I admit it – when I saw Dark Avenues by Ivan Bunin at the library sale I thought twice about buying it. True, it was in a cool UK “Oneworld Classics” edition, (with a largely inappropriate cover illustration – to my mind “Memories” by Fernand Khnopff would have been perfect), it struck me of the kind of mid-century Russian realism that can be tedious. I’d read The Gentleman From San Francisco and Other Stores years and years ago when I was remedying the astonishing fact that I hadn’t really been exposed to any Russian literature in college, but it obviously hadn’t made much of an impression on me as I hardly remembered Bunin. I did know from more recent researches that he was seen as the antithesis of my beloved Russian symbolists, and in fact one of the blurbs from the book is Andrei Bely’s “I have been keeping an eye on Bunin’s brilliant talent. He really is the enemy.” The fact that he won the Nobel prize in 1933 didn’t sway me much either — it seems like it was, as is so often the case, as much a political, anti-communist statement as an artistic one. But one phrase in the back cover copy sealed the deal, “…this collection of short fiction centres around dark, erotic liaisons.” Say no more, UBU is there!

And so it sat in the vast book pile until, inexplicably, I got a hankering for it months later. And yeah, it’s all that, and even more. After time the competing claims of different schools don’t seem that exclusive anymore (like, say, disco and punk) and these brief, highly charged stories reminded me as much of the symbolist images of Munch and Klimt as much as anything else. Maybe because they were composed between 1938 and 1944 during Europe’s nightmare years, they seem like a vivid, escapist mix of dream and memory, daydreams of man’s favorite daydream, woman. There’s no fantasy element to them, however, but a real sense of Russian tragedy, of the brutal beauty of Tzarist life, and the eternal dance of death between the sexes. Far be it from me to compare my humble UBU efforts to such work, but I will say that it made me feel better about the stuff I’ve been doing lately, which is similarly brief, somewhere between a short story and a prose poem, and largely lacking the encyclopedic, academic delineation of every detail that the MFA programs promulgate. Like UBU Bunin is obsessed by the physicality of women, their hair and skin and bodies, but also the clothes and accessories they surround themselves with, their movements and even the breath that animates them. A woman in his society had very little manifest power but often an ocean of latent effect, which in turn can either anger or bewitch the men around them.

Here’s a few beautifully written passages, many of which might be called figure studies:

She used to sit down freely on Levitsky’s knees – as though innocently, childishly – and probably sensed what he was secretly experiencing, holding her plumpness, softness and weight and trying to keep his eyes off her bare knees under the little tartan skirt.

“Everything passes my friend,” he began mumbling. “Love, youth – everything, everything. The ordinary vulgar story. Everything passes with the years.” “God treats people differently, Nikolai Alexeyevich. Youth passes for everyone, but love’s a different matter.”

I looked at her felt boots, at the knees under the grey skirt – everything was easily visible in the golden light falling from the window – and I wanted to shout out: Better you kill me, I can’t live without you, for those knees alone, for the skirt, for the felt boots, I’m prepared to give my life!

He had smiled awkwardly, had stood for a little and watched how, with a mallet in her hands, she bent toward a croquet ball, how her tussore skirt hung over her taut calves in fine stockings of pale yellow silk, how plumply and heavily her breasts stretched her transparent blouse, beneath which could be seen the tanned flesh of her rounded shoulders, seeming pinkish from the pink straps of her camisole – and had ambled off to the balcony.

And before lunch they would go through the garden to the river, would undress in the bathing hut, their naked bodies lit up from above by the blueness of the sky, and from below by the reflection of the transparent water.

I went in – she was standing, erect and somewhat theatrical beside the piano, in a black velvet dress which made her slimmer, she was brilliant in its smartness, in the festive arrangement of her jet-black hair, in the swarthy amber of her bare arms and shoulders and the delicate, plump beginnings of her breasts, in the gleaming of the diamond earrings hanging down her highly powdered cheeks, in the charcoal velvet of her eyes and the velvety purple of her lips.

In the night, drowned women are white like mist on the lakes, they lie naked on the banks, tempting a man to fornication, insatiable lechery; and there’s no small number of unfortunates who do nothing but practice that lechery, spending the night with them and sleeping in the daytime, they burn in fevers, abandoning all other worldly cares.