"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.

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, elegaic 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, Checkov 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.

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

Lazarus and The Gentleman from San Francisco, while fairly typical of Slavic literature, nevertheless contain few of the elements popularly associated with the work of contemporary Russian writers. They have no sex interest, no photographic descriptions of sordid conditions and no lugubrious philosophizing. These stories are not cheerful, yet their sadness is uplifting rather than depressing. They both contain what the Greek called katharsis in their tragedies - that cleansing atmosphere which purges us of every baser feeling as we read them.

Here is Bunin's great anti-Bolshevik diary of the Russian Revolution, translated into English for the first time. Cursed Days is a chilling account of the last days of the Russian master in his homeland. He recreates the time of revolution and civil war with graphic and gripping immediacy.

The Village, Ivan Bunin's first full-length novel, is a bleak and uncompromising portrayal of rural life in south-west Russia. Set at the time of the 1905 Revolution and centring on episodes in the lives of a landowner and his self-educated peasant brother, the book follows characters sunk so far below the average of intelligence as to be scarcely human. A triumph of bitter realism, Bunin's cruel, lyrical prose reveals the pettiness, violence and ignorance of life on the land, foreshadowing the turbulences of Russia in the twentieth century.

The first Russian to be awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, Ivan Bunin is often considered the last of the great Russian masters. Already renowned in Russia before the revolution, he fled the country in 1920 and lived the remainder of his life in France, where he continued to write for thirty years. Bunin made his name as a short-story writer with such masterpieces as "The Gentleman from San Francisco," the title piece in one of his collections and one of the stories in this volume. His last book of stories, "Dark Avenues," was published in the 1940s. Among his longer works were a fictional autobiography, "The Life of Arseniev" (1930), and its sequel, "Youth" (1939), which were later collected into one volume, and two memoirs, "The Accursed Days" (1926), and Memories and Portraits (1950). He also wrote books on Tolstoy and Chekhov, both of whom he knew personally. Bunin, in fact, serves as a link-both personal and literary-between Tolstoy, whom he met as a young man, Chekhov, a close friend, and Vladimir Nabokov, who was influenced by Bunin early in his career and who moved in the same emigre literary circles in the twenties and thirties.
Bunin achieved his greatest mastery in the short story, and much of his finest work appears in this volume-the largest collection of his prose works ever published in English. In Robert Bowie's fine translation, with extensive annotations and a lengthy critical afterword, this work affords readers of English their first opportunity for a sustained encounter with a Russian classic, and one of the great writers of the twentieth century.