Ivan Alekseyevich Bunin (1870-1953)
'Too many Russians have changed with lightning speed'. 1944
Autograph letter signed (‘Iv. B.’) to Nikolay Roshchin, [Grasse], 11 November 1944.

In Russian.. Two pages, 269 x 209mm.

'Too many Russians have changed with lightning speed': Bunin again reproaches his friend Roshchin for his repudiation of the Russian émigrés.

Ah, captain, captain! / A change of convictions is quite possible and legal – only the dead do not change. But too many Russians have changed with lightning speed, abruptly, rudely, despicably .... It is not necessary to pour slop over the emigration, in which one has lived and fed for 25 years; nonsense to say that the emigrants had absolutely nothing to do with Russia and that they had not even the slightest idea about Russian life over the past decades ... I was no less than others in grinding and grinding my teeth at the 'vile invaders' [i.e. the Nazis], and I am no less happy that the Russians and the Allies are breaking their heads, but this does not in the least exclude what I have just said. .../ But some other poets should still be instructed to write words for hymns – after all, the words for the Russian anthem were once written by Pushkin, Zhukovsky, – words that are suitable for great powers in their solemnity. ...

Published in L. Golubeva Istoria odnoy perepiski (Moscow, 1998). Nikolay Yakovlevich Roshchin (1896-1956) was a veteran of the First World War and the Civil War, being promoted to captain in the anti-Bolshevik armies (whence Bunin’s nickname for him, ‘capitan’). He emigrated to France, where he became a close friend of the Bunins, spending several months each year with them in Grasse, and was encouraged in a literary career by Bunin. During the Second World War he was active in the French Resistance, and took part in the Liberation of Paris. Having failed twice in requests to return to Russia during the early 1930s, in 1946 he was one of the first group of emigrants to return to the Soviet Union.

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