After leaving Russia, Ivan Bunin and his wife Vera Muromtseva settled in France. The couple spent the winter months in a rented flat in Paris, and during the warm months they travelled south to Grasse in the Maritime Alps. There the Bunins rented a cosy villa ‘Belvedere’.
‘Villa “Belvedere”, perched high on the mountain wall overlooking Grasse, was an old Provencal house with cracks on its yellowish walls, with green swinging shutters on either side of the high windows. These shutters with a crash and creak were thrown open in the morning by the quick hand movements of Ivan Alekseevich, and he himself ran down the stairs quickly with his light, almost youthful walk’, – wrote the poetess Galina Kuznetsova, friend of the Bunins and frequent guest of the villa, in the short story ‘Friends’.
In this hospitable house of the ‘Grasse hermit’, as Bunin was called, the writer’s friends and acquaintances lived for a long time: writers Leonid Zurov and Boris Zaitsev, critic Nikolai Roshchin, historian Ilia Fondaminsky and many others.
Tatiana Muraveva-Loginova, a friend of Bunin family, who created a series of drawings about the life of the writer in Grasse, painted the picture with a view of the villa represented in the exhibit. The artist recalled that she first saw Bunin in 1933 at the New Year’s ball of writers in one of the large Parisian hotels: ‘Very youthful, in a dinner jacket, in a snow-white dicky, Ivan Alekseevich was sitting at the table… He was asked for his autographs. Having just won the book of Bunin’s poems in the book lottery, I took courage and also approached the famous writer. Without even looking at me, he signed quickly – Iv. Bunin, 1. I. 1933’ – and took the next book’.
Two years later, Bunin and Muraveva-Loginova met at a book exhibition for real, began to communicate and see each other from time to time. The artist also came to the Villa ‘Belvedere’. She wrote in her book ‘Living Past’: ‘Vera Nikolaevna [Muromtseva] met me nicely and cordially. We sat on the terrace under a palm tree, drinking tea in the cool and slightly empty dining room. The furnishings were more than simple: a large table covered with oilcloth, the chairs were around. A little squeezed sofa, a table with magazines’.
