Books: Nobel Prize

Awarding a Nobel Prize, especially in literature, is a ticklish business. Only international prize of its kind, its bestowal on any world-citizen is regarded as a triumph for that citizen’s country. Whether or not the Committee deals out its favors impartially, it obviously tries to rotate them. Last year the Nobel Prize in Literature went to England (the late John Galsworthy), the year before to Sweden (Erik Axel Karlfeldt), year before that to the U. S. (Sinclair Lewis). This year for the first time it went to a man without a country.

Ivan Alexeyevich Bunin, 1933 Nobel Prize winner in Literature, is a 63-year-old White Russian, self-exiled from Russia 16 years ago, now living with his 20-year-old adopted daughter in a modest villa at Grasse, France. Writer of the old school, called “the last heir to the Russian realist tradition of the 19th Century,” Bunin has long had a big reputation in Russia, where he won the Pushkin prize for poetry (1890), was an honorary member (with Maxim Gorki and the late great Anton Chekhov) of the exclusive Academy of St. Petersburg. Enthusiastic Russians rank Bunin with Dostoyevsky and Turgenev. Europe has read translations of Mitya’s Love and The Village. But until U. S. Publisher Knopf brought out an English translation of Bunin’s famed short story, “The Gentleman from San Francisco” and The Village, few U. S. readers had ever heard his name. When news of his election reached the U. S. last week, critics who knew Bunin’s work thought him a better-than-average choice. Soviet sympathizers declared the award “political,” wanted to know why, if the Nobel Committee had decided to honor a Russian, they had not picked Russia’s No. 1 contemporary writer. Alexei Maximovich Pyeshkov (Maxim Gorki).

Alone among Russian émigré writers, who have generally lost both prestige and potency after being cut off from their native country, Author Bunin has tuned his exile’s harp with increasing skill, today stands head & shoulders above other White Russian writers. Unlike the Pulitzer, the Nobel Prize is never awarded for any particular book; like his predecessors, Bunin is being honored for cumulative excellence. His best-known book is the volume of short stories, The Gentleman from San Francisco, in which the title-story is a grotesque fantasy of a rich American who voyages to Europe on a luxury liner, dies on the trip, and comes back a corpse on the same ship; the hero, a symbol of everything cheap in commercial civilization, is contrasted with the pitiless realities of sea and storm. Though he has a resounding reputation as a realist (his “big novel,” The Village, is written in naturalistic, Chekhovian style) Author Bunin was once numbered among the symbolists, has also written and translated verse—notably Byron’s “Manfred” and “Cain” and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Hiawatha.”

Said happy Ivan Alexeyevich Bunin: “I am thrilled at the prospect of going to Stockholm on Dec. 11 to receive the honor at the hands of King Gustaf. I certainly can use the money.”