Going short: a dozen lines. “And all day a bootmaker sitting barefoot on a rotting bench near a tumbledown shack, his belt unbuckled and his long shirt hanging loose, the sun beating down on his shaggy head. He sits there killing time with a red dog.” “Shake!” But the dog doesn’t know that command. Eventually the dog “lifts one paw uncertainly, drops it back to the ground”, and gets hit in the face for its pains.
Published in Sunstroke: Selected Stories of Ivan Bunin, Ivan R. Dee Inc., 2002
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
Now I suppose, approaching the halfway point of this highly personal anthology, it is a not unreasonable time to confess that I am myself, oh yes, a dabbler in the fine art of fiction. Oh yes! I have myself written more than one short story. Although I should always be getting on with something else (commissioning a review, reading some long-deferred classic etc), and therefore seldom begin, let alone threaten to complete, something on a grander scale than a short story. I love a short story. My boss expressed not so long ago, in podcast form, his mystification at the idea of short fiction being fulfilling but, alas, we feel differently on this point. Long books daunt me but also, obscurely, move me to annoyance. What is the point of them? Why use many words when few will do? Alas – here we are. And, sure enough, here is Ivan Bunin. A master of the form. This particular instance, about a dialogue between two men meeting on the deck of ship ‘on its way from Odessa to the Crimea’, is economic yet quite open to vistas of . . . life. They are a ‘pair of celebrities’; yet here they are alone, struggling to come to terms with one another. Personally, I find it quietly, desperately riveting.
First published 1923. Collected in The Gentleman from San Francisco and Other Stories, Penguin, 1992
A Personal Anthology 