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"His translations are loyal in the fullest sense; each rises to the particular challenge of the author in question."" --The Moscow Times" on Hugh Aplin
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Considered one of the most influential authors of twentieth century Russian Literature, Ivan Bunin's "Dark Avenues" is the culmination of a life's work which unrelentingly questioned of the political doxa whilst taking his poetic mastery of language to dark new heights. Written between 1938 and 1944 and set in the context of a disintegrating Russian culture, this collection of short fiction centres around dark, erotic liaisons told with a rich, elegiac poetics which probes the artistic limits of depicting desire.A prolific writer and fierce political activist, Bunin became the first Russian to win the Nobel prize for Literature in 1933 and was highly influential on his contemporary Russian emigres, Chekhov and Nabokov. The "Dark Avenues" is the zenith of his work and one of the most important Russian texts to come out of the twentieth century.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The last White Russian,
By
This review is from: Dark Avenues (Oneworld Modern Classics) (Oneworld Classics) (Paperback)
I believe I am right in thinking that this is the first complete edition of Dark Avenues in English. A few years ago I bought the Hyperion edition, which contains only a selection of the tales. In some ways, the selective approach works well with Dark Avenues, whose subject is remarkably narrow. How many stories can you read about listless Russian aristocrats falling in love with peasant girls or daughters of the house?
On the other hand, the scale of Ivan Bunin's dedication to the Dark Avenues project, as laid out in this complete edition, is quite astonishing. It must have been very painful for him to sit in wartime France, by then an old man, and recall in beautiful, infinite, fabulous detail the sound of birds, the smell of gardens and the corners of lace tablecloths in pre-revolutionary Russia. The real wonder of these stories lies not so much in the narrative itself but in the way Bunin conjures up, across that distance in time and space, the circumstances of lives long ago made unlivable by politics. Neither the men nor the women in these stories have much of a presence compared to the surface of a lake at night, for example, the moon being covered in clouds or the dark avenues themselves. This edition features a useful mini-biography of Bunin, as well as the inclusion of Dark Avenues in its original Russian. The translation is perhaps a little functional, but you can at least hear a more beautiful language whispering beneath it.
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Veni, Vidi, Vici,
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This review is from: Dark Avenues (Oneworld Modern Classics) (Oneworld Classics) (Paperback)
Sex. It's everywhere in this collection that reads like a horny devil on meth. From the the towns and cities all across Russia to Paris you can't escape the process of manufacturing babies. Except there are few babies here. Bunin was well past his sixties when he wrote this collection but most of the protagonists are young to middle-aged men. Men who won't commit to their women whose virtues they intend to take one way or another. Half-way through the stories you're thoroughly familiar with the formula: I Raped, I Came, I Fled. This takes away any surprise because you already know how it ends. One feels that Bunin must have had either a very enterprising youth or one full of daydreaming of conquests. Somehow the former seems more plausible.
What saves Dark Avenues is Bunin's masterful ability to describe people and places and squeeze out the most interestng details about any setting. This skill marks out Dark Avenues as a (very) high brow Confessions to say Henry Miller's middle brow exploits. This will be a hard one for feminists to swallow. There are precious few strong female characters as most women here are simply just strung along for the ride. And there's only one gender in the saddle. But that was a different world then - women had little say and maybe that's just how it was.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta) Amazon.com:
4.0 out of 5 stars (1 customer review) 2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Uneven but occasionally brilliant short stories on sex and death,
By S. Smith-Peter - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Dark Avenues (Oneworld Modern Classics) (Oneworld Classics) (Paperback)
I am somewhat ambivalent about this collection of short stories. The theme is, without a doubt, the link between sex and death. When I started reading the collection, it was as if I was hearing the lowest note on the piano. Then in the next story I heard it again. "That's interesting," I thought. Then it came again. And again. "Enough already," I thought. I mean, yes, there is a connection between sex and death, but at the same time there's also a connection between sex and life and between not having sex and death. The worst stories are those in which a woman is abused in some way and then falls in love with her tormentor and lives a life of sacrifice for no apparent reason. However, there are also truly great stories, like "In Paris" or "Pure Monday", which have very real and likable female characters that have complex feelings and are capable of love that is believable and moving. The collection includes the Russian original of the title story, "Dark Avenues," which is about a nobleman who meets the former serf girl he used to love. In English it didn't move me much. In Russian, though, it was clear how much he was influenced by Pushkin. Also, the Russian dialogue is far more expressive, because it shows that she still referred to him formally, while he spoke to her informally, thus highlighting the social gap between them. The story was written in 1938 and I couldn't help but feel all the archaic vocabulary was at least partly an attempt to make the present go away, if only for the space of the story. The theme of nobleman mistreating a lower class girl, which is in this story and others, has links to the Russian Revolution. It's almost as if Bunin was writing these stories in a mood of both celebration and repentance. There is a very useful short biography of Bunin at the end that puts his work in a larger context, as well as a list of further reading. Foreign words and terms are glossed in helpful footnotes. As an introduction to Bunin's stories, I'd recommend the Northwestern University Press volume, Night of Denial. However, reading this collection is an excellent way to get a deeper sense of the themes of the collection as a whole. |
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