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314 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1930
I was born a half-century ago in Central Russia, in the country, on my father’s estate.!
We lack a sense of our beginning and end. And it is a great pity that I was told exactly when I was born. Had I not been told, I would have no idea of my age – the more so as I do not as yet at all feel its burden – and would therefore be spared the absurd thought that I must supposedly die in ten or in twenty years’ time. And had I been born and lived on a desert island, I would not have suspected even the existence of death.
I always remember my early childhood with sadness. Every childhood is sad; barren is that quiet world in which a timid and tender soul not yet quite awakened to life is dreaming its dream of life, still alien to everybody and everything. Golden childhood, a happy time, people usually say. No, it is an unhappy, morbidly sensitive, miserable time.
How dreadful was the beginning of that life! The mere fact of it being my first evening in town, the first after parting from my father and mother, the first in absolute solitude and, besides, in new and poverty-stricken surroundings, in two cramped rooms, among people absurdly unfamiliar and alien to me, whom I, a gentleman’s son, naturally regarded as beneath me, and who had yet suddenly acquired even some power over me – that in itself was dreadful.
Rapidly she approached us and, making affable play with her agate eyes, freely and firmly shook our hands, her own small hand in a tight black glove, and began talking and laughing fast, once or twice throwing a fleeting but curious glance at me; and I, for the first time in my life, became so vividly and sensuously aware of all that peculiar and terrible something which lurks in the lips of a laughing woman, in the childlike intonation of a woman’s voice, in the roundness of a woman’s shoulders, in the slimness of a woman’s waist, in that inexpressible something which there is even in a woman’s ankle – that I could not utter one word.
It was an uneasy happiness, exhausting both physically and spiritually.
I went back, frequently pausing and turning round. The wind seemed to blow still stronger and colder, but the sun was rising, shining, the day bgrew gayer, claimed for life, for joy, and over everything -- over the town, over the deserted Woodenware Place, over the sacred, silent domain of the monastery with its high wall, churchyard grove, and golden cathedral cupolas, and over that boundless steppe across which, away, towards the pellucid green northern horizon, the road ran -- there sailed, in the pale-blue, watery, bright autumnal sky, large and purplish clouds, and everything was bright and motley, and over everything, light and picturesque, now and again alternating with the sun, ran airy opaque shadows. I would stand still, gaze, and go further ... Where had I not been on that day!I could read that stuff forever. It's a pity that Bunin is not much read any more: This novel and the various short stories I have read are quite beautiful. It is not for nothing that he was the first Russian recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature.