Cursed Days is a book by Nobel Prize-winning Russian author Ivan Bunin, compiled of diaries and notes he made while in Moscow and Odessa in 1918-1920. Fragments from it were published in 1925-1926 by the Paris-based Vozrozhdenye newspaper. In its full version Cursed Days appeared in the Vol.X of The Complete Bunin (1936), compiled and published in Berlin by the Petropolis publishing house. In the USSR the book remained banned up until the late 1980s. Parts of it were included in the 1988 Moscow edition of The Complete Bunin. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cursed Days became immensely popular in its author's homeland. Since 1991, no less than fifteen separate editions of Bunin's diary/notebook have been published in Russia. The English translation, made by Bunin scholar Thomas Gaiton Marullo, was published in 1998 in the United States by Chicago-based Ivan R. Dee Publishers.
Cursed Days
Image: Cursed days cover
Ivan Alekseyevich Bunin 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.
Bunin, c. 1900
Alexey Nikolayevich Bunin
Bunin in 1891
Ivan Bunin with his brother Yuly