Cursed Days
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| Author | Ivan Bunin |
|---|---|
| Original title | Окаянные дни |
| Translator | Thomas Gaiton Marullo |
| Country | France |
| Language | Russian |
| Genre | diary |
| Publisher |
Vozrozhdenye(Paris, 1926) Petropolis (Berlin, 1936) Ivan R. Dee Publishers (Chicago, 1998) |
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Publication date
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1926 |
| Media type | print (Hardback & Paperback) |
| Preceded by | 'Mitya's Love (1925) |
Cursed Days (Окаянные дни, Okayánnye Dni) is a book by a Nobel Prize-winning Russian author Ivan Bunin, compiled of diaries and notes he made while in Moscow and Odessa in 1918-1920. Fragments from it were published in 1925-1926 by the Paris-based Vozrozhdenye newspaper. In its full version Cursed Days appeared in the Vol.X of The Complete Bunin (1936), compiled and published in Berlin by the Petropolis publishing house. In the USSR the book remained banned up until the late 1980s. Parts of it were included in the 1988 Moscow edition of The Complete Bunin (Vol. VI). After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cursed Days became immensely popular in its author's homeland. Since 1991, no less than fifteen separate editions of Bunin's diary/notebook have been published in Russia. The English translation, made by Bunin scholar Thomas Gaiton Marullo, was published (as Cursed Days. A Diary of the Revolution) in 1998 in the United States by Chicago-based Ivan R. Dee Publishers.
In 1920, after three years of great anguish, Ivan Bunin left his country forever. In the years that led up to his exile, he kept an account of (in words of one reviewer) "the ever widening bestiality that accompanied the consolidation of Bolshevik power." Depending much on newspapers and rumors, Bunin misunderstood some of the events or related the biased versions of them and often let his anger get in the way of reason. Still, according to the New York Times, "these are the (mostly) immediate reactions of a man whose instincts have been proved eminently right, who knew that, with the victory of the Bolsheviks, the worst would happen." Using Cursed Days as a forum to castigate the CPSU's leaders, publishers, and the intellectuals like Aleksandr Blok who joined their ranks, Bunin labeled the Soviet elite criminals. He repeatedly compared the Bolsheviks to the Jacobin Club during the Reign of Terror. Bunin also cited parallels between the Red Terror and the peasant uprisings of Stenka Razin, Emelian Pugachev, and Bohdan Khmelnitsky.
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