Desire in the Time of Plague: Ivan Bunin's 'New Decameron'

• In Event: Displaced Desires: Writing Sex, Self, and Relation in Exile

Abstract

Ivan Bunin spent the years of France's occupation in the Mediterranean town of Grasse, where he shared a villa with a group of exiled compatriots, their geographic mobility restricted by Vichy regulations regarding foreigners. The ups and downs of Bunin's creative activity in this period yielded the writer's ultimate collection of short stories, Dark Alleys (1943, 1946). This paper explores Bunin's uses of the art of story-telling as a medium for coping with wartime physical and psychological privations as well as the writer's search for the meaning of the act of story-telling at a dramatic time that evoked historical and literary parallels with medieval plague epidemics.

Author

• Leonid Livak, U of Toronto (Canada)