Ivan Alekseyevich Bunin — poet and prose writer, the first of the Russian writers to be awarded the Nobel Prize (1933). His works have been translated into many languages of the world and are forever inscribed in the golden fund of world literature. The Revolution of 1917 forced Bunin to leave his homeland, but the memory of the irretrievably lost Russia, of the people with whom fate brought him together, became a support for all his later creativity. The book «Memoirs» was published in 1950 in Paris, however, the first chapters were written much earlier. Repin, Rachmaninoff, Chekhov, Kuprin, Shalyapin — here are recreated portraits of those whom Bunin knew well. In Soviet Russia, it was impossible to read the book in full until Perestroika; even in the collected works of the writer, fragments and chapters where Bunin sharply and sarcastically spoke negatively about his colleagues who sided with the Bolsheviks: about Gorky, Mayakovsky, Blok, Yesenin, «Tolstoy the Third» were removed. In this current edition, these omissions have been restored according to the lifetime edition. The memories of L. N. Tolstoy, whom Bunin revered throughout his life, grew into the essay «The Liberation of Tolstoy».
