Professional Affiliation

PhD Candidate, University of Wisconsin

Wilson Center Project

Into the Heart of Darkness: Ivan Bunin and the Modernist Poetics of Personal Memory

Project Summary

Places Ivan Bunin in the cultural matrix of the Europe to which he emigrated, demonstrating the influence of turn-of-the-century European thought on Bunin’s fiction. Analyzes Bunin’s growing use of evocative, symbolic imagry as a method of revealing the modernist hidden realm of mental life. Examines the nature of Bunin’s nostalgia and formulates a theory of mnemonic writing for his work after emigration. Defines the qualities of his exile, and the longing to return in memory to an ahistoricval realm.