That year in June he came to stay at our estate. We had always thought of him as one of the family – his late father had been a close friend and neighbour to my own. On the fifteenth of June Ferdinand was killed in Sarajevo. On the morning of the sixteenth, the newspapers arrived from the post office. My father left his study with one of the evening papers in his hands and came into the dining room where I, my mother, and my love were still sitting drinking tea, and said:
“Well, my friends, it’s war! The Austrian crown prince has been killed in Sarajevo. It’s war!”
As it was my father’s Saint’s Day, on St Peter’s Day all sorts of people were coming by, and after lunch, he was declared my betrothed. But on the nineteenth of July Germany declared war on Russia…
In September he came to us, just for twenty-four hours. He wanted to say goodbye before he left for the front. At that point we still thought that the war would not last long; our wedding was simply postponed to the spring. And so, we had our farewell evening. As usual, once supper was over, we put the samovar on. My father looked at the window as it filled up with steam and said:
“Autumn is surprisingly early and cold this year!”
That evening we sat quietly, only occasionally exchanging the most meaningless of words with an exaggerated calm, hiding our true and secret thoughts and feelings. Even my father had spoken about the autumn with forced, false easiness. I went to the French windows and wiped the glass with my shawl. In the garden, against the black sky, the icy stars shone sharp and bright and clear. My father leaned back deep in his armchair and smoked, occasionally glancing uneasily at the lamp burning above the table; my mother, in her glasses, was assiduously stitching up a little silk bag – we all knew which – under its light. It was touching and terrifying all at once. My father asked:
“So, are you sure that you want to go first thing in the morning instead of waiting for breakfast?”
“Yes, if you will allow me to, I must go first thing,” he said. “It’s sad, but I still need to get my things in order at home.”
My father gave a heavy sigh.
“Well, as you wish, my dear. But in that case, we old folks must be getting to bed if we are to see you off tomorrow…”
My mother rose and crossed her future son – he bent towards her hand, and then to my father’s. Alone now, we stayed seated in the dining room a little longer – I had thought to lay out some cards for a game of patience. Meanwhile, he paced the room silently. Finally, he asked:
“Well, would you like to get some fresh air?”
In my heart, everything grew still heavier, but I answered indifferently: “I don’t mind.”
He was still deep in thought about something while we were getting dressed in the front room. With a cute smile he mentioned Fet’s poem:
“Oh, just how cold is this autumn! / Put on your bonnet and shawl.”
“I don’t have a bonnet,” I said. “How does the next part go?”
“I can’t remember. I think it’s something like: “Look how between blackening pines / A fire appears to be rising…””
“What’s the fire?”
“It’s the moon coming up, of course. There’s something wondrously autumnal in all that. “Put on your bonnet and shawl…” The days of our grandfathers and grandmothers… Oh, oh god! Oh God!”
“What?”
“It’s nothing, my friend. But still, I’m sad. Sad and yet, this is all so good too. I really, really love you…”
Once we had finished getting changed, we went through the dining room and out into the garden. At first, it was so dark that I had to hold onto his sleeve. But then I began to make out in the night sky the black branches of trees, showered in the light of the stars. He stopped and turned towards the house.
“Look, how completely different, how autumnal the windows are. So long as I live, I will always remember this evening.”
I looked, and he embraced me and my Swiss wrap. I took my feather scarf from my face and turned my head a little so that he could kiss me. Afterwards, he looked into my face.
“How your eyes shine,” he said. “Are you cold? The air is worthy of winter. If they kill me, you really won’t forget about me at once?”
I thought to myself: “And what if they really do kill him? And would I really forget him in a short while? Like we forget everything in the end…?” And I hurried to answer him, terrified of my thought:
“Don’t talk like that! I would never recover if you died!”
He was silent at first, but then he spoke slowly:
“Well, and so what if I die. I will wait for you there. As for you, just live, find what joy you can, and then come to me.”
And I cried bitter tears…
In the morning he left. My mother gave him that fatal bag, the one she had been stitching the evening before. In it, there was a gold ikon, the one that my father and grandfather had carried with them when they too went to war. We crossed him with a kind of despair. We stood on the wing looking after him, in that kind of dumbness that always follows when you see someone off for a long time and can only feel the surprising inappropriateness of the joy that still surrounds us – the sun, the shining frost on the morning grass. Once we had finished, we went into an empty house. I went through the rooms, with my hands behind my back, not knowing anymore what I was supposed to do with myself, whether it would be better to weep or to sing with all my voice…
He was killed – what a strange word! – a month later, in Galicia. And since that time thirty long years have passed. And so much, so much has happened in those years, years which seemed so long, when you think about them. So much magic, so much incomprehensibility, so much confusion – all that we call the Past, and which lies beyond the powers of both mind and heart. In the spring of ’18, when my mother and father were already buried, I was living in Moscow in a basement belonging to a saleswoman at the Smolensk Market. She used to laugh at me: “Well, your highness, how are your circumstances?” I too was a trader of sorts. I sold, like so many others did then, whatever I had left to the soldiers in their papakhas and their overcoats – a little ring, a cross, a fur collar eaten away by moths, and then one day, while I was at work, I made the acquaintance of a person with a rare and beautiful soul – an old soldier who had already retired. Soon I had married him and in April we went together down to Ekaterinodar. We travelled with his nephew, a boy of about seventeen who was also heading to join the volunteer forces. The journey took almost two weeks – me, an old woman, in my bast shoes; my husband, with a greying black beard, was wearing his worn-out Cossack’s caftan. We stayed around the Don and Kuban for over two years. In the winter, in a storm, alongside countless other refugees from Novorossia, we set out across the sea towards Turkey, and on the way, my husband died of typhus. After this, I had only three people left to me upon the earth: my husband’s nephew and his young wife, and their child, a seven-month-old girl. But husband and wife returned later to Crimea to join Wrangel, leaving their child with me. I don’t know what happened to them – they simply disappeared. And so, I lived in Constantinople for some time, earning what I could for myself and the little girl, breaking my back illegally working in awful conditions. Then, as did so many others, I left – and with the girl went almost everywhere. Bulgaria, Serbia, the Czech lands, Belgium, Paris, Nice… The girl grew up a long time ago and decided to stay in Paris. She is a real Frenchwoman now – she’s very beautiful and completely indifferent towards me. She was working in a chocolate shop near the Madeleine, putting together little boxes in coloured paper and then tying them up with gold lace. Her hands are manicured, and her nails are silver. As for me, I still live in Nice by God’s grace… The first time I was in Nice was in 1912… and in those days I could never even begin to have imagined what would happen with me…
And so, I lived, and I survived his death, even though I had once said that I never would. But, when I remember everything that has happened since then, I always ask myself: well, what was really in your life? And I answer: only that cold autumn evening. Did it really happen? Yes, it did. And everything else that I lived through was just a waste, a useless dream. And I believe, I believe with a faith like a fire, that he is waiting for me there – with the same love, the same youth, as on that evening. “Just live, find what joy you can, and then come to me…” I have lived, I have had some joy, and now already it is time for me to come.
3 May 1944
This piece is one of the most famous short stories of Ivan Bunin. Bunin was the first Russian to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1933, but much of his prose reflects that of an earlier period. Not for nothing is he known as the last representative of aristocratic prose – he was born on the family estate in 1870, befriended Tolstoy, and had a disdain for all that is crass and base. This poise generally means that we either like him or dislike him. To some, he is a dreamy wishy-washy fool, a representative of a class that rightly died out (read – was systematically murdered by the Bolsheviks). He repeatedly writes about love, which is rather tedious after a while. And I have read criticism suggesting he never moved on from the loss of his country in the Revolutions, a bit like Kipling after the first World War.
“Cold Autumn” I think at least counters this final complaint. It is a story precisely about the tragedy and loss of a world, rather than about a refusal to come to terms with it. The narrator has lived, she has existed. We have two paragraphs without her beloved, but they are solid and lengthy. Something lively has exited the prose itself. And how can we blame the narrator, when that autumn eve remains so much more significant in her mind? Whether we like it or not, our memories are incomplete – a part of us decides for ourselves which moments are worthy of remembrance. And that person who cannot find a moment that is seared within their brain has perhaps not truly lived.
The story is stained with death. The beloved, the husband, the nephew and his wife, the narrator’s mother and father – and even, at the at the beginning, the beloved’s father. Not only is the old world destroyed by the coming of the Bolsheviks, but it is also literally killed off and with it its memories. Like Bunin himself, the narrator works as a living receptacle of a lost world. The Frenchwoman of the next generation is already lost to it.
The beloved quotes Fet – perhaps my favourite Russian poet. But Fet is the poet of haybales and sunsets, a very accessible poet whose main sources of inspiration are love and nature and whose corpus is tainted with a certain proud, aristocratic melancholy – he was the first to translate Schopenhauer into Russian, whence he passed to Fet’s friend Tolstoy. Fet is not a poet for the horrors of the 20th century. By quoting him, the beloved shows that his world is not the one he actually lives in, foreshadowing his swift death later. I particularly like the use of the little bag with the ikon in it too. We expect these items, which have protected previous generations, to offer the same protection now. They do not. The superstitions of the past do not have power anymore either.
Faced with a lost world, we have a choice. Either we succumb to our memories, or we build a new one. I do not think, with the memories that she has and the realities that she has to live in, the narrator of Bunin’s story is worthy of much condemnation. Instead, her faith and at least some of that aristocratic worldview, prove deserving of a certain grudging admiration.