Böcker av Ivan Bunin

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 in prose.

Ivan Bunin was the first Russian to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. For his poetry, he was twice awarded Russia''s highest literary honor, the Pushkin Prize. While Bunin''s prose writing is well known, his poetry-though highly praised by critics and contemporaries such as Blok, Gorky and Nabokov-has been unjustly ignored. This collection of over 100 verse translations is the first English language book of Bunin''s poetry. Spanning a long period of poetic output (1886-1952), this selection includes both published and unpublished poems. In a variety of forms, they cover an astonishing range of topics and reveal a writer with singular artistic precision and deep humanity.

"The Gentleman from San Francisco" is easily the best known of Ivan Bunin's stories and has achieved the stature of a masterpiece. But Bunin's other stories and novellas are not to be missed. Over the last several years a great many of them have been freshly and brilliantly translated by Graham Hettlinger. Together, along with four new pieces, they are now published in a one-volume paperback collection of Bunin's greatest writings. In Mr. Hettlinger's renderings readers will see why Bunin was regarded by many of his contemporaries as the rightful successor to Tolstoy and Chekhov as a master of Russian letters.

At once nostalgic for a bygone more innocent age and foreshadowing the turbulences of the twentieth century, Bunin's narrative is a triumph of bitter realism, shot through with the author's classical style and precision of language.

Graham Hettlinger's brilliant translations of Bunin's stories in Sunstroke (2002) were widely acclaimed. In The Elagin Affair, Mr. Hettlinger continues to acquaint English-language readers with a Bunin they may not have appreciated. The Elagin Affair contains two of the author's greatest novellas, the title piece and "Mitya's Love," as well as a broad range of stories written between 1900 and 1940 and centered on themes of love, loss, and the Russian landscape, including several of Bunin's most haunting stories from his final collection, Dark Avenues.