Cursed Days: Diary of a Revolution Review

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(More customer reviews)The previous customer review refers haughtily to the "hauteur" of Ivan Bunin, a "right-wing, upper class novelist." Say what? Bunin, a master of Russian prose, was understandably aghast as he watched the sudden, violent and senseless destruction of the glorious Russian culture. The reviewer sneers that "the folk, in Bunin's opinion, were ignorant, gullible, violent, dirty, and totally unfit to take a hand in government." Well, it sounds like Bunin got it just about right! Just look what the left-wing thugs ruling in the name of "the folk" did to Russia for the next 70 years.
Strangely, Soviet leaders decided that "Cursed Days" was unsuitable for consumption by "the folk." Hmmm... Talk about hauteur! Only in recent years was the publication of this amazing diary permitted in Bunin's homeland, and now - thanks to Thomas Gaiton Marullo's splendid translation - English-speaking readers can finally see that there were some people who weren't fooled in 1917. I just hope that modern readers will read Bunin's prophetic diary of those cursed days... and remember.
Neal McCabe

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Here is Ivan Bunin's great anti-Bolshevik diary of the Russian Revolution, translated into English for the first time. Set against the backdrop of Moscow and Odessa in 1918 and 1919, Cursed Days is a chilling account of the last days of the Russian master in his homeland-a work banned during the years of Soviet power. Bunin recreates the time of revolution and civil war with graphic and gripping immediacy. Unlike the works of early Soviets and emigrés, with their self-censoring backdrop of memory, myth, and political expediency, Bunin's uncompromising truths are jolting. His pain and suffering in witnessing the takeover of his country by 'thugs" and the chaos of civil war, and his fears for the devastation of 'patriarchal" Russian culture, were with him daily and received vivid expression in his diary. Cursed Days foreshadows the later anti-Soviet memoirs of Nadezhda Mandelstam, Evgenia Ginsberg, and others, and the rebellions of Bulgakov and Paternak. Thomas Marullo's superb translation and annotations reveal Bunin not only as a master of prose (he was the first Russian to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature) but as a perceptive social critic engaged in a wrenching struggle to make sense of his shattered world.

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