“The most bitter black-hundredist and bullhead, he’s putrefied completely…”: Ivan Nazhivin on Ivan Bunin (1930s)

Abstract

The article reveals the reasons for Ivan Nazhivin’s hatred of Ivan Bunin, which became evident in the mid 1930s. The anti-Bunin campaign launched by Nazhivin is presented as a multi-pass combination. Nazhivin discredited the luminary of émigré literature in personal correspondence with Maxim Gorky, Mark Aldanov, Mikhail Osorgin, Sergei Svatikov, in critical-journalistic works which were intended for print, but remained unpublished, as well as in the novel “The Non-Highly-Regarded” (Tianjin, 1935). The article is based on little-known materials from RGALI, GARF, RAL and the Library of International Modern Documentation (La bibliothèque de documentation internationale contemporaine, Paris — Nanterre).

Keywords

• ivan nazhivin
• ivan bunin
• émigrés
• harassment
• correspondence
• “the district moncher”
• “the non-highly-regarded”