Cursed Days

Ivan Bunin's Cursed Days was translated by Thomas Gaiton Marullo, who provides extremely informative footnotes for those of us who need to be reminded of the differences between Black Hundreds, Cadets, and Decembrists.

“A revolution is not a tea party,” said Mao Tse-tung. "It is an act of violence by which one class overthrows another." Nobel-prize winning author Ivan Bunin, born in genteel circumstances, could not but agree. In Cursed Days he chronicles the Bolshevik revolution as seen by a conservative member of the upper class who was also a sensitive writer. It was written while chaos in the streets was ongoing and rumors about the victories of the White armies were rife. Bunin has tough things to say about cynical revolutionaries like Trotsky and Lenin and their enablers among students and intellectuals. He also berates The Folks like workers and peasnats for turning into beasts the minutes the yoke was lifted. Like Sofia Petrovna, a novel written during the time of Stalin’s 1937 Purge, this memoir has immediacy. In fact, some parts are hard to read as the highly strung Bunin tries to write despite feeling the choking, dizziness, chills, nausea, sweating, and trembling of anxiety. How he escaped to Paris without having a heart attack amazes me.