Ivan Alekseevich Bunin

Ivan Bunin was born on his parents' estate in Voronezh province, the third and youngest son of Aleksey Nikolayevich Bunin (1827-1906) and Lyudmila Aleksandrovna Bunina (née Chubarova, 1835-1910). He had two younger sisters, Masha (Maria Bunina-Laskarzhevskaya, 1873-1930) and Nadya (who died at an early age), and two elder brothers, Yuly and Yevgeny. Bunin, who sprung from a long line of rural gentry, was particularly proud of his forebears, poets Anna Bunina (1774-1829) and Vasily Zhukovsky (1783-1852). He wrote in his 1952 autobiography: Bunin's first poem "Village Paupers" was published in the Saint Petersburg literary magazine Rodina in May 1887. In 1891, his first short tale, "Country Sketch," appeared in the journal Russkoye Bogatstvo, edited by Nikolay Mikhaylovsky. Bunin moved to Kharkiv with his brother in the spring of 1889 and worked as a government clerk, assistant editor of a local daily, librarian, and court statistician. In January 1889, he relocated to Oryol to work for the local Orlovsky Vestnik newspaper, initially as an editorial assistant and eventually as de facto editor, allowing him to publish his short stories, poetry, and reviews in the paper's literary section. There, he met Varvara Pashchenko and fell deeply in love with her.