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".