Dark Avenues

Title page of the first edition

Dark Avenues (or Dark Alleys, Russian: Тёмные аллеи, romanizedTyomnyie alleyi) is a collection of short stories by Nobel Prize-winning Russian author Ivan Bunin. Written in 1937–1944, mostly in Grasse, France, the first eleven stories were published in New York City, United States, in 1943. The book's full version (27 stories added to the first 11) came out in 1946 in Paris. Dark Alleys, "the only book in the history of Russian literature devoted entirely to the concept of love," is regarded in Russia as Bunin's masterpiece.[1] These stories are characterised by dark, erotic liaisons and love affairs that are, according to James B. Woodward, marked by a contradiction that emerges from the interaction of a love that is enamoured in sensory experiences and physicality, with a love that is a supreme, if ephemeral, "dissolution of the self."[2]

  1. ^ Mikhailov, Oleg. The Works by I.A.Bunin. Vol.VII. Khudozhestvennaya Literatura. 1965. Commentaries. P. 355
  2. ^ Eros and Nirvana in the Art of Bunin, by James B. Woodward, The Modern Language Review, Vol. 65, No. 3 (Jul., 1970), pp. 576–586