The photograph shows Maria Bunina, Khristina Mikhailovna’s daughter from her first marriage to the engineer Nikolay Aleksandrovich Bunin.
Maria’s father, Nikolay Bunin, was a hydraulic engineer at the Regional Economic Soviet. During an expedition to build artesian wells, he was killed by Makhnovists.
In 1919, Khristina Mikhailovna with her ten-year-old daughter Maria came to Crimea, where she stayed at the summer cottage of the Sapozhnikovs — her colleagues from a gymnasium in Yekaterinoslav. She and her daughter came there for a holiday but could not go back home because of all the turmoil caused by the Russian Civil War. Those were hard times with riots, looting, coup d’état, famine, and epidemics.
Sapozhnikov’s dacha was next to that of Sergey Sergeyev-Tsensky. Khristina Mikhailovna used to come to Sergeyev-Tsensky’s to get milk for her daughter and that is how they met. At that time, the writer was engaged in dairy farming and had a few cows.
Khristina Mikhailovna Bunina was a well-educated woman: she graduated from the Higher Courses for Women in Moscow and studied at a music school. Back in Yekaterinoslav, she taught literature in senior classes of the 3rd gymnasium for girls.
Sergey Sergeyev-Tsensky soon proposed to Khristina Mikhailovna and they got married. She was always by his side, attended all business meetings, kept in touch with publishers, received guests, and accompanied her husband on trips around the country. Twenty-five years into their marriage, Sergeyev-Tsensky wrote in his autobiography, “By taking care of all the household chores, my wife made it possible for me to write, and for me, the word-painter, this was the most important thing.” Khristina Mikhailovna was by her husband’s side until the very last days of his life.
Sergeyev-Tsensky loved his stepdaughter with all his heart. Maria was a quick-witted and smart girl. Unfortunately, in 1922, she contracted cholera and soon died, which shocked and devastated the Sergeyev-Tsensky family. The couple had no children of their own. Sergeyev-Tsensky and Khristina Mikhailovna provided help to an orphanage in Alushta.
