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This book sprang from three handwritten lines by Ivan Bunin, Russia’s first winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Found inside a first edition of Mitya’s Love, they led to the discovery of one of the largest corpora of letters written to Ivan and Vera Bunin by two people whose lives and legacy had been, until now, forgotten. These letters are now in the Russian Archive in Leeds (RAL), and are published here for the first time. The book also focuses on memory and history in its purest form, as narrated by witnesses who lived through the most tragic century in Russian history. Their stories involve Grand Dukes, Russian literary and political giants, as well as one of the architects of the Gulag, and show how these lives intertwined. It also sheds new light on the life and works of Chekhov, Gorky, A. Tolstoy, and Bunin.
“This is not an ordinary study of literary history. It starts as Tsareva-Brauner’s personal journey—beginning with her chance discovery of an autograph of writer Ivan Bunin on the inside cover of a book—and develops into a family history of Nikolai and Natalia Kulman, close friends and financial supporters of the Bunin family in Russia and France… This is a book for readers who already know and admire Bunin’s work. However, it is also a book for those interested in following the twists and turns of intellectual history as it unfolds... Highly recommended.”
–A. J. DeBlasio, Dickinson College, CHOICE
“By translating the letters of the Kulmans to the Bunins, the author of Autographs Don’t Burn: Letters to Bunins sheds light on the unknown life of Russian émigré intellectuals and their close friends who had to flee the country during the establishment of the Soviet Union and provides information on what these intellectuals went through during a very turbulent time in Russian history, as well as their life experiences and activities to preserve their culture and language in a foreign country.”
—Ayse Dietrich, International Journal of Russian Studies
Vera Tsareva-Brauner is a lecturer at the University of Cambridge, specializing in Russian language and translation studies. Born in St. Petersburg, she graduated from St. Petersburg State University, moving to Manchester, UK for her post-graduate studies. She edited the first full English translation of Yuri Tynyanov’s novel Death of the Vazir-Mukhtar and is currently editing a book on the challenges of translating from Slavic languages.
Table of Contents
Archives and Libraries
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1: The People behind the Autograph
Nikolai Karlovich Kulman
Natalia Ivanovna Bokii-Likhareva-Kulman
Nikolai and Natalia Kulman: Their Story
Gleb Bokii—The Case of Myth Creation
Chapter 2: The Exodus
Chapter 3: Note on Translation of Letters
Chapter 4: Letters of Nikolai Kulman to Ivan Bunin (1922–1935)
Chapter 5: Letters of Nikolai Kulman to Vera Bunina (1928–1938)
Chapter 6: Letters of Natalia Kulman to Ivan Bunin (1944–1952)
Bibliography