The son of a landowner, Bunin began writing as a poet but became one of the great masters of Russian lyrical prose. He published his first poems in 1887 and his first collection in 1891; his book Listopad (Fall of Leaves) (1901) won the Pushkin Prize for poetry. He also produced a superb translation of Longfellow's The Song of Hiawatha. A brilliant stylist, Bunin was the teacher of the young Valentin Katayev and many fledgling writers. His lyrically beautiful prose can be seen as even more poetic than his poetry. In 1909 he was elected an honorary member of the Russian Academy of Science.
Bunin opposed the October Revolution and emigrated to France, where he wrote his diary of the Revolution, Okayannye dni (Accursed Days), in 1925. That book damned not only the Revolution but anyone who did not condemn it or condemned it insufficiently. His emigre writing was always closely linked to Russia, even though Soviet literary criticism of him was restrained. He came to be considered the finest writer in emigration and in 1933 was the first Russian awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. After the Soviets’ Second Writers Congress in 1954 his significance was acknowledged, and now all his work, including Accursed Days, is published in his homeland. He had died in poverty, however, the year before the congress.
