Ivan Bunin

Ivan Bunin was a Russian writer, poet, honorary academician of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences (1909), and the 1933 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate.

He was born in Voronezh, where he spent the first three years of his life. Later the family moved to the Ozerki estate near Yelets (Oryol Governorate, now Lipetsk Oblast). His father was Alexey Nikolayevich Bunin, and his mother was Lyudmila Aleksandrovna Bunina (née Chubarova). He wrote his first poem at the age of eight. Until the age of 11 he was educated at home; in 1881 he entered the Yelets district gymnasium, and in 1885 returned home and continued his education under the guidance of his elder brother Yuly.

At the age of 17 he began writing poetry; in 1887 he made his debut in print. In 1889 he went to work as a proofreader for the local newspaper Orlovsky Vestnik. In 1891, as an appendix to Orlovsky Vestnik, Bunin’s student booklet Poems. 1887–1891 was published. To this period belongs his long relationship with the newspaper’s employee Varvara Pashchenko, with whom, against the wishes of their relatives, they moved to Poltava (1892). During this same period of his life, Bunin met L. N. Tolstoy.

In 1895 he personally met Chekhov; until then they had corresponded.

In the 1890s he traveled on the steamboat Chaika (“a barge with firewood”) along the Dnieper and visited the grave of Taras Shevchenko, whom he loved and later translated extensively. Several years later he wrote the sketch On the “Chaika”, published in the children’s illustrated magazine Vskhody (1898, no. 21, November 1).

In 1899 he met Gorky, and their friendship lasted for about 20 years.

In 1899