Gentle Breathing

Ivan Bunin received the 1933 Nobel Prize in Literature "for the strict artistry with which he has carried on the classical Russian traditions in prose writing.” Aristocrat to the core, Bunin somehow remained connected to the land and people and keenly felt their pulse of life. His acute observations resulted in the accurate and unforgettable characters who populated his writing.

His love for punctuation and punctilious choice of words is legendary.

Reading Bunin's stories is one of the best ways to understand the mysterious Russian soul and begin to understand one of Russia’s greatest periods of literature.

Ivan Bunin’s “Gentle Breathing” (1916) tells the story of a young schoolgirl named Olya Meshcherskaya, sketching a brief account of her life and her abrupt murder. Yet Bunin’s decidedly non-linear rendering of this straightforward plot suggests that the focus of his narrative is not as simple as it might first appear to be.