Cursed Days: Diary of a Revolution

Here is Ivan Bunin’s great anti-Bolshevik diary of the Russian Revolution, translated into English for the first time. Set against the backdrop of Moscow and Odessa in 1918 and 1919, Cursed Days is a chilling account of the last days of the Russian master in his homeland—a work banned during the years of Soviet power. Bunin recreates the time of revolution and civil war with graphic and gripping immediacy. Unlike the works of early Soviets and emigrés, with their self-censoring backdrop of memory, myth, and political expediency, Bunin’s uncompromising truths are jolting. His pain and suffering in witnessing the takeover of his country by “thugs” and the chaos of civil war, and his fears for the devastation of “patriarchal” Russian culture, were with him daily and received vivid expression in his diary. Cursed Days foreshadows the later anti-Soviet memoirs of Nadezhda Mandelstam, Evgenia Ginsberg, and others, and the rebellions of Bulgakov and Paternak. Thomas Marullo’s superb translation and annotations reveal Bunin not only as a master of prose (he was the first Russian to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature) but as a perceptive social critic engaged in a wrenching struggle to make sense of his shattered world.