Literary Birthday – 22 October – Ivan Bunin

Ivan Bunin was born 22 October 1870, and died 8 November 1953.

Five Quotes

1. Life, arguably, is given to one only as a weapon for one’s contest with death, which man has to fight even beyond his grave. Death steals his name, yet he writes it on a cross or on a gravestone. She shrouds his lifetime with darkness, but again he resurrects his name using a written word.
2. It’s a terrible thing to say, but it’s the truth: if it were not for the misfortunes of the folk, thousands of our intellectuals would be profoundly unhappy people. What else would they have cried and written about? Without the folk, life would not have been life for them.
3. Words are one thing, deeds are quite another.
4. Everybody tends to read The Life of Arseniev as the account of my own life. That is not so. Reality is something that I am totally incapable of writing about directly. Even the heroine here is cooked up. But so immersed into her being I was that I came to believe in her, as if she were a real person, and so strong was that belief that I that couldn’t help crying as I was writing about her. She visited me in dreams, even.
5. Such things and deeds as are not written down are covered with darkness, and given over to the sepulchre of oblivion.

Ivan Bunin was the first Russian writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. He was known for his short novels, The Village, and Dry Valley, and his novel The Life of Arseniev.

Source for Image

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ivan_Bunin_(sepia).jpg

Georgi Vasilievich Trunov, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

by Amanda Patterson

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