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.

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.

"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.

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.

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.