Cursed Days: A Diary of Revolution

by Thomas Gaiton Marullo, Ivan Alekseevich Bunin

Release Date: June, 1998

Edition: Hardcover

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Bunin didn't call this book "Cursed Days" for nothing!

The previous customer review refers haughtily to the "hauteur" of Ivan Bunin, a "right-wing, upper class novelist." Say what? Bunin, a master of Russian prose, was understandably aghast as he watched the sudden, violent and senseless destruction of the glorious Russian culture. The reviewer sneers that "the folk, in Bunin's opinion, were ignorant, gullible, violent, dirty, and totally unfit to take a hand in government." Well, it sounds like Bunin got it just about right! Just look what the left-wing thugs ruling in the name of "the folk" did to Russia for the next 70 years.

Strangely, Soviet leaders decided that "Cursed Days" was unsuitable for consumption by "the folk." Hmmm... Talk about hauteur! Only in recent years was the publication of this amazing diary permitted in Bunin's homeland, and now - thanks to Thomas Gaiton Marullo's splendid translation - English-speaking readers can finally see that there were some people who weren't fooled in 1917. I just hope that modern readers will read Bunin's prophetic diary of those cursed days... and remember.

Neal McCabe

Picture of everyday confusion & fears of the 1917 revolution

This day-to-day diary of the confusion and fears that confronted those who lived through Russia's revolutions and their aftermaths in 1917-19 is well worth reading. However, it has its frustrations, especially a) the unremitting tone of hauteur by this right-wing, upper class novelist when confronted by the ascendant working class, and b) the editor's feeling that every rumor reported by Bunin, no matter how outlandish (St. Petersburg has fallen to the Germans; "The Red Army has been chased from Russia") requires his footnote assuring us that "The rumor was not true". Although both are very different in focus from this book, I much preferred Bulgakov's The White Guard, an autobiographically fictional account of his life during the same time period, with the same confusion, in Kiev, and Sukhanov's The Russian Revolution, 1917, an almost hour-by-hour description of the actual government takeovers in 1917.