russian writer to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, cited for developing the traditions of Russian classical prose; The Life of Arsenyev, a semi-autobiographical novel, was the work most associated with the award. The prize money was soon exhausted, and the household often went hungry. During the German occupation of France he stayed in Grasse, wrote without publishing, and is reported to have sheltered a Jewish acquaintance in his house. He completed the story cycle Dark Avenues in 1944.
He died of a heart attack in his flat in Paris on 8 November 1953, aged eighty-three, leaving his book of reminiscences on Chekhov unfinished. He is buried in the Russian cemetery at Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois.
"Left Moscow for Odessa after 1917 and sailed from Odessa to Constantinople in early 1920 (some sources say 1919); reached Paris via Sofia and Belgrade and later lived mainly in Grasse."
Migration storyTracing the roots — Voronezh
Born in Voronezh, Russian Empire, on 22 October 1870 to Aleksey Nikolayevich Bunin, of an impoverished noble family. He emigrated to France in 1920 and died in Paris in 1953.
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Voronezh. At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.
A career defined by ambition
"In youth, we do not think of death. In age, we think of nothing else."