Vera Muromtseva, Ivan Bunin’s wife, was born in 1881 into the family of Nikolai Muromtsev, a professor at Moscow University. As Oleg Mikhailov, a literary scholar, wrote, it was “a wonderful nobleman”s and professor”s old Moscow family; a cosy mansion on Bolshaia Nikitskaia Street; a hospitable household, as it is supposed to be in the oldest capital”.
Vera Nikolaevna received a good education at home and knew several foreign languages. She also studied at the Faculty of Sciences of the Higher Women’s Courses of Professor Guerrier, where she studied chemistry and attended lectures given by Nikolai Zelinsky and Ilia Mechnikov. Muromtseva had every chance of becoming a professional research scientist – but Ivan Bunin appeared in her life. ‘At that time he was thirty-six years old – elegant, skinny, with a sharp beard and a side parting, reading his poems and attracted Vera with his reading, ’ – the writer Boris Zaitsev recalled.
Bunin and Muromtseva met at a literary evening at Zaitsev’s house, with whose wife Vera had been friends since her gymnasium years. Muromtseva wrote: “That year Ivan Alekseevich had just turned thirty-six. But he seemed younger to me. I knew that he was married and had lost a young son. <…> He was a complicated and experienced man that I had to really get acquainted with on November 4, 1906 and then live for forty-six and a half years, with a man who was unlike anyone else, which fascinated me in particular”.
Relatives of Vera Nikolaevna and friends from the faculty were against her relationship with Bunin: Muromtseva had to take her final exams and write her diploma thesis, and the writer insisted that she had to start doing translations. So for six months the lovers met in secret, and in spring of 1907 they went on their first trip together.
Ivan Bunin himself remembered: “On those blessed days, when at noon there was the sun of my life, when, in the colour of strength and hope, hand in hand with the one whom God had chosen to be my companion till death do us apart, I made my first long journey, a marriage journey, which was also a pilgrimage to the Holy Land”. However, the couple was only able to get married in 1922: the writer had long been denied a divorce by his first wife, Anna Tsakni.
Despite the fact that relations between Bunin and Muromtseva were not always perfect, according to the poet Georgii Adamovich, ’…for her infinite loyalty, he was infinitely grateful to her and valued her above all else. <…> I think that if someone had hurt or offended Vera Nikolaevna in his presence, he would have killed that man with his great passion – not only as his enemy, but also as a slanderer, as a moral freak, unable to distinguish good from evil, light from darkness’.
Vera Nikolaevna outlived her husband for 8 years and after his death did a lot to preserve the literary heritage of the writer. She published Bunin’s unpublished manuscripts and wrote several books about his life: ‘Bunin”s Life’, ‘Conversations with Memory’ and ‘Adolescent Years of I.А. Bunin’.
Vera Nikolaevna received a good education at home and knew several foreign languages. She also studied at the Faculty of Sciences of the Higher Women’s Courses of Professor Guerrier, where she studied chemistry and attended lectures given by Nikolai Zelinsky and Ilia Mechnikov. Muromtseva had every chance of becoming a professional research scientist – but Ivan Bunin appeared in her life. ‘At that time he was thirty-six years old – elegant, skinny, with a sharp beard and a side parting, reading his poems and attracted Vera with his reading, ’ – the writer Boris Zaitsev recalled.
Bunin and Muromtseva met at a literary evening at Zaitsev’s house, with whose wife Vera had been friends since her gymnasium years. Muromtseva wrote: “That year Ivan Alekseevich had just turned thirty-six. But he seemed younger to me. I knew that he was married and had lost a young son. <…> He was a complicated and experienced man that I had to really get acquainted with on November 4, 1906 and then live for forty-six and a half years, with a man who was unlike anyone else, which fascinated me in particular”.
Relatives of Vera Nikolaevna and friends from the faculty were against her relationship with Bunin: Muromtseva had to take her final exams and write her diploma thesis, and the writer insisted that she had to start doing translations. So for six months the lovers met in secret, and in spring of 1907 they went on their first trip together.
Ivan Bunin himself remembered: “On those blessed days, when at noon there was the sun of my life, when, in the colour of strength and hope, hand in hand with the one whom God had chosen to be my companion till death do us apart, I made my first long journey, a marriage journey, which was also a pilgrimage to the Holy Land”. However, the couple was only able to get married in 1922: the writer had long been denied a divorce by his first wife, Anna Tsakni.
Despite the fact that relations between Bunin and Muromtseva were not always perfect, according to the poet Georgii Adamovich, ’…for her infinite loyalty, he was infinitely grateful to her and valued her above all else. <…> I think that if someone had hurt or offended Vera Nikolaevna in his presence, he would have killed that man with his great passion – not only as his enemy, but also as a slanderer, as a moral freak, unable to distinguish good from evil, light from darkness’.
Vera Nikolaevna outlived her husband for 8 years and after his death did a lot to preserve the literary heritage of the writer. She published Bunin’s unpublished manuscripts and wrote several books about his life: ‘Bunin”s Life’, ‘Conversations with Memory’ and ‘Adolescent Years of I.А. Bunin’.
