In the early 1910s the interest in the prose of Ivan Bunin among Russian readers increased. According to critics, the author was recognized as a great prose writer immediately after the publication of the short story ‘The Village’ in 1910. Another significant work of Bunin about peasantry was the short novel ‘Sukhodol’.

The collection ‘Sukhodol: Novellas and Short Stories of 1911-1912’ was published in 1912. The book was published just 6 months after Bunin’s initial meeting with the publishing house.

The collection was titled after the central novella, “Sukhodol”, also known as “Drydale” or “Dry Valley”, in which Bunin chronicles the gradual degradation of Russian landed gentry. He recreated the lives of the Khrushchev landowners, who were unable to cope either with the impoverishment of their Sukhodol estate or with their own moral decline: stupid superstitions, unjust punishments of servants, gradual insanity, the fear of peasants — all this the author described consistently and without embellishments.

One of the storylines is connected with the Khrushchev brothers. As landowners, they could not agree on how to manage their estate, pushing it into losses. Bunin wrote:

It is very important to note that the ‘Sukhodol’ was at odds with the works of Pushkin, Turgenev and Tolstoy, in which the decline of the Russian nobility was depicted in a more poetic way. In this work, Bunin replaces this idealization with an honest account. At the same time, he did not set the landowners in opposition to peasants. He wrote: ‘The masters had the same in their character as the serfs: either to rule or be afraid’. The author truly cared for people of all social classes, he argued that the contradictions between the peasants and nobles had faded away, and now they all were one Russian people.