Galina Kuznetsova. Bunin’s last love

The young poetess was introduced to Bunin when she was 26, and Ivan Alekseevich was 56. The fateful meeting took place on the south coast of France, at a time when both he and she were married. But when Kuznetsova readily left her husband for the sake of fleeting emotions, Bunin, unwilling to part with his wife, invited Kuznetsova to apprentice at his Belvedere villa in Grasse. Thus began their life as a trio: Bunin, Kuznetsova and Muromtseva, Bunin’s legal wife.

Kuznetsova became one of the controversial figures in the Russian literary heritage. Georgy Adamovich wrote of her: ’Galina Kuznetsova writes as if about nothing, but she touches on many things. Nothing happens in her novellas, or almost nothing; chance plays no part in them. She does not write about what occasionally happens in life, but only about what is always there — and she illuminates this «always there» with her own, never-before-seen light’. The theme of Russian people’s hardships during the revolution occupied a special place in Kuznetsova’s work. The writer became an important milestone not only in Bunin’s life, but also in the creative heritage of Russian writers abroad.

Our next lecture is about the complicated love triangle and the famous "Grass Diary" that Kuznetsova kept during the seven years she spent with the Bunin family.

Lecturer

Nina Shcherbak, Associate Professor in the Department of English Philology and Cultural Linguistics at St Petersburg University, Master of Arts (the United Kingdom), a writer and screenwriter. She is also a scriptwriter for science television shows, author of fifteen monographs, and books on linguistics, literature, language philosophy, and English literature. The lecture will be held as part of the events to mark the 300th anniversary of St Petersburg University, the oldest university in Russia. The meeting will be held online in Russian with simultaneous interpreting into Spanish.

Registration