Quotes from Bunin's works (100 quotes)

Ivan Alekseevich Bunin can be considered a “star” of Russian literature. Ivan was born into an impoverished family of nobles, and began his adult life quite early, he worked in newspaper production, the office and loved to travel. But the main thing is that this is one of the first Russian writers nominated for the Nobel Prize. To appreciate the depth of Bunin’s thoughts and the beauty of his style, we suggest taking a look at a selection of quotes. Quotes from Bunin's works are collected in this section.

Everything passes, but not everything is forgotten.

In essence, it’s high time for all of us to hang ourselves, we are so downtrodden, muzzled, deprived of all rights and laws, we live in such vile slavery, amidst constant beatings and mockery.

Human wit is not rich.

A beautiful woman should occupy the second stage; The first one belongs to a nice woman. This becomes the mistress of our heart: before we give ourselves an account of her, our heart becomes a slave of love forever.

A beautiful woman should occupy the second stage; The first one belongs to a nice woman.

Human happiness lies in not wanting anything for yourself. The soul calms down and begins to find good things where it was not expected at all.

There was Russia, there was a great house, bursting with all sorts of belongings, inhabited by a powerful family, created by the blessed labors of many, many generations, consecrated by God, the memory of the past and everything that is called cult and culture. What did they do to him? They paid for the overthrow of the housekeeper with the complete destruction of literally the entire house and unheard of fratricide, all that nightmarishly bloody farce, the monstrous consequences of which are incalculable... The planetary villain, overshadowed by a banner with a mocking call for freedom, brotherhood, equality, sat high on the neck of the Russian “savage” and called for trampling conscience, shame, love, mercy into the dirt... A degenerate, a moral idiot from birth, Lenin revealed to the world just at the height of his activity something monstrous, amazing, he ruined the greatest country in the world and killed millions of people, and in broad daylight they argue: Is he a benefactor of humanity or not?

There are female souls who are always languishing with some kind of sad thirst for love and who, because of this, never love anyone.

Vanity chooses, true love does not choose.

He danced only with her, and everything turned out so subtly and charmingly that only one commander knew that this couple was hired by Lloyd to play at love for good money...

I'm not a piece of gold to please everyone.

We adore a woman because she rules over our ideal dream.

Love brings an ideal attitude and light into the everyday prose of life, stirs up the noble instincts of the soul and prevents it from becoming coarse in narrow materialism and crude animal egoism.

I see, I hear, I am happy. Everything is in me.

When you love someone, no one can force you to believe that the one you love may not love you.

Women are never as strong as when they arm themselves with weakness.

I don't owe anyone anything, I didn't borrow anything.

Everything passes, but not everything is forgotten.

We always only remember about happiness. And happiness is everywhere. Maybe it’s this autumn garden behind the barn and the clean air flowing through the window.

Those who never take risks take the most risks.

What a joy it is to exist! Just to see, at least to see only this smoke and this light. If I had no arms and legs and I could only sit on a bench and look at the setting sun, then I would be happy with it. All you need is to see and breathe. Nothing gives such pleasure as paints...

Love brings an ideal attitude and light into the everyday prose of life, stirs up the noble instincts of the soul and prevents it from becoming coarse in narrow materialism and crude animal egoism.

You know, there are so few happy meetings in the world...

The crown of every human life is the memory of it - the highest thing that is promised to a person over his grave is eternal memory. And there is no soul that does not languish in secret with the dream of this crown.

Everyone's youth passes, but love is another matter.

Revolutions are not made with white gloves...” Why be indignant that counter-revolutions are made with iron fists?

All my life I have suffered from the fact that I cannot express what I want.

If a person has not lost the ability to expect happiness, he is happy. This is happiness.

The holiest of titles,” the title of “man,” is disgraced as never before. The Russian people are also disgraced - and what would it be, where would we turn our eyes, if there were no “ice campaigns”!

Be generous like a palm tree. And if you can’t, then be a cypress trunk, straight and simple - noble.

Those who never take risks take the most risks.

I am exhausted by the fact that I look at the world only with my own eyes and cannot look at it any other way.

Probably, each of us has some especially dear love memory or some especially serious love sin.

When you love someone, no one can force you to believe that the one you love may not love you.

A beautiful woman should occupy the second stage; The first one belongs to a nice woman.

Love brings an ideal attitude and light into the everyday prose of life, stirs up the noble instincts of the soul and prevents it from becoming coarse in narrow materialism and crude animal egoism.

Life, like a steppe, is empty and great...

When you love someone, no one can force you to believe that the one you love may not love you.

From us, like from wood, there is both a club and an icon, depending on the circumstances, on who processes this wood: Sergius of Radonezh or Emelka Pugachev. If I hadn’t loved this “icon”, this Rus', hadn’t seen it, why would I have gone so crazy all these years, why have I suffered so continuously, so fiercely?

It is not words that need to be translated, but strength and spirit.

What an old Russian disease this is, this languor, this boredom, this spoiledness - the eternal hope that some frog will come with a magic ring and do everything for you: you just have to go out onto the porch and throw the ring from hand to hand!

The most intelligent and cunning leaders quite deliberately prepared a mocking sign: “Freedom, brotherhood, equality, socialism, communism!” And this sign will hang for a long time - until they sit very firmly on the necks of the people.

Only a person marvels at his own existence, thinks about it. This is his main difference from other creatures who are still in paradise, in not thinking about themselves. But people also differ from each other in the degree and measure of this surprise.

Our reason contradicts our heart and does not convince it.

But I always share my thoughts with you: I am a man: like God, I am doomed To know the melancholy of all countries and all times.

There are female souls who are always languishing with some kind of sad thirst for love and who, because of this, never love anyone.

If a person has not lost the ability to expect happiness, he is happy. This is happiness.

The day is already close, a short dream has passed - And, without disturbing the silence in the house, I silently go out the door onto the balcony And quietly wait for the bright sunrise...

A.K. Tolstoy once wrote: “When I remember the beauty of our history before the damned Mongols, I want to throw myself on the ground and roll in despair.” In Russian literature only yesterday there were Pushkins, Tolstoys, and now there are almost only “damned Mongols”.

I don’t understand who I love with longing, Who is dear to me... And does it really matter? I'm waiting for happiness, suffering and yearning, But I don't believe in happiness for a long time!

Love brings an ideal attitude and light into the everyday prose of life, stirs up the noble instincts of the soul and prevents it from becoming coarse in narrow materialism and crude animal egoism.

Don’t you already know that seventeen and seventy years old love the same? Haven't you realized yet that love and death are inextricably linked?

And the wind, and the rain, and the darkness Above the cold desert of water. Here life died until spring, Gardens were empty until spring. I'm alone at the dacha. It’s dark for me behind the easel, and it’s blowing through the window.

Women are never as strong as when they arm themselves with weakness.

The forms of the female body are painful with their incomprehensible charm.

The blissful hours pass, and it is necessary to somehow preserve at least something, that is, to oppose death, the fading of the rosehip.

“Vigorous Antonovka - for a fun year.” Village affairs are good if Antonovka is bad: that means the bread is bad too...

Birch trees with yellow carvings sparkle in the blue azure.

In recent years, one thing has supported the fading spirit of the landowners - hunting.

The smell of Antonov apples disappears from the landowners' estates. These days were so recent, and yet it seems to me that almost a whole century has passed since then.

The tombs, mummies and bones are silent, Only the word is given life: From the ancient darkness, in the world graveyard, Only Writings sound.

“Revolutions are not made with white gloves...” Why be indignant that counter-revolutions are made with iron fists?

The kingdom of small estates, impoverished to the point of beggary, is coming!..

In joy we are trusting, like children. The myrtle comforts us, the victorious laurel intoxicates us...

“The holiest of titles,” the title of “man,” is disgraced as never before. The Russian people are also disgraced - and what would it be, where would we turn our eyes, if there were no “ice campaigns”!

In general, I’ve been wondering for a long time: where does such interest in Pushkin come from in recent decades?

Those who never take risks take the most risks.

When you love someone, no one can force you to believe that the one you love may not love you.

Everyone's youth passes, but love is another matter.

Does it matter who you talk about? Every person who lived on earth deserves it.

True love never ends in marriage.

In this world there should be only one truth - the third - and what it is - the last Master, to whom Chang should soon return, knows about it.

In the quiet garden the nightingale fell silent; Drops fall from the branches in the darkness; It smells like bird cherry...

Every time I experienced a love catastrophe - and there were many of these love catastrophes in my life, or rather, almost every love of mine was a catastrophe - I was close to suicide.

Goethe said that he was happy for only seven minutes in his entire life. Still, I’ll probably dial it in, I’ll dial up happy minutes for half an hour - if you count from childhood.

And what about Savoy? the homeland of those same Savoyard boys with monkeys about whom I read such touching stories as a child!

In recent years, one thing has supported the fading spirit of the landowners - hunting.

The smell of Antonov apples disappears from the landowners' estates. These days were so recent, and yet it seems to me that almost a whole century has passed since then.

The kingdom of small estates, impoverished to the point of beggary, is coming!..

There is something unshakable that unites us all: this is freedom of thought and conscience, something to which we owe civilization. For a writer this freedom is especially necessary; for him it is a dogma, an axiom.

Until that time, he had not lived, but only existed, although very well, but still pinning all his hopes on the future.

In the empty, see-through hall of the garden I walk, rustling with dry leaves: What a strange joy to trample on the past!

The kingdom of God, joy is within ourselves. Sometimes you need surprisingly little to be happy. Sometimes, in the gymnasium, the teacher’s trousers would get caught in the back ear of his bootie—what a laugh!

About literary fashion

“<…> Damn this fashion! I am not a tailor to adapt to the seasons, but neither will you. Although, of course, it’s hard when you’re into, say, Shakespeare’s elegant costumes, and everyone walks around in the widest and most vulgar trousers and mocks you.”
From a letter to Nikolai Teleshov. July 16, 1900

Meeting of the literary circle "Wednesday". 1902 Standing (from left to right): The Wanderer and Maxim Gorky.
Seated: Leonid Andreev, Fyodor Chaliapin, Ivan Bunin, Nikolai Teleshov and Evgeny Chirikov. Library named after N. A. Nekrasova Nikolai Dmitrievich Teleshov is one of Bunin’s first and closest friends from the Moscow literary circle, the organizer of the famous literary circle “Sreda”. One of the most sensitive writers to the mood of his time, Bunin was considered throughout his life the “singer of the past” and the successor of the classical tradition. It is no wonder that the inevitable comparison with the modernists, whom he could not stand and who determined the development of art at the turn of the century, irritated him. A quarter of a century later, in a review of the collection “Rose of Jericho,” Sasha Cherny will say about Bunin in similar terms: “...The restrained power of clear simplicity and clarity is unattractive to the fashionistas and fashionistas crowding around Parnassus.” S. Cherny. Rose of Jericho. // Russian newspaper. 29th of November. No. 186. Paris, 1924.. And a few years later, Vladimir Nabokov repeated the same idea: “Bunin’s poems are the best that was created by the Russian muse over several decades. Once upon a time, in the loud years of St. Petersburg, they were drowned out by the brilliant clanging of fashionable lyres; but this poetic hype passed without a trace - the “creators of blasphemous words” were debunked or forgotten... and only the trembling of one lyre, the special trembling inherent in immortal poetry, excites, as before, excites more than before, and it seems strange that in those St. Petersburg Over the years, not everyone was intelligible, not every soul was amazed by the voice of the poet, the like of which has not been seen since the time of Tyutchev.” V. Sirin (V.V. Nabokov). Review of the book: Bunin I. A. Selected poems, 1900–1925. // Steering wheel. 22nd of May. No. 2577. Berlin, 1929..

About the birthday

“It's my birthday. 52. And I no longer feel the horror of this particularly strongly. I started to get used to it and became dull. It's a wonderful day. I went to the park. Sunny, with the sound of trees. He walked upward, illuminated by the yellow-red foliage rustling under his feet. And just like in Glotov – goldfinches, their ringing twitter.”
From the diary.
October 23, 1922

Judging by the surviving evidence, Bunin did not celebrate his birthday until the early 1920s. He spent the autumn of 1922 with his wife and the Merezhkovskys. Symbolist poets Dmitry Merezhkovsky and Zinaida Gippius were then close friends with the Bunins. in the town of Amboise, on the banks of the Loire. In the entry dated October 23, he mentioned his birthday for almost the first time in his diary. It is interesting that almost the same words appear in a diary entry made in October 1917 in Glotovo, the Tula estate of Bunin’s relatives, and in a poem written at the same time:

Goldfinches, their ringing, glassy, lifeless, And the maple above the fallen leaves, In the azure and clean emptiness, Already all bare, light and branched... Oh, the agony of torment! What do I, he, the Goldfinches, the foliage need? And will I understand why I must place the joy of this torment, this horizon, and this ringing, and the dark meaning with which it is full, in harmonies and sounds? <…>

About the revolution

“For the thousandth time it occurred to me: yes, yes, all this is just a comedy - Bolshevik deeds. Not once in all four years did they even bother to show the appearance of seriousness - all with such a cynical clumsiness that is completely implausible.”
From the diary.
November 28, 1921

Bunin repeats the same idea more than once in “Cursed Days.” He considered one of the main features of the Russian revolution to be “masquerade”, a deliberate orientation towards a “carnival” - a reverse action in relation to the true reality, which plunged the country into a “giant bloody booth”. He foresaw the revolution back in 1910, when he wrote “The Village” - a sharply journalistic story about the cruelty and backwardness of the entire way of Russian life, and the beginning of the First World War marked for him “the end of all our former life.” Bunin did not follow the example of his close friends, writers Alexei Nikolaevich Tolstoy and Alexander Kuprin, who returned to the USSR in different years, and rejected offers from the Soviet side to return to their homeland after the war.

About the war and new spelling

“<…> Russia, together with its allies, defeated Germany: I’m very glad, but why, as a result of this, should I suddenly start writing like Mikhryutka? In this case, a generalized figurative name for the revolutionary plebs.?”
From a letter to Georgy Adamovich. 1947

Bunin considered the new spelling introduced in 1918 to be another manifestation of Bolshevism; all his life he adhered to the pre-reform spelling with “eras”, “yats”, endings in -ago, etc. and demanded that his works be published only in this way. His attitude did not change even after the war and the Allied victory, which he ardently sympathized with. In 1951, while preparing a new edition of “The Life of Arsenyev,” he

About stars and death

“<...> At six o’clock, immediately after sunset, I saw above my head, above the masts, in a terribly large and still very bright sky, the silvery scattering of Orion. Orion in the afternoon! How to thank God for everything that He gives me, for all this joy and newness! And is it really possible that one day all this, already so close, familiar, dear to me, will be immediately taken away from me - immediately and forever, forever, no matter how many millennia there are on earth? How to believe this, how to come to terms with this?
From the diary. February 16, 1911

Bunin was interested in constellations - there are many descriptions of this kind in his texts. The writer was taught to navigate the starry sky by his cousin Nikolai Pusheshnikov. And in 1909, on Capri, Bunin met the astronomer Max Meyer, whose works he had read in his youth, and went to see him to look at the stars through a telescope. As for the Southern Cross and Orion (in the daytime), Bunin saw them for the first time two years later, during a trip to Ceylon. The recording was made in the Red Sea - which is why Orion was visible in the sky before it got dark.

About the time

“I lay there, read, then looked at Esterel, at its ridges in the sunny haze... My God, literally, literally, all this happened under the Romans! For this Esterel, another thousand years is absolutely nothing, but for me, another year off the charts is true horror. And this feeling is even more terrible because I am so infinitely happy that God allowed me to live among this beauty. Who knows if this is my last summer not only here, but on earth in general!”
From the diary.
June 1, 1924

Since 1923, the Bunins spent most of the year in Grasse, in the south of France, and from 1925 to 1936 they lived in the Belvedere villa. Cape Esterel was visible from the window of Bunin's office. The transience of human life in the face of the eternal world, the happiness of belonging to it at every moment and the horror of the end, of insoluble loneliness not only accompanied Bunin all his life, but was also experienced by him simultaneously, mutually reinforcing each other. In the fall of 1940, he wrote: “I was thinking again about that extraordinary loneliness in which I have been living for so many years. Worth writing."