A much neglected literary figure, Ivan Bunin is one of Russia's major writers and ranks with Tolstoy and Chekhov at the forefront of the Russian Realists.
Drawing artistic inspiration from his personal experience, these powerful, evocative stories are set in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Russia of his youth, in the countries that he visited and in France, where he spent the last thirty years of his life.
In the title story, for example, a family's tour of fashionable European resorts comes to an unexpected end; 'Late Hour' describes an old man's return to the little Russian town in the steppes that he has not seen since his early youth; while 'Mitya's Love' explores the darker emotional reverberations of sexual experience. Throughout his stories there is a sense of the precariousness of existence, an omnipresent awareness of the impermanence of human aspirations and achievements.
‘Bunin . . . represents the last flowering of the great tradition of Turgenev and Tolstoy’ – April Fitzlyon in London Magazine‘Half-suppressed nostalgia, memories that return, images that will not be erased, particularly the splendours and miseries of sexual infatuation. #These stories# are reminiscent of Nabokov with a heart’ – New Statesman
The Gentleman from San Francisco and Other Stories
Introduction
The Gentleman from San Francisco
The Primer of Love
Chang's Dreams
Temir-Aksak-Khan
Long Ago
An Unknown Friend
At Sea, at Night
Graffiti
Mitya's Love
Sunstroke
Night
The Caucasus
Late Hour
Visiting Cards
Zoyka and Valeria
The Riverside Tavern
A Cold Autumn
