The Life of Arseniev

All of a sudden I felt this Russia, I felt her past and present, her wild, frightening, and yet somehow captivating qualities, and of course my own blood kinship with her…

Born amid the abject impoverishment of the gentry, ‘inconceivable to any European’, among the vast fields and wild skies of 1870s Russia, Alexei Arseniev dreams of beauty. He finds it in the sublime cycle of the seasons, the charisma of his father and the piety of his mother, and above all in literature. Moving from his childhood and schooldays to early friendships with young socialists and the passion his first love, and on again to the dawning of writerly and romantic maturity, Arseniev experiences the world with exhilarating intensity all the more thrilling for its transience. The Life of Arseniev is a deeply personal snapshot of an old-world Russia now lost forever, captured forever in the amber of Bunin’s exquisite prose.

A realist writer with a baroque style, Ivan Bunin was considered to be the modern heir of the literary tradition established by Tolstoy and Chekov. The Life of Arseniev, his masterpiece, was written over more than a decade; a part-translation was put out by Virginia and Leonard Woolf's Hogarth Press in 1933, but Bunin continued working on the novel until 1952, the year before his death. This is the first English translation of Bunin’s magnum opus as he truly envisioned it.

Translated, with notes and an introduction, by Bryan Karetnyk