Ivan Alekseevich Bunin — poet and prose writer, the first of the Russian writers to be awarded the Nobel Prize. “The fact that I became a writer somehow happened on its own, was determined so early and unnoticed, as it happens only to those for whom something is 'written in their blood',” he once wrote about himself. I. S. Shmelev spoke of the fact that through Bunin's prose, Russia itself is revealed. The revolution forced Bunin to leave his homeland, but the memory of it became the foundation of all his subsequent creativity: he began to recreate the forever lost Russia, its vanished beauty in his works. In essence, the cycle of stories “Dark Alleys” — the main book of Bunin's emigration period — is a “restoration of the instant time of love in the eternal time of Russia, its nature, its frozen in its splendor past” (I. N. Sukhikh). This edition includes the cycle “Dark Alleys,” diary entries from 1918-1919 “Accursed Days,” literary memories, the book “The Liberation of Tolstoy,” as well as poems from different years.
