Ivan Bunin was born in Voronezh, in central Russia, into an old family of country gentry who had lost almost all their money. He grew up on run-down estates, and that world of fading manor houses, peasants, birch woods and long autumns is the world of his best writing. He never finished school, and was taught largely by an older brother.

He began as a poet. He won the Pushkin Prize, Russia’s highest literary honor, in 1903, and part of what he was honored for was his translation of Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha into Russian. He was a friend of Anton Chekhov, whom he admired more than any other writer, and his prose has something of Chekhov’s clarity: plain sentences, exact details, and great feeling held in check.

His short novel The Village (1910) was a harsh, unsentimental picture of peasant life that shocked many readers. Five years later came his most famous story, “The Gentleman from San Francisco,” about a rich American who travels to Italy to enjoy himself at last, and dies suddenly in his hotel on Capri. The hotel is embarrassed. His body goes home in a soda-water crate in the hold of the same luxury liner he sailed out on, while the passengers above go on dancing.

Bunin hated the Bolshevik revolution. His diary of 1918 and 1919, later published as Cursed Days, is a furious record of those years. In 1920 he left Russia for good, and he lived in France for the rest of his life, mostly in Paris and in Grasse, in the hills above the Riviera. His books were banned in the Soviet Union.

In 1933 he became the first Russian writer to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. He kept writing well into old age. Dark Avenues, a collection of stories about love, many written in Grasse during the Second World War, is often called his finest book. He died in Paris in 1953, and only after that did Russian readers at home begin to get his work back.