In February 1920, Ivan Bunin and his wife Vera Muromtseva left Russia for good. The writer did not accept the revolutionary events of 1917 and the new Soviet power, and therefore emigrated to France. First, the Bunins settled in Paris, and in 1923 they moved to the south of the country to the small town of Grasse, where they rented a villa. In May 1945, the family returned to the capital and lived there until the death of Bunin, practically without leaving the city.
In Paris, the Bunins rented a modest flat in house No. 1 on Jacques Offenbach Street. It consisted of two rooms: an office and a dining room. After the death of Ivan Bunin in 1953, his widow Vera Nikolaevna and the writer Leonid Zurov, who was practically a member of the Bunin’s family, continued to live in it. According to Muromtseva’s will, he received the couple’s archives, personal belongings and furnishings.
Before vacating the apartment of the writer, Zurov invited the photographer of the Louvre Schuzeville, who made the photographs of the rooms’ interiors, sketched their detailed plan presented at the exhibit, and compiled “The description of the Parisian flat, furniture and things of I. A. Bunin”. He considered it his duty to fulfil the will of Muromtseva-Bunina: to transfer the archives to Moscow, and furniture and personal belongings to Oryol, where they planned to create the museum of Bunin.
On April 30, 1961, Zurov wrote to the director of the Oryol Literary Museum of I. S. Turgenev, Leonid Afonin:
