Ivan Alexeyevich Bunin — a poet and prose writer, the first of the Russian writers to be awarded the Nobel Prize. «The fact that I became a writer happened somehow on its own, determined so early and imperceptibly, as it happens only to those to whom something is „written in their destiny“», — he once wrote about himself. And. S. Shmelev spoke of the fact that through Bunin's prose the very essence of Russia is revealed. The revolution forced Bunin to leave his homeland, but the memory of it became the foundation of all his later creativity: he began to recreate the forever lost Russia, its vanished beauty in his works. In essence, the cycle of stories «Dark Alleys» — Bunin's main book of the emigration period — is «the restoration of the instant time of love in the eternal time of Russia, its nature, its frozen magnificence of the past» (I.N. Sukhikh).