The Life of Arseniev
Youth

Ivan Alekseevich Bunin (Author), Gleb Struve (Author), Andrew Wachtel (Author)

9780810111721

Paperback / softback, published 26 October 1994

254 pages
23.4 x 15.6 x 1.5 cm, 0.377 kg

Bunin's late novel does indeed possess all the best characteristics of his earlier style and approach, developing a richness that is full and autumnal without being in the least decadent. Bunin's descriptive prose is alive in the same absolute sense as that of D. H. Lawrence." —New York Review of Books

Ivan Bunin was the first Russian writer of the twentieth century to be award the Nobel Prize in literature. Like many other Russian writers, he emigrated after the Revolution and never returned to his homeland; The Life of Arseniev is the major work of his émigré period.

In ways similar to Nabokov's Speak, Memory, Bunin's novel powerfully evokes the atmosphere of Russia in the decades before the Revolution and illuminates those Russian literary and cultural traditions eradicated in the Soviet era. This first full English-language edition updates earlier translations, taking as its source the version Bunin revised in 1952, and including an introduction and annotations by Andrew Baruch Wachtel.