Ivan Bunin

He fell in love with his classmate Varvara Paschenko from Yelets days in 1889. Their relationship ended in 1894.

On September 23, 1898, he married Anna, daughter of one of his associates N. P. Tsakni. They separated in March 1900 while Anna was pregnant. On August 30, 1900 their son Nikolai was born, who died young in January 16, 1905.

After he legally divorced Anna, he married Vera Muromtseva in 1922.

He was born on October 22 (Old Style, October 10), 1870 in Voronezh, Central Russia to Aleksey Nikolayevich Bunin and Lyudmila Aleksandrovna Bunina as their youngest son among five children. His ancestry included poets such as Vasily Zhukovsky and Anna Bunina.

He had a happy early childhood living in Butyrky Khutor and thereafter in Ozerky, surrounded by loving and intelligent people. He was introduced to the world of Russian literature by his mother.

He was first taught by a private tutor, Romashkov and thereafter by his elder brother Yuly. Yuly, a university student, taught him philosophy, psychology and social science and also inspired him to read Russian classics like Tolstoy, Gogol and Pushkin among others. Yuly gradually became his companion and mentor, who also encouraged him to write.

By the 1870s the family was severely impacted by the gambling spree of his father who lost the family estate in a deplorable card game.

In 1881 he joined the gymnasium in Yelets for his secondary education but had to drop out after five years in March 1886 due to financial constraints.

He possessed extraordinary perception and acumen towards subtleties of nature and many of his works display his experience of rural and natural life. ‘Village Paupers’ was his first poem that was published in the ‘Rodina’ magazine in May 1887.

The impoverished state of his family forced him to take up various clerical and technical jobs. He went to Kharkov with his brother in 1889 and there he did several jobs working as assistant editor of local paper, court statistician, government clerk and librarian.

Thereafter he relocated to Oryol in 1889 and till mid-1892 he served the local newspaper ‘Orlovsky Vestnik’ in its editorial section. Many of his early poems and short stories were published in the literary section of the newspaper.

‘Country sketch’ was his first short story that was published in the ‘Russkoye Bogatstvo’ journal in 1891.

In August 1892 he relocated to Poltava where his brother Yuly was settled. Yuly helped him in getting work in the administration of Zemstvo.

In 1933 he became the first Russian writer to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature.