Ivan Bunin

Dmitry Olshansky
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Like many earlier Russian classic authors, Nobel Prize-winner Ivan Bunin was interested in the depths of human experience: the relation between death and sexual drives was the main theme of his fiction and essays. But his talent was distinguished by the combination of sincerity in his description of human experience and the refinement of sensation. Unlike Gogol and Dostoevsky, Bunin was a researcher of sensibility rather than an ethical thinker, but he retained their focus on the tragedy of human desire that constitutes the encounter between social law and the passions of the soul. An aristocrat in literature, Bunin was a deep connoisseur of the discourse of love and, at the same time, an original investigator of death – a writer who c…

3271 words

Citation: Olshansky, Dmitry. "Ivan Bunin". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 14 February 2008 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=12012, accessed 28 March 2024.]

12012 Ivan Bunin 1 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

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