In 1910, Ivan Bunin and his wife Vera Muromtseva travelled to eastern countries. They visited Egypt and arrived in Ceylon. From the city of Colombo, Bunin sent a comic poem to his close friend, writer Nikolai Teleshov:
‘I’m sitting on Sandunov’s shelf
With pineapples, bananas in my hand
It is steaming on top, it is stewing from below… I’m completely
sorry, I became shameless: only a helmet
Snakes, tigers, Sinhaleses and elephants!
Give me back, you bastards, at least my pants! ’
Teleshov responded with the same humorous poem and harmless caricature, in which he portrayed Bunin barefooted, in a loincloth and a cap, with pineapples in his hands.
Vera Muromtseva recalled that trip: “After 18-day trek through the Red Sea and ocean, where we experienced completely new sensations, saw charming sunsets, incredibly beautiful moonlit nights, sweated and practised French, we finally got to Colombo. And from the very first step, amazement and admiration seize us alternately. First of all, I was struck by the terracotta-coloured causeway, then the rickshaws –horse-people with their elegant light strollers, then unusual vegetation, there is everything… We lived in Colombo for two days, lived outside the city in a one-story bungalow house, in a garden, rooms without the ceiling, all night long an electric fan produced the wind – the heat was unquenchable. We drove rickshaws several miles to the hotel, standing on the ocean outside the city… It seemed that we were going through some magical land. From Colombo we took the railway to Candy, the path was very interesting, went through the mountains past a tea plantation… now we climbed even higher, to a place… Nurilia. We eat pineapples and bananas here”.
Ivan Bunin was astounded by Anaradhapura – the remains of an ancient city in the north of the island, where the Bunins spent a day. Later in the story “The City of Kings” Ivan Alekseevich wrote: “The greatest holiness of the Buddhist world, the ancient capital of Ceylon, Anaradhapura, now is overgrown with jungle, turned into one of the most remote Ceylon villages and striking the pilgrim only with the monstrous remains of its former glory, has more than two and a half thousand years of its existence, of which as many as two thousand it flourished to the wonder of the entire ancient East, in size almost equal to our modern Paris, not inferior to Rome in gold and marble, but by their dagobas, erected to store sacred Buddhist relics, surpassing the pyramids of Egypt”.
