Dhe syntax of impatience shuns verbs: “Christmas, lots of snow, clear, frosty days, the cab drivers drive fast and high-spirited, from two o’clock onwards military music plays on the road in the city garden.” Ivan Bunin provides the motif of impatience in his story “The Meteor”. just one page later: “In the grove it’s even sweeter to feel young, festive, always close to some happiness, and to breathe that wintry, ethereal air. The lyceum student waits for happiness more impatiently than anyone else and always stays close to the high school student.”

Spring awakens in winter: youthful sexuality trembles through the lines like the lip of a pleading stallion. The realism of the ski party through the winter forest, a motif almost like that of Eduard von Keyserling’s short stories, is increasingly symbolically interspersed: in the first moment of undisturbed togetherness, which could bring the desired happiness, perhaps the first kiss, more intimate touches, the lyceum student shoots just a bullfinch. Odo Marquard already knew: “Humans are creatures that always do something instead.” The catching or killing of songbirds has long been a symbol of a little sublimated, even violent sexuality.

But Bunin, in his prose of haste, comes up with a much bigger bang: the impact of a meteorite. The densely packed seventeen-page tale, more sketchy or miniature, modeled on Ivan Turgenev’s late “Poems in Prose,” culminates in this event that, as you read it, you can’t quite tell if it stands on its own – or for something instead. We only learn one thing: When the two young people come back, “they can no longer speak a word”. She was disturbed by the impact of the experience. Whether one should read this naturalistically or symbolistically remains in limbo. Only the intensity is enormous due to its brevity, speed and recess.

Bunin, who became the first Russian ever to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1933, was merciless in his literary standards. In Dostoyevsky he detested “those fastidious talkers with their crazy ideas”; Chekhov, whom he respected much more highly, was bothered by the “sensibility” in his plays. Only Lev Tolstoy – the novelist, not the pamphleteer – was left untouched by Bunin. But the stories from the years 1920 to 1924, with which the Dörlemann-Verlag is now continuing its work edition in new translations under the title “Nachts auf dem Meer”, have a new tone of strong emotional involvement, enthusiasm and nostalgia in store for the author. The short story The Reapers is a summery idyll in which the simple, industrious, song-filled country life of pre-revolutionary Russia is elevated to metaphysical timelessness, as in Ivan Shishkin’s painting Noon – In the Surroundings of Moscow: “In the eternal To the stillness, simplicity and originality of its fields they walked and sang with epic freedom and devotion. And the birch forest took up their song and joined in, just as freely and freely as they sang.” The illusion-free precision with which Bunin used to describe village life has given way to a tone of transfiguration.