In 1923 Ivan Bunin and his wife Vera Muromtseva settled in the Maritime Alps in the south of France, in the town of Grasse, where they rented a cosy villa ‘Belvedere’. The Bunins never lived alone. The writer Nikolai Roshchin recalled that ‘one of the literary friends always lives on the hospitable “Belvedere”. Writers Boris Zaitsev and Dmitry Merezhkovsky, Mark Aldanov and Georgy Adamovich, historian Ilia Fondaminsky and others came to the couple from Paris.
In a simple, inexpensively furnished house in Provence, Bunin was transforming. He ate and drank in moderation, went to bed early, worked with inspiration.
Young writers Leonid Zurov and Galina Kuznetsova stayed at the villa “Belvedere” for a long time. The writer’s personal secretary, Andrei Sedykh, recalled that Bunin ‘loved to surround himself with young writers and patronized them. They were reading aloud what they had written, Bunin criticized – in his writing craft he was merciless, hated unnecessary words, any bombast, artificially created “beauty”. He crossed out entire pages and individual phrases written by young people, and inspired a harsh attitude towards what was written’.
Galina Kuznetsova was the last love of Ivan Bunin. She settled in the villa in 1927 and lived there until April 1942, leaving from time to time for 2-3 months. She recalled: ‘Life in Grasse was for Ivan Alekseevich a condition for writing, he rested there from the bustle of Paris, concentrated, prepared for writing, as for some kind of feat, even his regime was changing… The whole house then lived an even working life, everyone got up early, all day sat in their rooms, working on something, in the evening they went for a walk’. The last time Kuznetsova came to Grasse in 1942. Later she wrote: ‘There were many reasons for my departure, in particular, there were also purely personal ones. Of course, my departure for some time created an atmosphere of painful break with Ivan Alekseevich, which was not easy for him and for me’.
Leonid Zurov was a member of the White movement. His books about Russia ‘Cadet’ and ‘Fatherland’ attracted Bunin’s attention, and the writer invited Zurov to his place. On November 23, 1929, Zurov unexpectedly appeared at the “Belvedere” villa with gifts – a loaf of black bread, cranberries and antonovka apples. He lived with the Bunins for a long time, and after the death of the writer inherited his archive, which, after unsuccessful negotiations with the Soviet Union, sold it to Militsa Green, a professor at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.
