Three Novellas: The Village, Dry Valley, Mitya's Love

Ivan Bunin (1870–1953) is the first Russian Nobel Prize laureate in Literature (1933), an outstanding master of words and an impeccable stylist. Love is something he understands as a fateful power, love-as-passion. Only moments are given to lovers. For I. Bunin, true feeling is always an unreachable peak that a person strives for—but never attains for good, until the end of his days. That is where the tragedy of human existence lies, for which the main purpose— to love—can never be fulfilled.

“The Village” by Ivan Bunin is a 1910 novella depicting the bleak life of a Russian peasant village at the turn of the 19th–20th centuries: its poverty and patriarchal ways. Bunin wanted to show the “soul of the Russian person” and the main layers of the Russian people—peasantry and petty bourgeoisie—on the eve of revolutionary changes.

For Bunin, who is generally far from mysticism, the neo-romantic tendency is, in fact, a reason to explore nostalgia. Natalia, a former serf who raised the narrator and his sister, recalls with longing the estate of SukhoDol, surrounded by legends. As they grow up, the narrator and his sister go to SukhoDol and learn about many dark yet also romantic events from the estate’s history: murders, the holy fool (jurodivy), terrifying visions, and a fire; the bygone life of pre-reform Russia is perceived as a frightening and thrilling fairy tale. In classical Russian prose, “SukhoDol” is closest to the Western genre of “ghost-house” stories, the main one of which—Henry James’s “The Turn of the Screw”—was written fourteen years earlier.

Bunin’s novella echoes Tolstoy’s “The Devil” in many motifs, but the careful moralizing of Tolstoy is rejected here in favor of metaphysics of love-longing. Bunin describes a feeling that is frightening in its enormity—a feeling the main hero, the student Mitya, cannot cope with. Bunin does not separate romantic love and bodily passion (the heroine Katya’s reproach: “You love only my body, not my soul!”—is absolutely unfair); he shows that this connection can be deadly, but, unlike Tolstoy, he is not horrified by it—instead, he indulges in it. Written already in emigration, “Mitya’s Love”, like “Dark Avenues,” lies far from what happens to the theme of sex in the Soviet literature of Bunin’s time. By preserving his style, he penetrates even deeper into the problematic nexus between eroticism and death that obsesses him.