Ivan Bunin, Creativity and Love
St Petersburg University and its Representative Office in Barcelona invite you to the online lecture ‘Ivan Bunin, Creativity and Love’. During the lecture, we will talk about the writer’s works as the brightest example of Russian heritage. The lecture will be delivered by Nina Shcherbak, Candidate of Philology.
Ivan Bunin, the last classicist of pre-revolutionary Russia and the first Russian Nobel Prize winner, was born in 1870 in Voronezh. The writer's oeuvre was recognised throughout the world, but his fame in the USSR came only after his death.
The decision to emigrate was finally taken by Bunin in 1920 and it was not an easy one. He settled in Paris with his wife Vera Muromtseva, and in the spring the couple went to the south of France, where they rented the villa Belvedere. In 1926, Ivan Bunin met the poetess Galina Kuznetsova, who became his student, assistant, and an indispensable member of the family that his legal wife had to put up with. For the first few years after the move, the writer practically did not engage in literature. The family was desperately short of money.
On 9 November 1933, the Bunin family received a joyful phone call from Stockholm. ‘Your husband is a Nobel Prize winner,’ Vera Muromtseva, who picked up the phone, heard on the other end of the line. The prize was awarded to 63-year-old Ivan Bunin ‘for following through and developing with chastity and artfulness the traditions of Russian classic prose’. The writer also received 715,000 francs, which he spent on various needs over the next two years. Ivan Bunin more than once thought about returning to his homeland and even wrote to Leo Tolstoy about it, but World War II broke out.
In 1956, the USSR published the first collection of Ivan Bunin's works in five volumes. The nine-volume book was published only in 1970 during the Khrushchev Thaw. ‘Bunin did not need to live in Russia to write about it, Russia lived in him, he was Russia,’ Andrej Sedykh wrote after Ivan Bunin’s death.
Our next lecture is about the poignant prose and love stories, incredible writing skills and endless sensitivity to the word of the writer who considered himself a ‘Russian exile’.
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 lecture will be held online in Russian with simultaneous interpreting into Spanish.