Gentleman from San Francisco and
Other Stories (Penguin Classics) by
Ivan Bunin
Amazing Short Stories
A much neglected literary figure, Ivan Bunin is one of Russias 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 familys tour of fashionable European resorts comes to an
unexpected end; Late Hour describes an old mans return to the little
Russian town in the steppes that he has not seen since his early youth;
while Mityas 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.

Personal Review: Gentleman from San Francisco and Other
Stories (Penguin Classics) by Ivan Bunin
In the meditation entitled "Night," Bunin's unnamed narrator says: "Why did
God choose to brand me so deeply with wonderment, thought and
`wisdom', and why is that fatal mark constantly growing inside me?"
Although the voice is abstract, I think it works as a description of Bunin
himself. He wasbclearly a man with (again in his own words) "the
capacity to feel with a singular intensity ... not only their own identities but
those of other people...." And although he may feel that his capacity is
somehow unusual, he does a remarkable job of imagining (or is it
projection?) that capacity in others. Everybody, he says somewhere
(although I can't put my finger on it), has a story that deserves to be told.
In his introduction, David Richards calls Bunin "egocentric." In context I
think I know what it means, but it's an odd choice of words and I suspect
misleading. Conceded that Bunin is not a "social" novelist in the sense
that Tolstoi is, nor a dramatist like Dostoevsky: his metier is, indeed, the
minute attention to feelings. In some sense I suppose these feelings are
"his own," but in some sense, every artist's feelings are "his own."
Perhaps closer to the mark to suggest that at some level every one of us is
an egocentric, and that Bunin may be able to capture the egocentricity in
all of us.
Caution: Bunin won a Nobel Prize, but don't be misled into disappointment.
He's a fine and rewarding writer, but not better than several others who did
not win the prize, the award of which inevitably has more to do with politics
than with intrinsic merit.
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