During the five years of the occupation of France by fascist troops, Bunin and his wife Vera Muromtseva lived in the south of the country in the small town of Grasse. They rented the villa “Jeannette”, which was located on the steep slope of the Alps. During the war years, acquaintances who needed help found shelter with the Bunins: the poetess Galina Kuznetsova and her friend Margarita Stepun, the writer Leonid Zurov, the writer Aleksandr Bakhrakh, the family of the Jewish pianist Aleksandr Liberman, who was threatened with arrest, and many others.

At that time, life at the villa “Jeannette” was getting harder day by day. However, despite the lack of money and hunger, Bunin flatly refused to cooperate with publishing houses under the fascist regime.

On June 22, 1941, Bunin wrote in his diary: “Suddenly Zurov”s cry: “Ivan Alekseevich, Germany has declared war on Russia!” I thought he was joking, but Bakhrakh also shouted from below. Ran into the dining room to the radio – yes! We are terribly alarmed! ’ From that day on, the writer’s attention was focused on Russia. In his room, he hung up maps of the Soviet Union, on which he marked the path of advancement of the Soviet troops, every evening he listened to reports of military events on the radio. Bunin’s diaries of these years were both a chronicle of military events, and a reflection of his state of mind – far from balance and harmony.As Vera Muromtseva recalled, only creativity saved the classic. Only work on the collection ‘Dark Avenues’ allowed him to temporarily move ‘to another world, where blood was not shed, where they do not burn alive’.

In a letter to the writer Nadezhda Teffi on May 19, 1944, Bunin told: ‘This whole book is called after the first short story – “Dark Avenues” – in which the heroine reminds her first lover how he once read poems to her about “dark avenues” (“Around the scarlet rosehip bloomed, there were dark linden avenues”) – and all the stories of this book are only about love, about its “dark” and most often gloomy and cruel avenues’.

The collection ‘Dark Avenues’ was first published in 1943 in New York in a circulation of six hundred copies. Out of the twenty stories written by Bunin by that time, only eleven were included. The second complete edition of ‘Dark Avenues’ was published in Paris in 1946.