Comprehending the Beauty of the World: Bunin's Philosophy of Travel

Author(s): D. J. Richards
Reviewed work(s):
Source: The Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 52, No. 129 (Oct., 1974), pp. 514-532
Published by: the Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School of
Slavonic and East European Studies
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 Comprehendingthe Beauty of
the World: Bunin's Philosophy
of Travel
D. J. RICHARDS

I
'TRAVEL', remarkedBunin in October I912 duringan interview
with reportersfrom the newspaperGolosMoskvy,'has played an
enormousrole in my life'.' Fromthe purelyphysicalpoint of view,
apartfromany widerimplications,this statementwas no exaggera-
tion: at the time of the interviewBuninhad been almostconstantly
on the movefor sometwentyyears,rarelyremainingfor morethan
a month or two in any one place. Galina Kuznetsova, the emigrle
poetessand novelistwho lived for many yearswith Bunin and his
wife in Parisand the South of France,aptly describedthe writer's
way of life beforethe Revolution:
Buninled not a settled,but a nomadicexistence.In Russiahe possessed
no house of his own; he used to stay with relationsin the countryor
live in Moscow-but alwaysin a hotel-or he wouldgo off on journeys
all over the world.2

This life of perpetualmigration,which continueduntil the early

I920S, came to be viewedby Buninhimselfnot as a curseor a self-
imposedburden,but as a blessingand a joy, and indeedas a source
of positive achievement.Earlierin the interviewfrom which the
openingwordsof this essay were taken, he had, for instance,ob-
served:'As far as travelin generalis concerned,I have even con-
structeda certain philosophyabout this.'3Bunindid not enlarge
on thisremark;nordoeshe provideanywhereelsea formalexposition
of his theoriesof travel.Indicationsof his viewsare, however,to be
foundin his writings,and the aim of the presentessay-after briefly
recordingthe extentof Bunin'smainjourneys-is to examinethese
indicationsand to suggestwhatsomeof the principalelementsin the
writer'sphilosophyof travelmighthave been.

D. J. Richards is Senior Lecturer in Russian at Exeter University.

1 I. A. Bunin, Sobraniyesochineniyv devyatitomakh,Moscow, I965-7, ix, p. 541. All
translations are by D. J. Richards.
2 A. Baboreko, I. A. Bunin-Materialy dlya biografli,Moscow, I967, p. 223.
3 Bunin, op. cit., ix, p. 541.
 BUNIN 'S PHILOSOPHY OF TRAVEL 5I5

II
As a child Bunin travelled very little, but from his earliest days-
if the words of the semi-autobiographicalAleksey Arsen'yev can be
taken to reflect Bunin's own thoughts4-he experienced that migra-
tory urge which was to influence so much of his later life. The child
Aleksey longed 'to mount a droshky, climb into a tarantass or a
closed sleigh and, bouncing up and down, travel somewhere far, far
away....',5 and the adult narrator of Zhizn' Arsen5yeva(The Life of
Arsen'yev) goes on to ask: 'Why, from childhood on, is a man drawn
by distant prospects, wide expanses, depths, heights, the unknown
and the dangerous.... ?'6
Opportunities for serious independent travel were, naturally
enough, very limited while Bunin was a schoolboy, but even after
finishing his formal education (he was expelled from the Elets
gimnaziyain March I886 for regular truancy) more than two years
elapsed before his nomadic existence began in earnest. A turning
point was the decision which he took early in I889 to leave his
parents' home and travel to Khar'kov to join there his elder brother
Yuly. At first Bunin's wanderings were limited largely to peregrina-
tions between Moscow, St Petersburg,Orel (where in the early I89os
he worked for the local newspaper, Orlovskiy vestnik),Poltava (where
Yuly Bunin was employed in the statistics office), Ognevka (his
brother Yevgeny's estate), Odessa and Yalta, but by the mid-I8gos
he had established the pattern of life which was to remain with him
for the next twenty-five years. 'I am now a thorough-going vagrant
[brodyaga]',Bunin wrote to Tolstoy in March I896,7 a judgment
which an outline of his movements during the following months
quickly confirms.8
Bunin's first journey outside Russia was made in I900, when in
October and November with his friend V. P. Kurovsky he visited
Berlin, Paris, Switzerland, Munich, Vienna and Dresden. In April
4 Bunin's Zhizn' Arsen'yevais undoubtedly based very closely on the first twenty years
of the author's life. How far any sentiment recorded in the book is 'true', however, can
hardly be established: in any autobiographical work the line between Dichtung and
Wahrheitmust frequently be blurred-even in the author's own mind.
5 Bunin, Op. Cit., Vi, p. 21.
6 Ibid.
7 Baboreko, Op.Cit.,p. 55.
8 Bunin travelled from Poltava to Ognevka at the end of March I896, but then spent
much of May and June wandering in the Crimea. Returning to Poltava for a few days
at the end of June, Bunin went again to Ognevka, where he remained (a surprisingly
long period) until mid-October. The end of October, however, saw Bunin first in Moscow
and then in St Petersburg. Early in January of the following year he travelled back to
Moscow and at the end of the month to Ognevka. March saw him in Poltava and, again,
in Ognevka. In April he travelled first to Shishaki and then to Mirgorod before returning
to Poltava. Two weeks later, towards the end of May, Bunin went to Kremenchug,
Nikolayev and Odessa. He returned to Ognevka via Poltava. Soon, however, he was
again in Moscow, then St Petersburg, then Moscow again, where he remained for a while
before travelling once more to St Petersburg.
5I6 D. J. RICHARDS
I903 he travelled to Turkey and made the first of his thirteen visits
to Constantinople. At the end of the same year he went abroad
again, spending over a month in France and Italy. Bunin's fourth
journey abroad (travelling with Vera Nikolayevna Muromtseva-
Bunina) was made in I907, this time to the Eastern Mediterranean
and the Middle East. During this first decade of the twentieth
century, Vera Nikolayevna subsequently recalled, Bunin 'used to
speak of his desire to leave Russia for a few years, make a journey
round the world, visit Africa, South America and the islands of
Tahiti... .'9 Two years later Bunin again toured Western Europe,
and in the following year, I9I0, made an even longer journey
embracing both Europe and North Africa.
Bunin embarked on his longest journey in late i910, when he
sailed from Odessa through the Suez Canal to Ceylon, spending
almost exactly four months en route.Although he apparently found
this journey exhausting, only a few months later he set off abroad
once more, spending most of the winter of 19II/12 in the Mediter-
ranean, principally on Capri. He had apparently intended to fulfil
his dream of travelling right round the world during the winter of
I912/13, but in the event did not feel well enough to undertakesuch
an arduous enterprise.10
Throughout these early years of the twentieth century, as his
travels abroad became more extensive in both time and space, Bunin
still pursued his unsettled existence at home. The outbreak of the
First World War, however, made travel abroad for Russian citizens
impossible and journeys within Russia itself for private purposes
much more difficult than they had been. Only after the Revolution
was Bunin able to undertake his last substantial journey. In May
19i8, having spent most of the winter of I9I 7/I8 in Moscow, Bunin
set off for Odessa, where, after a short sojourn in Kiev, he spent the
rest of that year and the whole of i9i9. On 26 January 1920 he
sailed with Vera Nikolayevna from Odessa, the port where so many
of his earlierjourneys had begun, never to return to his homeland.1'
During the last thirty years of his life Bunin travelled compara-
tively little. Occasionally he and his wife would spend the winter
in Paris but, as he explained in I933:
Becauseof my lack of rightsas an e'migreand becauseof the difficulties
we emigres encounterin trying to obtain visas I have not travelled
abroadfor thirteenyears,exceptfor one trip to England.12
9 V. N. Muromtseva-Bunina, 'Besedy s pamyat'yu' (Novyy zhurnal,New York, I960,
no. 62, P. 1,53).
10 Bunin, op cit., ix, p. 54I.
11 From Constantinople the Bunins travelled through Bulgaria and Serbia, arriving
in Paris at the end of March. They stayed in the French capital until the summer of
I923, when they moved to the South of France, settling in Grasse, near Cannes.
12 Bunin, Op.cit., ix, p. 325. This trip, a brief visit to London, was made in I926 at
 BUNIN S PHILOSOPHY OF TRAVEL 5I7
The ideal length of time which Bunin believed that travel should
occupy within the context of a man's entire life is perhaps indicated
in the opening section of the prose poem Ten'ptitsy (Shadow of the
Bird, I907). In this work Bunin includes several quotations from a
Persian source about Saadi, whose Gulistanthe Russian poet gener-
ally carried with him on his travels. Bunin, for whom the Persian
poet was not only a master craftsman ('the most delightful of
writers....')13 but also a model traveller, cites with approval: 'He
devoted thirty years of his life to the acquisition of knowledge, thirty
to wanderings, and thirty to reflection, contemplation and creative
work . . .'14 Born in I870, making his firstjourney abroad in igoo,
and after his emigration from Russia in I920 leading a much more
settled existence during his remaining 33 years, Bunin came close to
repeating this pattern in his own life.

III
Bunin's travels exercised a strong influence on his art. Numerous
works are inconceivable without the writer's first-hand experience
of foreign lands. Thus the cycle Ten'ptitsyreflects both the author's
journey to Turkey in 1903 and his tour of the EasternMediterranean
four yearslater, and Vodymnogiye(Many Waters, I925-6) is presented
as Bunin's diary for the period I2 February to i March I9II when
he was travelling to Ceylon. Many of Bunin's poems written between
1903 and I 91 7 are either meditations on alien traditions and legends
or, quite frequently, unambiguously entitled descriptions of places
visited by the poet.
Some of Bunin's most famous stories are set abroad: the action
of both Brat'ya(Brothers,1914) and Sootechestvennik (The Compatriot,
i9i6), for example, takes place in Ceylon, while the Mediterranean
is the setting for Gospodiniz San-Frantsisko (The Gentleman from
San Francisco, I9I5) and Syn(The Son, i9i6). Paris, understandably
enough, provides the backgroundto several of Bunin's storieswritten
after his emigration from Russia, while Geneva, Istanbul, Cairo,
Cannes, Judea and Spain may be numbered among many other
foreign places described.

the invitation of the P.E.N. Club, who obtained the necessary travel documents for him.
In December I933 he travelled to Stockholm to receive the Nobel Prize for literature
which had been awarded to him that year. Three years later, at the age of 66, he embarked
on a long journey which took him to Leipzig, Berlin, Prague, Munich and Geneva;
from there he had originally intended to go on to Rome, but, feeling unwell, he returned
directly to Paris. In 1938 Bunin spent a few weeks in Estonia and Latvia-the last time
he was to travel outside France. During the Second World War he rejected opportunities
to travel to the U.S.A. and after the war declined invitations to return to his motherland.
13 Bunin, Op. cit., iii, p. 314.
14 Ibid., iii, p. 315.
5I8 D. J. RICHARDS
The heroes of Bunin's stories (or their anonymous first-person
narrators)are frequentlytravellers,if only temporarily.In the stories
about or related by Russians abroad this is inevitable, but again
and again, even in stories set in Russia, the principal action occurs
during the course of a journey. The hero of one of Bunin's most
udar(Sunstroke, I925), meets his love
typical love stories, Solnechnyy
on a steamer on the Volga, and voyages or river-tripsform the back-
ground to (interalia) Lirnik Rodion (Rodion the Minstrel, 19I3),
V nochnom more(Night at Sea, 1923) and Vizitnyyekartochki(Visiting
Cards, 1940). More frequently still Bunin's heroes are to be found
travelling on trains or, as for instance in Malen'kiyroman(A Little
Romance,I909) and Ida (I925), enjoyingpoeticencounterson rail-
way stations. Even when the principal figure of a story is a dog,
in Sny Changa(The Dreams of Chang), the animal has an exotic
background and has travelled all over the world!
The narrator of Pereval(The Pass, I892-8), the short prose poem
with which Bunin chose to open the six-volume Polnoyesobraniye
of I9I5, is an anonymous traveller, and the chief figure
sochineniy
in Bunin's last prose work, Bernar(I952), is a seaman, the real-
life model for the hero of Maupassant's Surl'eau,Bernard, who 'for
many years shared the great poet's wandering maritime life.... '15

IV
The urge to travel seems to have been an almost instinctive response
to life on Bunin's part, something in which from his earliest youth
onwards he felt impelled to indulge and which, moreover, he
thoroughly enjoyed. Gor'ky, who knew Bunin well during the early
years of this century, referredto the latter's 'wandering pilgrim soul'
(strannicheskayadusha),16and Bunin himself in his interview with the
reportersfrom GolosMoskvyremarked, 'I know nothing better than
a journey.'17 During his early years as an emigrant Bunin was
apparently distressedby the impossibility of travelling as he used to.
Gorodtsaryatsarey(The City of the King of Kings, I 924), for instance,
opens with the words: 'Before me lies an old, old map of the world.
I gaze at it again-for the umpteenth time in my life, but still
avidly! -...'18 And in 1933 he referred to his inability to travel
outside France as 'one of the greatest deprivations'.'9
The exhilaration experienced by Bunin or his fictional heroes
while enrouteis naturally reflectedin story after story but, in addition
15 Ibid., viii, p. 346.
16 Baboreko, I. A. Bunin, p. I70.
17 Bunin, op. cit., ix, p. 541.
18 Ibid., v, p. 130.
19 Ibid., ix, p. 325.
 BUNIN 'S PHILOSOPHY OF TRAVEL 5I9
to this, from his earliest days Bunin appears to have been stirred
by the merest prospect of travel. In one of the opening chapters of
Zhizn' Arsen'yevathe narrator records the tense excitement he felt
before the first journey of his life, which he recalls incidentally as
one of the high points of his early childhood:
In first place among these events stands the firstjourney of my life,
the furthestand the most unusual of all my journeys. Father and
mother set off for the secret land known as 'the town' and took me
with them. For the firsttime in my life I experiencedthe sweetnessof
a dream being realisedand at the same time the fear that for some
reasonor other it might not be realised.To this day I rememberthe
agonyof waitingas I stoodin the middleof the yardin the full heat of
the sun, lookingat the tarantasswhich early that morninghad been
wheeledout of the coach-house....20
The sensations experienced by the child looking at the family
tarantassseem to have recurredwhenever the older Bunin sniffed the
atmosphere of travel. The boy Arsen'yev/Buninused to play truant
to observe the arrivals and departures at the local railway station,
where he particularly noticed 'those who, bustling and anxious,
arranged themselves and their many things in the long-distance
carriages';21 and on his first visit to St Petersburga year or two later
he hurries to the Finland Station 'to experience the atmosphere of
things foreign'.22
Ports apparently evoked similar responses. One of Bunin's early
prose-poems is Nadezhda(Hope, I902), which records the emotions
and reflectionsinspired by a sailing ship of that symbolic name, seen
first on the horizon, then in Odessa harbour and finally as it dis-
appears into the distance, making for an unknown destination. And
again in Ten'ptitsyBunin describes'the anxious andjoyful sensations'
he experienced before setting off on his journey to Turkey in I903
as he descended into Odessa harbour, 'into that mast-studdedworld
of agencies, offices,warehouses,railway tracks,coal and goods which
constantly stirs me'.23
The remark he made to his nephew, N. A. Pusheshnikov,'that he
never felt better than during the momentsjust before embarking on
a long journey',24suggests that the excitement of anticipation re-
mained for Bunin one of the high points of the whole process of
travelling.
But for Bunin and his fictional heroes travel was not simply an
instinctive urge and a transientself-indulgentpleasure.'Anyjourney',
20 Ibid., vi, p. i i.
21 Ibid., vi, p. 98.
22 Ibid., vi, p. 252.
23 Ibid., iii, pp. 3 13-4.
24 Baboreko, L A. Bunin, p. i65.
520 D. J. RICHARDS
the writer once remarked,'greatly changes a man.'25The experience
of travel can indeed, he believed, influence a man's whole life.
The mature Bunin viewed travel in the first place as a necessary
and inevitable part of a man's development. One grows and learns
by moving from the known to the unknown, from oneself to the
other. Not surprisingly, many of Bunin's fictional characters, like
the author himself, are fascinated precisely by the unknown,sharing
before their journeys the thrill experienced by the child Arsen'yev
as he used to listen to the conventional but enchanting words of the
fairy-tales:'In a certain kingdom, in an unknown state, at the other
end of the world [za tridevyat'zemel']. ... beyond the mountains,
beyond the valleys, beyond the blue seas ... Tsar-Devitsa, Vasilisa
the Wise . . .'26 Vera Nikolayevna Bunina, in her reminiscences of
her husband, recalls that Bunin himself would never send luggage
in advance, 'and I wouldn't know which countries we would visit'.27
In Zhizn'Arsen'yeva the hero's psychological development is traced
against a background of his carefully recorded physical journeys
from the known to the unknown. As he exploresthe world, gradually
moving further afield from his parents' home, so his awareness of
life, his poetic sensibilitiesand his capacity for reflection all increase.
The child, introduced at the beginning of the book as he lies in his
cot staring at a lone distant star, grows into the intelligent and
sensitive youth who at the end of the work has seen much of his
homeland, enjoyed his firstexperiencesof love and already embarked
on a career as a poet. The young Arsen'yev's emotional and intel-
lectual development cannot be traced in isolation from his explora-
tions and journeys. Travel and self-realisation,if not synonymous,
at least occur simultaneously.
Nor did Bunin view this process of expanding awareness and
growing self-realisationas something appropriate only to childhood
and youth. It was to be a life-long quest in pursuit of nothing less
than complete knowledge and total human experience. At first the
goal was simply 'a full life'. In Kazatskimkhodom(At Cossack Pace,
I898), for instance, which is based on the author's wanderings in
Southern Russia during the I89os, Bunin observes: 'I realised that in
orderto live a full life study, mere book knowledge and material well-
being were not enough....'28 But by i9o9 he could write much
more ambitiously:
51 eJIOBeK: Kay Bor, A o6peqeH
HI03HaTb TOCKY BCeX CTpaH H BCeX BpeMeH.29
25 Ibid., p. ixo.
26 Bunin, op. cit., vi, p. 2I.
27 Muromtseva-Bunina, op. cit., Novyy zhurnal,no. 63, I961, p. 203.
28 Bunin, Op. cit., ii, p. 434. (My itals.)
29 Ibid., i, p. 319. I am a man: like God, I am doomed/To experience the yearnings
of all lands and all ages.
 BUNIN S PHILOSOPHY OF TRAVEL 521
And laterstillin Vodymnogiye he characterised his life as a 'quivering
and joyful communionwith the eternal and the temporal,things
nearand far, all agesand all lands,with the life of everythingwhich
has been and everythingwhich now exists on this so beloved
Earth. .*.'30 The ultimate aim of the ideal travellerseeking to
expandhis awarenessof life is to enter into communionwith the
wholeof creation,to embrace,like God, the whole universe.
Any way of life which abandonsthis ambitiousgoal in favourof
or the pursuitof materialadvancement,
settledfamilyresponsibilities
or indeed almost any of the routinesfollowedby the more con-
ventionallyminded,evokedBunin'sundisguisedhorror:
Thus all my life I have neverunderstoodhow the meaningof life could
be foundin a career,in materialconcerns,in politics,in makingmoney
or in family life. I have always regardedwith genuine horror any
prosperitywhoseacquisitionand possessionengulfa man, and an excess
of such prosperity,with its normalbad taste, has alwaysprovokedmy
hatred. Even the average drawing-roomwith its obligatorystandard
lamp undera huge red silk shadewould drive me out of my mind.31
The red silklampshadeseemsto havesymbolisedforBuninspiritual
futlyarnost'-theloss of the vital migratoryinstincttowardsthe un-
known and the abandonmentof the life-givingquest for total
experience.

V
In his pursuitof total knowledgeand experiencethe ideal traveller
mustvisitnot only otherlands,but alsootherages;he mustconquer
time as well as space.'All my life',wroteBunin,'I strive,consciously
or unconsciously,to overcomeand to destroytime and space and
form.'32In journeyingabroadthe travelleralwaysovercomesspace
(and breaksout of the establishedformsof his own society), but
travel can also be a journeyinto the past. The young Arsen'yev/
Bunin travelsto the Crimeain searchof his father'syouth; one of
Bunin's earliest prose works, Svyatyye gory (1895), describesan
expeditionthe author made as a young man to the Svyatogorsk
monasteryon the Donets,hopingto returnat least in spiritto the
days of PrinceIgor; and on his later travels,much furtherafield,
Buninonce commented,'All my mostcherishedjourneystookplace
in thoselost kingdomsof the East and the South,in the dead and
forgottenlands,amongtheirruinsand cemeteries.'33
30Ibid.,v, pp. 3 14-5.
31 Ibid., ix, p- 352.
32 Ibid., v, p. 305.
33 Ibid., ix, p. 365.
522 D. J. RICHARDS
The traveller on such journeys to the past overcomes time either
through a leap of the creative imagination or through inherited
memory. A typical example of the former is recorded by Bunin in
Svetzodiaka(Zodiacal Light, 1907). The author stands at the entrance
to the Great Pyramid of Cheops and touches the stones which
he believes are among the oldest hewn by men:
From the time when they were laid on just such a sultrymorningas
today the face of the earthhas changedthousandsof times. Moseswas
not born until another twenty centurieslater. Forty centurieslater
Jesus arrivedon the shoreof the sea of Galilee.But the centuriesand
the milleniadisappearand my hand in brotherhood joins the blue-grey
hand of the Arabianslavewho laid thosestones.34
In a poem written at about the same time, Mogilav skale(The Grave
in the Rock, I909), the narrator experiences a similar sensation on
sighting a footprint made in an Egyptian tomb some five thousand
years previously:
BI,I HeKHH AeHb, 6b1.I HeKHIi KpaTKHH 'iac,
HpoIIaJIbHbIAIMHIr,KorAa B nocJIeAHH-Hpa3
B3xJoXHYJ132AeCbTOT, KTOY3K1O0 CTOInIO
B aTJIacHbIH ripax BgaBHJI CBOH y3KHH crex.
TOT MHIrBOCKpeC.14 Ha IIATb TbICAI IeT
YMHOKHJI KH3Hb,MHe qaHHY0 cyqj6oio.35

Bunin's concept of inherited memory was derived from his very

highly developed sense of the continuity of life and his conviction
that man is more than the ephemeral creature of his own space and
time:
My birth is by no means my beginning. My beginning lies also in that
completely impenetrable darkness in which I was conceived before
birth, and in my father and mother, grandparents and great-grand-
parents, for they are also me, albeit in a different form....36
Consequently, man can at times-admittedly only very rarely-
recall a past existence. When the young Arsen'yev/Bunin, on his
journey to the Crimea, approached Sebastopol (where he had never
been before) he 'with horror and joy suddenly recognised it. Pre-
cisely-recalled and recognised it!'37 And, looking at a picture-book
of countries of the world, the child Arsen'yev/Buninfelt he had lived
in some of them before:
34 Ibid., iii, p- 355.
35 Ibid., i, p. 320. There was a certain day, there was a certain short hour,/A moment
of parting, when for the last time/He breathed here, who with his narrow foot/Pressed
his narrow print into the satin dust.//That moment is resurrected. And by five thousand
years/It has increased the life-span given to me by fate.
36 Ibid., v, p. 300.
3 Ibid., Vi, p. 176.
 BUNIN S PHILOSOPHY OF TRAVEL 523
I recalledwith such extraordinaryforce everythingwhich I had seen
and experiencedin my earlier immemorialexistencesthat when I
subsequentlyvisited Egypt, Nubia or the tropicsI could only say to
myself,'Yes,everythingisjust as I first"recalled"it thirtyyearsago!'38
So too Zotov, the hero of Bunin's story Sootechestvennik, repeatedly
assures the narrator that he had long ago already seen the Indian
tropics, 'perhaps thousands of years ago, through the eyes and soul
of his infinitely remote ancestor'.39
The fascination which the past exercised on Bunin and the im-
portant role it played in his life and work is reflected too in his
constant preoccupation with the phenomenon of memory. Many
of his characterswho were unable to make their way to those ancient
lands which so attracted the writer himself make limited journeys
to the past through the workings of their own memories or listen
entranced to the reminiscencesof others.

VI
'It is certain', wrote Hugo von Hofmannsthal, in words with
which Bunin would surely have concurred, 'that acts of travelling
and seeking and meeting belong in some way among the mysteries
of Eros.... '40 Travel, Bunin and Hofmannsthalwould have agreed,
is motivated not merely by the desire to move from the known to
the unknown in order to observethe other, but more fundamentally
by a yearning to embraceand even lose oneselfin that unknown or
other. The traveller longs both to heighten his sense of individuality
and separateness by contrasting himself with another and also to
overcome it in a higher union with God, nature or a human being.
Of course journeys do not always end in lovers' meetings, but
the thought that they may is never far from the minds of Bunin's
heroes. The gentleman from San Francisco, for instance, who is
travelling 'solely for pleasure',4"looks forward to enjoying, among
other things, 'the love of young Neapolitan girls, even if not dis-
interestedly',42while his daughter muses on the possibilityof meeting
eligible young men during their long European tour. These two
insensitive and unattractive Americans are not the only Buninesque
38 Ibid., vi, p. 37.
39 Ibid., iv, p. 404.
40 H. von Hofmannsthal, 'Die Wege und die Begegnungen', GesammelteWerkein drei
Banden,Berlin, I 934, iii, Dritter Teil, p. 174. Another modern writer to stress the connec-
tion between travel and Eros was Ortega y Gasset. In his essay 'Para una psicologia del
hombre interesante' he argues that the petit bourgeois,for whom life consists in an insistence
on what is known and habitual, cannot fall in love in an authentic manner precisely
because he lacks the instinct for migration (ansia emigratoria)-which Ortega sees as
fundamentally a yearning to move from oneself to the other: Obrascompletas,Madrid,
1947, iv, pp. 477-8.
41 Bunin, op. cit., iv, p. 308.
42 Ibid., iv, p. 309.
524 D. J. RICHARDS
heroes whose thoughts run on these lines. Mitya, the Werther-like
hero of Mitina lyubov'(Mitya's Love, I924), travels to Moscow and
finds himself (for a while) 'in that legendary world of love which he
had been secretly awaiting since childhood, since boyhood'43; and
the admission of the hero of V Parizhe (In Paris, 1940) when he
meets the woman who is to become his mistress,would be inappro-
priate to few of Bunin's travellers: 'Yes, year in, year out, day in,
day out, you are secretly waiting for only one thing-a happy erotic
encounter, deep down you live only on the hope for such an en-
counter'.44And indeed, although they seldom achieve the ideal of
erotic fulfilment for which most of them more or less consciously
yearn, Bunin's travellers certainly experience sexual adventures. As
he moves further from home the young Arsen'yev encounters and
explores woman: Nalya while away at school, Annchen in his sister-
in-law's house, Liza Bibikova while visiting the near-by town, and
Lika, the love of his life, when he leaves home to work in Orel.45
The hero of Solnechnyy udarspends the most memorable night of his
life with a young married woman he meets on a steamer, while a
similar but coarserencounter on a steamshipis describedin Vizitnyye
kartochki.The narrator of Mest' (Revenge, 1944) meets his mistress-
to-be while on holiday in Cannes, while the narrator of the tale
Vesnoyv Iudeye(Spring in Judea, I946) relates how he became in-
volved with the niece of a sheikh while taking part in a scientific
expedition to the Dead Sea.
Travelling may resurrect memories of past loves, as happens for
instance to the protagonists of V nochnom more(1923) or to the nar-
rator of Rusya(1940); or, like Nikolay Alekseyevichin Tyomnyye
allei (Dark Avenues, 1938), the traveller may unexpectedly en-
counter again a mistresslong forgotten.
At times a Bunin story may be little more than the record of a
traveller'sdistant glimpse of a woman: thus in Sto rupii(A Hundred
Rupees, 1944) the hero is offered a Malayan girl whom he has briefly
admiredfrom the window of his Colombo hotel, and in Kamarg(The
Camargue, I 944) the narratorrecordshis impressionof a girl he saw
sitting in a large crowdedrailway carriagein the South of France. Yet
these moments can be of more than transitory significance: in
Nachalo (The Beginning, 1943) the twelve-year-old boy travelling
home from school for the Christmasholidays is aroused sexually for
the first time in his life by tantalising glimpses of the dozing young
woman stretched out on the opposite seat in his railway compart-
ment.
43 Ibid., v, p. 184.
44 Ibid., vii, p. I I3.
45 Their first sexual congress takes place, it may be noted, not in Orel, but on a train,
where they find themselves travelling through the night, unexpectedly alone.
 BUNIN S PHILOSOPHY OF TRAVEL 525
Just as the pure knight is vouchsafed never more than a fleeting
glimpse of the Holy Grail, so the Buninesque traveller's quest for
his ideal love is never fulfilled for more than a few brief moments.
Like Aleksey Arsen'yev in his relationship with Lika, all Bunin's
heroes are driven to recognise, sooner or later, 'that eternal dis-
cordance between dream and reality, the eternal unattainability of
the fulness and wholeness of love'.46 Inevitably the more intense
the hero's longing for erotic fulfilment, the more likely is it that his
quest will end in despair. Thus, Mitya shoots himself, Maria
Sosnovskaya, in Delo Kornetarelagina (The Cornet Yelagin Case,
1925), dies in a mismanaged suicide pact and Olya Meshcherskaya,
in Lyogkoyedykhaniye (Gentle Breathing, I9I6), is murdered; even
the gentleman from San Francisco, without enjoying any erotic en-
counters with Mediterranean beauties, dies of a heart attack on
Capri.
It would seem, however, that Bunin's lovers die not only from
their despair at failing to realise their erotic ideals. Death is associ-
ated with love at a deeper level in the sense that Bunin, like Freud
(by whom he may have been influenced), seems to posit the existence,
parallel with Eros, of an impulse towards death, so that the lover's
desireto mergewith another is ultimately a longing for self-extinction.
Like the moth, apparently seeking the light of the candle-flame,
Bunin's traveller, searching for love, is simultaneously on a quest
for death.

VII
At the same time the many journeys undertakenby Bunin and some
of his fictional heroes are not just expeditions in pursuit of infinite
experience. They are also quests for the truth about life, searches
for spiritual enlightenment. Almost as constantly as Tolstoy, Bunin
poses in his work the question of the meaning of life. 'What then
exactly is my life?' the young Arsen'yev/Bunin finds himself asking:
What then exactly is my life in the mysterious,huge, eternal world
aroundme, in the infinityof the pastand the futureand yet in a certain
Baturino,within the confinesof my own allottedspace and time?4
The boy's life appears to him at this time-he is about i6 or I7
years old-as a disorderedaccumulation of impressionsand a cease-
less flow of incoherent thoughts and feelings, but he looks forward
anxiously, though with some confidence, to enjoying significantex-
periences which will suddenly reveal to him the meaning of his
46 Bunin, op. cit., vi, p. 212.
47 Ibid., vi, pp. 152-3.
526 D. J. RICHARDS

existence. Already at this age the boy links the migratoryurge, which
he has felt but not yet acted upon, with this yearning for meaning:
'You,as the oraclesput it, arereachingout too farinto the distance. . .'
Yes, indeed. Secretlymy whole being was reachingout into it. Why?
Perhapspreciselyin searchof this meaning.48
Bunin's search for the meaning of life, like Tolstoy's, led quite
naturally to his taking a serious interest in the religious heritage of
mankind. He referred to some of his journeys to the Middle and
Far East as pilgrimages (palomnichestva), and before setting out he
would read the sacred texts and study the religions of any non-
Christian peoples whose lands he was to visit. Vera Nikolayevna
Bunina recallsfor example that before his firstvisit to Constantinople
in April I903, 'he for the first time read through the entire Koran,
which enchanted him. .. .' 49 Four years later in preparation for
his 'firstlong journey, the honeymoon voyage which was at the same
time a pilgrimage to the Holy Land of our Lord Jesus Christ'50
Bunin 'studied the Bible and the Koran and read books about the
Holy Land by Professor A. Olesnitsky and Tischendorf... .'51 The
range and depth of Bunin's studies at this time are clearly reflected
in Ten' ptitsy which contains, among other riches, a wealth of histori-
cal and religious information and a series of meditations inspired by
the author's reading of the sacred texts. He refers in some detail to
Greek legends, the beliefs of Ancient Egypt, the Jewish faith, the
religion of Baal and Christianity.For Bunin Christianityrepresented
the culmination of Mediterranean man's search for religious en-
lightenment, which had begun with primitive sun-worship.
A similar religious sensitivity is also reflected in Vodymnogiye,
Bunin's diary of his voyage to Ceylon in i9 ii. This journey to the
Far East, not surprisingly,also excited Bunin's interest in Buddhism,
whose doctrines are cited not only in the stories of the East (Bratya,
Sootechestvennik,etc.), but also in the writer's more philosophical
works which discuss the question of the meaning of life, Noch'
(Night, I925) and Osvobozhdeniye Tolstogo(The Liberationof Tolstoy,
I937)E
On his journeys abroad Bunin made a point of visiting a country's
sacred places. On a pilgrimage to the Holy Land it was only natural
that he should travel to those regions of Palestine which figure so
prominently in the Jewish and Christian religious tradition-Jeru-
48 Ibid.
49 V. N. Muromtseva-Bunina, Zhizn' Bunina, Paris, 1958, p. 143.
60 Bunin, op. cit., v, p. 8.
61 Baboreko, L.A. Bunin, p. Io8. Akim Olesnitsky (1842-?) was Professor of Biblical
Archeology in the Kiev Theological Academy; K. von Tischendorf (1815-74) was an
outstanding German biblical scholar, the discoverer of the CodexSinaiticus.
 BUNIN S PHILOSOPHY OF TRAVEL 527
salem, Jericho, Bethlehem, Nazareth, Capernaum, the River
Jordan, the Sea of Galilee, etc.,-but in Ten'ptitsy he also devotes
considerable attention to the Athenian Acropolis and Parthenon,
the Pyramids and Sphinx of Egypt, the Mosque of Omar in Jeru-
salem, and the Temple of the Sun in Baalbek (the ancient Helio-
polis). During his visit to Ceylon in I9II Bunin was particularly
impressed by the ancient capital of the island, Anuradhapura, 'the
greatest shrine of the Buddhist world',52his impressionsof which are
recorded in Gorodtsaryatsarey.
According to Vera Nikolayevna Bunina the reactions to the East
and to Buddhism expressedby the Englishman-heroof Bratjyawere
largely autobiographical.53If so, Bunin's journey to Ceylon must
have provided one of the supreme religious experiences of his life,
and the Buddhist doctrines he subsequently expounds may well
reflect some of his deepest mature convictions about the meaning
of life. Speaking ostensibly in the name of civilised European man-
but describing a quest for religious truth strikingly reminiscent of
Bunin's own travels-the Englishman (like so many of Bunin's
travellers he has no name) confesses to the captain of the Russian
ship on which he is sailing home:
For a long time there has been no God and no religionin Europe.
With all our efficiencyand acquisitivenesswe are as cold as ice to life
and death.... only here do we senseto somedegreelife and deathand
the divine. Here, indifferentto all the Osirises,Zeusesand Appollos,
to Christand to Mahomet,I sensedover and over again that I could
bow downonly to them,to theseterribleGodsof our ancienthomeland
-the hundred-armedBrahma,Shiva, the Devil and Buddha,whose
world echoed in truth like the voice of Methuselah,hammeringnails
into the coffin-lidof the world. .. .54
Bunin's views about the meaning of life, which he derived from
his acquaintance with Buddhism, are set out most clearly in the
philosophical meditation Noch' and in Osvobozhdeniye Tolstogo.In
both these works emphasis is laid on the doctrine that every man's
life is a spiritual journey (a familiar enough metaphor, but one
having special significancein Bunin's case): 'Ancient Indian wisdom
says that a man must follow two paths in life: the Path of Egression
and the Path of Return [Put' Vystupleniya i Put' Vozvrata].'55
On the
former a man, acting egocentrically,gathers worldly experience and
goods and strives to assert himself as an individual separate from

52 Bunin, op. cit., V, p. I30.

63 Baboreko, L.A. Bunin, p. 158. Baboreko quotes from a private letter to him from
Vera Nikolayevna Bunina.
54 Bunin, op.Cit., iv, pp. 276-7.
55 Ibid., ix, p. I8.
528 D. J. RICHARDS
the life of the universe; on the latter, however, acting more altru-
istically, a man feels impelled to give back what he has amassed and
to lose his individuality by merging his personality into the life of
all. Depending on the stage he has reached in his spiritual develop-
ment, the traveller on his earthly journeys will be following one or
other of these two paths, trying either to acquire total human experi-
ence, or, like the whirling dervishes Bunin observed in their Con-
stantinople monastery, to experience 'the dread but most sweet
"disappearancein God and eternity". . .'.56
Further, however, Bunin suggests that in some individuals these
two conflicting impulses-self-assertion and self-abandonment-are
felt simultaneously and with equal force. A heightened awareness
of the divine life of all and a desire to lose his separate identity can
exist in a man alongside a passionate love of earthly goods and a
highly developed sense of individuality. Bunin indicates as well-
known illustrations of this phenomenon Solomon/Ecclesiastes,
Buddha and Tolstoy: all began life as sinnersdevoted to the accumu-
lation of material wealth and the pursuit of worldly pleasures and
they became able to follow consistentlythe superiorlife of self-denial
only after many years of intense inner struggle. A man can renounce
life only if he has experienced it. He can die only if he has lived.
Bunin doubtless also numbers himself among those men of split
personality who, aware of the ultimate vanity of earthly life, are
yet in thrall to its charms. If the spiritual goal of such men is am-
biguous, so too is presumably the psychological motivation of their
physical journeys: the split Buninesque traveller will be seeking
simultaneouslyboth a heightening of consciousnessand the oblitera-
tion of consciousness.In searching for meaning, as in searching for
love, he is on a quest for both life and for death.

VIII
Travel, as a means of expanding his awarenessof life and discovering
meaning, is important for every sentient being, but it is indispensable
for a poet of Bunin's stamp, much of whose art springs directly from
a constantly refreshed empathetic awareness of the glories of the
created universe and the living joyful and mysterious experience
of mankind. Travel excites the senses and evokes a joyous mood;
travel keeps alive one's capacity to wonder and to see visions; or,
66 Ibid., iii, p. 332. It is worth recalling that one of the very earliest memories of
Aleksey Arsen'yev, recorded in the second chapter of Book I of Zhizn' Arsen'yeva,is the
child's experience of a similar desire to lose himself: 'If only I could sit on that cloud and
float away on it in the mysterious heights of the celestial expanses, close to God and
the white-winged angels who dwell somewhere in that supernal world....': ibid., vi,
p. IO.
 BUNIN S PHILOSOPHY OF TRAVEL 529
as the young Arsen'yev/Bunin expresses it: '. . . the newness, which
is always festive, heightens one's sense of life .. .'57; and this in turn
(since Bunin concurswith Goethe'sjudgment that all art is sensual)58
stimulates the poet to creative activity. An experience of this mode
of inspiration-which presumably led to the creation of the sketch
where it is itself recorded-is described in Tishina (Stillness, 1901),
an account of Bunin'sjourney to Switzerland the previous year:
The beauty of the landscapewhich was new to us, and the beauty of
art and religion everywhere,inspiredus with the youthful desire to
elevateour lives to the level of that beauty, to fill them with truejoys
and to sharethesejoys with otherpeople.59
For the mature artist travel inevitably becomes at least partly a
search for fresh material, a conscious quest for those 'joys of earthly
existence' (radostizemnogobytiya) which began to be revealed to
Arsen'yev/Buninas a small boy on the very firstjourney of his life.60
Although such an approach to travel necessarilyinhibits spontaneous
enjoyment, as Bunin knew only too well, nevertheless the way of
life dedicated to this twofold process of sensual experience followed
by artistic creation met his full approval. More than once in his
writings Bunin cites the saying of Saadi's, 'How excellent is the life
spent in contemplating the Beauty of the World and in leaving after
one the impress of one's soul.'61

Ix
Bunin's response to the Beauty of the World is reflected most obvi-
ously in the magnificent portraits of nature which abound in his
work, both verse and prose, from the beginning to the end of his
artistic career. His descriptions of the Russian countryside won the
admiration of both critics and fellow poets throughout his long
literary life, and the wonderful blend of almost scientific precision
and poetic rapture which characterisesBunin's portraitsof his native
land appears again in his depictions of foreign scenes-the land-
scapes he visited abroad, the seas on which he sailed and, over both,
the canopy of the heavens, so different in the Southern from the
Northern hemisphere. The painter, A. P. Nilus, one of the writer's
close friends during the early years of the century, wrote that Bunin
described his travels 'with an incredible luxuriance of picturesque
57 Ibid., vi, p. 260.
68 Ibid., vi, p. 275-
59 Ibid.,ii, p. 240. (My italics.)
60 Ibid., vi, p. I 2.
61 Ibid.,iii, p. 3I5
(intr alia).
530 D. J. RICHARDS

details. His pictures of Palestine unroll like magnificent Eastern

carpets.'62
The beauty of nature in itself was, however, ultimately less signifi-
cant for Bunin than that which it symbolised:
HeT,He fel 3aXKBJIe1ieT MeHS5,
He cpaCKH)KaAHMIH B30p ioAMeTHT,
A TO, xITO B 3THX KpacKax CBeTHT:
Jhlo6oBbI4pagOCTb 6bITHI.
he wrote in a poem of I907.63 In the last analysis nature is a theo-
phany, revealing and confirming the existence of a beneficent
creator. The hymn of grateful worship raised in Vodymnogiye-'And
God has given me the immense happiness of seeing all this . . .';
'How can I thank Thee?'64 etc.,-is clearly audible in every one of
Bunin's mature descriptionsof nature.
But the Beauty of the World means much more even than the
magnificent landscapes of the earth or the vibrant life of the natural
kingdoms: for Bunin (as for Saadi) the Beauty of the World embraced
everything which Aleksey Arsen'yev's father called 'the poetry of
life and the soul' (poeziyadushii zhizni)65-all those individual
experiences of love, or art, or religion, of death, or memory, as well
as of natural beauty, which stir a man to the depths of his emotional
being and leave their indelible mark on his spiritual consciousness.
All experiences of 'the poetry of life and the soul', which are the
focal point of Bunin's mature art, have more than aesthetic signifi-
cance: they all inspire a sense of the joy of existence and moreover
aid self-definition. Whatever may be the meaning or the truth of
life in the widest sense of patterns prescribedfor mankind by higher
powers, and even if the ultimate goal of every earthly traveller can
be none other than death, nevertheless in his enjoyment of 'the
poetry of life', a man finds meaning, if only temporarily, in the
narrower sense of a feeling of spiritual harmony and personal fulfil-
ment. Every man's poetic experiences help him to discover what in
life is valuable for him.
Bunin believed that the meaning of life is not to be found in the
attainment of worldly benefits, not even in self-sacrificialdedication
to the service of one's fellow men, but in each individual's emotional
experiences. Similarly, the role of art, which Bunin once defined as
'the prayer, the music and the song of the human soul',66is to record
62 Quoted in Baboreko, L.A. Bunin, p. 159.
63 Bunin, op. cit., i, p. 142. No, it is not the landscape which attracts me,/It is not the
colours which my eager gaze observes,/But that which radiates through those colours:/
Love and the joy of existence.
64 Ibid., v, pp. 330 and 337.
65 Ibid., vi, p. 94-
66 Bunin, Op.cit., ix, p. 451.
 BUNIN' S PHILOSOPHY OF TRAVEL 531
these emotions, to convey the artist's experiences of radost'bytiya,to
portray his glimpses of the Beauty of the World.
Inevitably, Bunin and his heroes are vouchsafed no more than
glimpses: no man, however deep his insights, however refined his
sensitivity, and however extensively he may travel, can grasp the
Beauty of the World in its totality. Consequently Bunin's work may
at first sight appear disturbinglyfragmentaryand episodic. (In spite
of his deep roots in the igth-century Russian realist tradition and
his profoundveneration of Leo Tolstoy Bunin's characteristicliterary
forms were the lyric and the short story.) At a deeper level, however,
his art manifests a satisfying unity and integrity deriving from his
faith that, beyond man's limited powers of comprehension, exists a
total, all-embracing, divine beauty and harmony of which he
becomes poignantly aware during his brief experiences of the poetry
of life and the soul:
Bce MrHOBeHHO, BCeHCKpMi,HOi1CKpI EJHHOrO,Be'Horo,
14BOBCeM- KpaCOTa,KpacOTa!67
In the last analysis it is this faith in divine harmony-a faith in
the Russian Igth-century rather than 2oth-century tradition-
which makes Bunin's travellersmore than mere homeless wanderers
or hedonistic pursuers of personal fulfilment. Their journeys are
informed by a characteristicallyRussian yearning for paradise and
transfiguredby a sense of thatjoy in the divine beauty of life, 'without
which', in the words of Dmitry Karamazov, 'the world cannot stand
or be'.68

x
Bunin was not the only Russian man of letters to record in literary
form the vivid impressionsmade on him by journeys to other lands.
Karamzin's Pis'ma russkogoputeshestvennika, Pushkin's Puteshestviye
v
Arzrum,Goncharov'sFregat'Pallada'and Chekhov's OstrovSakhalin
are all notable examples of the genre. None of these writers,however,
appears to have regarded travel in the same light as did Bunin. For
them the journeys they recorded were limited experiences from
which they were happy to return home, whereas Bunin, who for
many years had no permanent residence, was at his happiest and
most himself-one is tempted to say most at home-precisely while
travelling. For it was in travelling that Bunin seems to have come
closest to reconciling the contradictory impulses of his complex
67 Quoted in Serge Kryzytski, The Works
of Ivan Bunin, The Hague, Paris, 1971, p. 241.
Everything is but momentary, everything is but flashes, but flashes of the Whole, of the
Eternal//And in everything is Beauty, Beauty!
68 F. M. Dostoyevsky, Sobraniye
sochineniyv desyatitomakh,Moscow, 1956-8, ix, p. 137.
532 D. J. RICHARDS
nature: his encounters with the Beauty of the World united the
sensual hedonist with the ascetic contemplative, the voracious
collector of experience with the sceptical querist, and the arrogant
man of the world with the reverent worshipper of creation in all
its forms. Travel seems to have produced in Bunin himself a precious
though precariousinner balance which he could never have achieved
through a more settled existence.
In Bunin's view, however, travel does more than heal the divided
mind: it also helps man overcome his alienation from God. For the
Beauty of the World-which stands as a reproach to man's fallen
state and evokesin him a yearning for the lost paradise-in suggesting
the existence of a total divine harmony, inspires the hope that that
paradise may be regained. In comprehending the Beauty of the
World, Bunin believed as firmly as Prince Myshkin, lies man's best
hope of achieving salvation.