The Village
By (Author) Ivan Bunin
Translated by Hugh Aplin
Translated by Gayla Aplin
Alma Books Ltd
Alma Classics
1st January 2013
22nd November 2012
United Kingdom
General
Fiction
Fiction in translation
891.733
Paperback
176
Width 128mm, Height 198mm, Spine 16mm
200g
The Village, Ivan Bunins first full-length novel, is a bleak and uncompromising portrayal of rural life in south-west Russia. Set at the time of the 1905 Revolution and centring on episodes in the lives of a landowner and his self-educated peasant brother, the book follows characters sunk so far below the average of intelligence as to be scarcely human. A triumph of bitter realism, Bunins cruel, lyrical prose reveals the pettiness, violence and ignorance of life on the land, foreshadowing the turbulences of Russia in the twentieth century.
I do not know any other writer whose external world is so closely tied to another, whose sensations are more exact and indispensable, and whose world is more genuine and also more unexpected. -- Andr Gide
Ivan Alekseyevich Bunin (1870-1953) was the first Russian writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. His last book of fiction, Dark Avenues, is arguably the most widely read 20th-century collection of short stories in Russia.