Ivan Alekseyevich Bunin was the first Russian writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. He was noted for the strict artistry with which he carried on the classical Russian traditions in the writing of prose and poetry. The texture of his poems and stories, sometimes referred to as "Bunin brocade", is considered to be one of the richest in the language.
Background
Ivan Bunin was born on his parental estate in Voronezh province in Central Russia, the third and youngest son of Aleksey Nikolayevich Bunin (1827–1906) and Lyudmila Aleksandrovna Bunina (née Chubarova, 1835–1910). He had two younger sisters: Masha (Maria Bunina-Laskarzhevskaya, 1873–1930) and Nadya (the latter died very young) and two elder brothers, Yuly and Yevgeny. Having come from a long line of rural gentry with a distinguished ancestry including Polish roots, Bunin was especially proud that poets Anna Bunina (1774–1829) and Vasily Zhukovsky (1783–1852) were among his ancestors.
Education
Bunin was graduated from the Yelets Gymnasium and attended the University of Moscow for one year. In 1909 he was elected an honorary member of the Russian Academy.
Career
Ivan Alekseyevich Bunin's first volume of verse was published in 1891. It depicts the ugliness of peasant life before the Revolution of 1905. In 1910-1911 Bunin wrote a novel, The Village, in which he vividly described the dying patriarchal life of the Russian peasantry, and this work placed him immediately in the forefront of Russian novelists. There followed the short stories, The Gentleman from San Francisco, Brothers, Mitia's Love, The Affair of Cornet Yelagin, and many others.
His last full-length novel was The Life of Arseniev. In his description of nature and his psychologically realistic approach to human characters, he is the successor of Leo Tolstoy, although his sense of irony is more profound.