From Russia, with love (and unfulfilled yearning, crushing despair
and profound heartache). Bunin, now forgotten by all but a handful
of specialists, won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1933. A
successful and well-respected writer in Russia, he settled in Paris
after the Revolution, where he maintained himself by writing about
a culture that had virtually disappeared by the time he got to
France. The six stories collected here were written between 1900
and 1944. All are set in either a fiercely cosmopolitan Moscow or a
tenderly bucolic Russian countryside. A few, like the eponymous
"The Elagin Affair" and "Mitya's Love," are long enough to count as
novellas; others seem, in comparison, like sketches. Bunin's
greatest strength is his ability to focus intensely on the
consciousness of a single character. His stories, packed with
sensory information and grounded by long, clause-heavy
descriptions, work to find the mysterious moment at which objective
reality becomes part of the interior world. Some stories, like
"Mitya's Love," spend paragraph after lavish paragraph on minute
sensory experiences-the thick air of the country on a languorous
afternoon, the sound of a woman's laugh, the long wait for a short
letter. But many of the stories promise a bigger payoff than they
can deliver. Bunin's prose is always stronger than the stories'
plots, which often seem to end rather abruptly, often by
introducing a relatively cliched and unsatisfying convention more
indebted to melodrama than to the 19th-century realists he
otherwise resembles. Taken together, the stories make a worthy
addition to the archive of great Russian writers of the 19th and
20th centuries, even if individually, their prose spills over the
narrow confines of Bunin's plots. (Kirkus Reviews)
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. Bunin's sensual, elaborate,
and highly rhythmic prose has proven deeply resistant to earlier
translations. In these new stories, Mr. Hettlinger captures both
the music and the grace, as well as the literal meaning, of Bunin's
renowned prose. The Elagin Affair contains three of the author's
greatest novellas, the title piece, "Mitya's Love," and "Sukhodol"
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. Praise for Sunstroke, Graham Hettlinger's
first translations of Ivan Bunin: "Bunin is, unaccountably, the
least translated of the great Russian writers (and his best work
ranks with that of Turgenev and Chekhov). This splendid volume
takes an important step toward righting a long-standing
wrong."-Kirkus Reviews "Graham Hettlinger's new translation...gives
us a Bunin startling in his vividness, sensuality, and
restraint."-Virginia Quarterly Review "Vibrant...a fine
introduction to Bunin's work and a reminder of its importance."-New
York Sun
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