Dark Avenues
is a volume of short yet dark and erotic love stories by a Nobel
Prize-winning author Ivan Bunin. In The
Works by I.A. Bunin, Oleg Mikhailov
wrote that Dark Avenues
is "the only book in the history of Russian literature devoted
entirely to the concept of love" and this classic of Russian
literature is considered to be Bunin's magnum opus.
Considering the
ephebophilia and nympholepsy in Dark
Avenues it is interesting that Boyd
wrote in Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian
Years that since Nabokov’s “early
youth” he “cherished” and “valued” Bunin. And Field shared
in Nabokov, His Life in Art
an excerpt from an article that Nabokov wrote in The
Rudder (1929) about Bunin’s poetry
“The poems of Bunin are the best that has been created by the
Russian Muse for several decades…Every line of Bunin’s is worthy
of being preserved.”
According Alma
Classics, Dark Avenues,
if not the most read, is one of the most read volumes of short
stories in Russia.
In “Styopa”,
Krasilshchikov, a young merchant and graduate from a university in
Moscow, due to a “downpour” and “shaking thunderclaps”, led
his horse into an inn “kept by the old widower Pronin.” The cook
quit after a “row” with the widower before Pronin and the
labourer “went off to the town on business”; therefore, Styopa,
Pronin’s sixteen-year-old daughter, was left alone in the inn.
Styopa is described as
having a “half-childish voice”, “black eyes and [a] swarthy
little face.” In addition, Bunin wrote “The match was burning
out, but he could still see her shyly little face, the coral necklace
round her neck, her small breasts under the yellow cotton dress….She
was hardly his height and almost a child.”
Krasilshchikov gave Styopa
“a prolonged kiss on the lips, and his hands slid lower.” Styopa
responded by pleading, “…papa will come back….Oh, you mustn’t!”
Over half an hour later she went to sleep after they made love and
awoke in the morning “with her unbuttoned dress and disheveled
hair”.
After Krasilshchikov
informed Styopa, “It’s time for me to go.” She pleaded, “[…]
in the name of the heavenly father, marry me! I will be your lowest
slave! I will sleep on your threshold – take me!” However, by
“that evening he left in a troika for the railway station. Two days
later he was already in Kislovodsk.”
Here is the opening of
“Tanya”:
“She was working
as a housemaid in the house of his relation Madame Kazakov, who owned
a small estate. She was just seventeen years old; her tiny figure was
especially noticeable when she walked barefoot, her skirt swaying
gently from side to side and her little breasts moving under her
blouse […] her simple little face could be called pleasing, and her
grey peasant eyes had no beauty other than that of youth.” And
Tanya, an orphan, was described as a “half-childish girl” with an
“intoxicating scent of something rural and virginal”.
Petrusha, on his way back
to Moscow, had stopped to visit Kazakova in the country. In the
middle of the night “He lit a match and caught sight of her asleep.
She was lying on her back on a wooden bed, in a blouse and cotton
skirt - her little breasts showed roundness through her blouse, her
legs were bare to the knees[...] The match went out. He stood there –
and gently approached the bed...” “He moved her legs apart in
their tender warmth[...]” “[...] and he began to kiss her neck,
her breast, inhaling that intoxicating scent of something rural and
virginal. And she, through her tears, suddenly gave a spontaneous
feminine response – strongly, and it seemed gratefully, embracing
him and pressing his head to her breast.” After subsequent sexual
conquests with the nymphet, to Tanya's utter dismay, Petrusha left
the country never to visit again.
And in “The Crow”, a
father, an important government official, banished his son to
Petersburg and threatened to disinherit him if he didn't comply. That
was done after the father caught the son cavorting with the help,
Elena Nikolaevna. Nikolaevna was described as “young light-limbed”
with a “fine delicate face blushing in crimson patches – the face
of a frail blonde girl in a thin white blouse, with dark armpits and
still only faintly outlined breasts.” Subsequently, the son caught
the father with Nikolaevna, his “enchanting young wife”, entering
the Marinsky theater in Petersburg. “On her neck a little ruby
cross with a dark fire; her slim arms had already grown rounder and
were bare to above the elbow [...]”
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