person
Ivan Alekseyevich Bunin
Bunin
also: Иван Алексеевич Бунин, Иван Алексеевич, I. A. Bunin, Ivan Bunin
Russian writer and poet (1870-1953), about twenty years old and just starting out when this letter marks his first documented contact with Chekhov; he would go on to become the first Russian writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature (1933). Chekhov and Bunin later became close friends and correspondents.
Reading notes
- To I. A. Bunin, 30 January 1891. Moscow. §3 Dear Sir Ivan Alekseyevich
This is the first documented letter from Chekhov to Ivan Alekseyevich Bunin -- then about twenty years old and just beginning as a writer, decades before he would become, in 1933, the first Russian writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. The formal address "Milostivyi gosudar'" ("Dear Sir" / "Gracious Sovereign"), a period epistolary formula for an unfamiliar correspondent, marks the distance of an opening contact; it stands in contrast to the warmth of Chekhov's later letters to Bunin once the two writers became close friends.