Correspondence between Valery Semenov-Tyan-Shansky and Ivan and Vera Bunins

For the first time, the article publishes the correspondence between Ivan Bunin and Valery Petrovich Semenov-Tyan-Shansky (1871–1968). Semenov-Tyan-Shansky was a lawyer, statesman, memoirist, artist, and a prominent representative of the first wave of Russian emigration. His correspondence with Ivan Bunin spans the period from 1926 to 1953. It is supplemented by the correspondence between Semenov-Tyan-Shansky and Vera Bunina after Ivan Bunin’s death. The correspondence contains important biographical material about Bunin, the Semenov-Tyan-Shansky family, and the history of the Russian diaspora. The publication of the correspondence relies on previously unpublished materials from the family archive. The correspondence with Semenov-Tyan-Shansky served Bunin as a source of information that found its way into his memoir essay “The Semenovs and the Bunins.” One of the important themes of the correspondence concerns the fate and creative legacy of Valery Petrovich’s elder sister, Olga Petrovna Semenova, and her posthumously published book The Life of Ivan. Bunin’s intention, to which he returned several times in his letters, to write about Olga Petrovna, remained unreal- ized. A significant episode in the correspondence is connected with the preparation of a lecture on Bunin’s work that Valery Petrovich delivered in the spring of 1932 at the request of the Russian Academic Union in Finland. In response to the request for help in preparing the lecture, Bunin sent Semenov-Tyan-Shansky a bundle of reviews selected by Vera Bunina. The lecture was delivered in June 1933 and then repeated in December 1933, already after Bunin had been awarded the Nobel Prize. The text of the lecture received high praise from Bunin himself, who responded to its receipt with a warm letter. The lecture was not published (except a short summary appeared in the journal Sodruzhestvo, published in Vyborg with the participation of Semenov-Tyan-Shansky). The text of the lecture has been prepared for publication and will appear separately in one of the next issues of Literary Fact.