Dark Avenues (or Dark Alleys, Russian: Тёмные аллеи, romanized: Tyomnyie alleyi) is a collection of short stories by Nobel Prize-winning Russian author Ivan Bunin. Written in 1937–1944, mostly in Grasse, France, the first eleven stories were published in New York City, United States, in 1943. The book's full version (27 stories added to the first 11) came out in 1946 in Paris. Dark Alleys, "the only book in the history of Russian literature devoted entirely to the concept of love," is regarded in Russia as Bunin's masterpiece. These stories are characterised by dark, erotic liaisons and love affairs that are, according to James B. Woodward, marked by a contradiction that emerges from the interaction of a love that is enamoured in sensory experiences and physicality, with a love that is a supreme, if ephemeral, "dissolution of the self."
Dark Avenues in the context of Ivan Bunin
Ivan Alekseyevich Bunin (/ˈbuːniːn/ BOO-neen or /ˈbuːnɪn/ BOO-nin; Russian: Ива́н Алексе́евич Бу́нин, IPA: [ɪˈvan ɐlʲɪkˈsʲejɪvʲɪdʑ ˈbunʲɪn] ; 22 October [O.S. 10 October] 1870 – 8 November 1953) was the first Russian writer awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1933. He was noted for the strict artistry with which he carried on the classical Russian traditions in the writing of prose and poetry. The texture of his poems and stories, sometimes referred to as "Bunin brocade", is considered to be one of the richest in the language.
Best known for his short novels The Village (1910) and Dry Valley (1912), his autobiographical novel The Life of Arseniev (1933, 1939), the book of short stories Dark Avenues (1946) and his 1917–1918 diary (Cursed Days, 1926), Bunin was a revered figure among white emigres, European critics, and many of his fellow writers, who viewed him as a true heir to the tradition of realism in Russian literature established by Tolstoy and Chekhov.
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