Like many earlier Russian classic authors, Nobel Prize-winner Ivan Bunin was interested in the depths of human experience: the relation between death and sexual drives was the main theme of his fiction and essays. But his talent was distinguished by the combination of sincerity in his description of human experience and the refinement of sensation. Unlike Gogol and Dostoevsky, Bunin was a researcher of sensibility rather than an ethical thinker, but he retained their focus on the tragedy of human desire that constitutes the encounter between social law and the passions of the soul. An aristocrat in literature, Bunin was a deep connoisseur of the discourse of love and, at the same time, an original investigator of death – a writer who can

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First published 14 February 2008

Citation: Olshansky, Dmitry. "Ivan Bunin". The Literary Encyclopedia. 14 February 2008.
[http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=12012, accessed 9 February 2010.]