Russian Crafts

The website http://www.russian-crafts.com/ is well worth a visit. I mention this because it is through Russia's folk culture that we can access an artistic vibrancy which is both traditional and contemporary, and has a historical continuum which other aspects of Russian culture do not.

Dark Avenues by Ivan Bunin

Ivan Bunin (1870-1953) was the first Russian writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. He was an emigre writer, whose masterpiece, "Dark Avenues", was written in Grasse during World War II. "Dark Avenues" is a collection of short stories which, according the One World Classics edition, is set "in the context of the Russian cultural and historical crises of the preceding decades". Bunin himself compared the book to Boccaccio's Decameron because it was created at the height of the Nazi regime "to escape to a different world, where there was no bloodshed and people were not burned alive" However, he also said of the stories in "Dark Avenues", : they are "only about love", but " its dark, and more often than not, gloomy and sinister avenues".

"My Country is Russian Literature"

The 19th century Russian exile Vladimir Korolenko said : "My country is not Russia, my country is Russian Literature". Maybe I too - although excluded rather than exiled - will say some day : "My country is not England, my country is English Literature" !

On Marriage, War and Peace

In Part I of Tolstoy's "War and Peace", the hero, Pierre, is advised by his friend Prince Andrei :

"Never, never marry, my dear fellow. That is my advice to you - don't marry until you can say to yourself that you have done all that you are capable of doing, and until you cease to love the woman of your choice and see her plainly as she really is; or else you will be making a cruel and irreparable mistake. Marry when you are old and good for nothing. Otherwise everything that is fine and noble in you will be thrown away. It will be wasted on trifles. Yes, yes, yes ! Don't look at me with such surprise. If you marry while you still have any hopes of yourself you will be made to feel that at every step for you it is all over, every door closed but that of the drawing room, where you will stand on the same level as the court lackey and the idiot...."

Good advice, perhaps, for the young men (and women !) of today who find marriage and family life so difficult to bear, and, like Prince Andrei, prefer conflict to the dullness of domesticity.