The Dreams of Chang and Other Stories

By Ivan Alekseyevich Bunin

Book Overview

In these luminous stories, a master of Russian prose explores the borderlands between memory and dream, beauty and grief, love and its inevitable loss. The title story unfolds through the consciousness of a ship captain's dog, whose fragmented recollections trace his master's long descent from happiness into ruin-a meditation on longing and disillusionment rendered with devastating clarity.

Across the collection, Bunin turns his precisely observant eye on the textures of life: the bittersweet pleasures of the Russian countryside, the melancholy of exile, the way time strips away everything we hold most dear. His prose moves between the sensory and the philosophical with effortless grace, finding in small, intimate moments the weight of entire lives.

Written during the early decades of the twentieth century, these stories established Bunin as one of the defining voices of Russian literature-a writer whose work transcends its era to speak with undiminished power to any reader who has known beauty, or loss, or the ache of the irrecoverable past.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1667665928
• ISBN13: 9781667665924
• Release Date: March 2026
• Publisher: Wildside Press
• Length: 210 Pages
• Weight: 0.96 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

In the same tradition as Anton Chekhov or L.N. Tolstoi

In Ivan Bunin's collection of nine short stories, the reader gets acquainted with various human destinies which resemble the violent storms of inland Russia. There are the two unnamed passengers who meet again after 23 years on a steamer, one of them being terminally ill. There's Ermil, a poor soul easily scared living in an isolated isba, who kills Makhor, a villager, out of fear. And Ilia Kapitonov, lost in a foggy night, who can't help seing his son dying of exhaustion. There is Voieikov spending his last day on the farm he was compelled to sell because of bankruptcy. And who will help old and diseased Averki return back home to die in peace? Then there is Arsenitch, returning every winter to an old inn where he once was a ma?tre d'h?tel and met a stunningly beautiful courtesan, Adele. Boroda, Fedia and Kiriousha all enjoy an immense glory in spite of being half-crazy, incompetent cretins! As Adam Sokolovitch claims that the urge to kill is deeply rooted in every human mind, the reader soon discovers how earnestly these words have to be taken. There is Ardei, always worried, although, as he states, "For Heaven's sake, nothing has ever happened to me." And finally one narrator, staring into the night, admiring the "silent stars" and wondering why his mind is perpetually anguished and tormented - in the end coming to the conclusion that it must be due to one's lifelong struggle against death.

***** First Rate Stories *****

These first-rate stories by the great 20th-century Russian poet and fiction writer Ivan Bunin are translated by Bernard Guilbert Guerney, Vladimir Nabokov's favorite professional Russian-English translator (and VN was a tough critic). Bunin's standing in the English-speaking world is a sliver of what it should and eventually will be. Thanks to the Dutch publisher for reprinting this excellent translation of some of Bunin's strange and unforgettable stories.