Mitya's Love

Mitya's Love (Митина любовь, Mi′tina Lyubo′v) is a short novel by a Nobel Prize-winning Russian author Ivan Bunin written in 1924 and first published in books XXIII and XXIV of the Sovremennye Zapiski Paris-based literary journal in 1925. It also featured in (and gave the title to) a compilation of novelets and short stories published the same year in France.

Ivan Bunin started working upon Mitya's Love in Grasse in the summer of 1924. In the course of writing plot lines were changing continuously. The first version (marked as of June 3, 1924, by Vera Muromtseva) told the story of a 'moral fall' of a young man who's been degraded and compromised by a local village counterman. The theme of Mitya's love for Katya appeared later and soon became the major one. Some versions were full of details of country life, Alyonka's proposed marriage and Moscow's bohemian life Katya fell victim of. Most of these sub-plots were later omitted. Some of the sketches concerning the main character's relations with a village teacher Ganhka formed the plot of a short story called "April" (Апрель). Another spin-off was "Rain" (Дождь), a short story which was supposed to reveal in detail the chain of events that led to Petya's (such in this case was the hero's name) suicide. Bunin completed this story on June 7, 1924, then two days later returned to the main work and included the slightly altered version of Rain into it. In the final version of the novelet they form chapters XVIII and XIX. The last of the known versions' manuscript is dated September 27 (o.s. 14), 1924.

In her letters (dated March 8 and September 16, 1959) Vera Muromtseva-Bunina told correspondent N.Smirnov that Mitya's prototype was partly Bunin's nephew Nikolai Pusheshnikov (who'd suffered a similar kind of unhappy love affair) partly (and more in terms of general appearance) the latter's brother Petya, a passionate hunter. "As for the title, that summer [of 1924] a boy named Mitya visited Grasse, rich land-owner's son, quiet, self-conscious and very young Russian aristocrat. Ivan Alekseevich instantly imagined how such a person could have been be tempted into something wrong by a village's - for the simple motive of extorting a bottle of vodka off him, and that was how the novel started."

There were other autobiographical details in the book. The Shakhovskoye was, in fact, Kolontayevka, an estate next to the Bunin's one. Galina Kuznetsova in her Grasse Diary remembered: "In the neighbouring Kolontayevka estate, according to Bunin, there was this pine-tree alley which one particular summer was filled with some kind of special jasmine aromas... 'This alley I carried away with me to later put into Mitya's Love and - to such a sad and tragic effect!' I remember him saying."