Dark Avenues

Dark Avenues (or Dark Alleys, Russian: «Тёмные аллеи», Tyomnyye allei) is a collection of short stories by a Nobel Prize-winning Russian author Ivan Bunin written in 1937–1944, mostly in Grasse, France, first eleven stories of which were published in New York City, United States, in 1943. The book's full version (27 stories added to the first 11) came out in 1946 in Paris. Dark Alleys, "the only book in the history of Russian literature devoted entirely to the concept of love," is regarded in Russia as Bunin's masterpiece. These stories are characterised by dark, erotic liaisons and love affairs that are, in the words of one critic, marked by a contradiction that emerges from the interaction of a love that is enamoured in sensory experiences and physicalty, with a love that is a supreme, if ephemeral, "dissolution of the self".

In 1942, when most of the European Russian emigres were hastily preparing to flee for America, Bunin with his wife, Vera Muromtseva, destitute as they were, decided to stay in France. Journalist Andrey Sedykh visited Bunin just before departing to the USA. As he was ready to leave the house, the writer said to him. "Last year I wrote Dark Alleys, a book about love. There it is, on the table. What am I to do with it here? Take it with you to America; who knows, may be you'll manage to publish it." In 1943 600 copies of the book were printed by a small New York publishing company Novaya Zemlya (New Land). Out of twenty stories Sedykh took with him only 11 were included: "Dark Alleys", "Caucasus", "The Ballad", "The Wall", "Muse", "Late Hour", "Rusia", "Tanya", "In Paris", "Natalie" and "April" (the last one later got excluded by the author from the second edition).

Dark Alleys' full version (38 short stories) came out in 1946 in Paris, 2,000 copies printed. On June 19, 1945, the book were premiered at a public recital show in Paris which (according Soviet Patriot, an immigrant newspaper based in Paris) was highly successful. But the general response to the book was indifferent, according to Georgy Adamovich. "[The French] press reviews were mostly positive, occasionally even ecstatic, for how could it be otherwise, but unofficial, 'spoken' opinions were different and it caused Bunin lots of grief," the critic remembered. It was translated from the Russian by Richard Hare and published in London by John Lehmann as Dark Avenues and Other Stories in 1949.