Born in Russia in 1870, Bunin’s life was one that took him from being a student of Tolstoy and friend of Chekhov to winning the Nobel, being repudiated by the new Soviet state, and dying in penury of pneumonia in Paris in 1953. He specialised in short stories, bringing the style of the great Nineteenth-Century Russians to the concerns of the Twentieth Century, including the series of dense, dark and sex-charged fictions he wrote while living in Nazi-occupied France, collected as Dark Avenues. ‘Calling Cards’ is one of the shortest and best from this book, a brief story about a brief liaison on a pre-revolution Volga steamboat. The description of a woman undressing, told with both admiration and pity, has stayed with me for more than 20 years while the rest of my memory has fallen away like wet cake:
“Thin collarbones and ribs stood out in conformity with the thin face and slender shins. But the hips were even large. The belly, with a small, deep navel, was sunken, the prominent triangle of dark, beautiful hair beneath it corresponded with the abundance of dark hair on her head. She took the pins out, and the hair fell down thickly onto her thin back with its protruding vertebrae. She bent to pull up the slipping stockings – the small breasts with frozen, wrinkled brown nipples hung down like skinny little pears, delightful in their meagreness.”
I’m not sure exactly what this says about me, so let’s just move along, shall we?
First English publication, translated by Sophie Lund, in The Gentleman from San Francisco and Other Stories, Angel Books, 1984. First full English publication of Dark Avenues, translated by Hugh Aplin, by Oneworld, 2008
A Personal Anthology 