The poems of Bunin are the best that has been created by the Russian Muse for several decades. Some time ago, during the loud Petersburg years, they were muffled by the brilliant clatter of stylish fashionable lyres. However, this poetic tendency faded away and did not leave a single trace. These ‘blasphemous poets-creators’ were debunked or forgotten. We feel coldness coming from the dead blocks of Bryusov’s poems; the Balmont’s poetry, which deceived us with its new melodiousness, now seems disharmonious. Only the trembling of a lyre, a special kind of trembling, characteristic of immortal poetry, excites us, as before, excites even more now. It seems strange that in those Saint Petersburg years, not everyone could understand the poet’s soul, not everyone was amazed by it. There was nobody equal to him since Tyutchev.

Anyway, I believe that even nowadays among the so-called “reading public”, especially the part of it, which is able to see new “achievement” in the illiterate mumblings of the Soviet poet, are some people who simply do not like Bunin’s poems. Such people consider this poetry a little illegal amusement of a man doomed to write in prose. It is not necessary to argue about it. There are not many poems in Bunin’s “Selected Poems”, which one would like to reread. They were published along with the author’s short stories, in the shadow of his prose; they can be seen in old magazines, in additional materials of the magazine ‘Niva’, or as a separate book, poorly and sloppily published by that same ‘Niva’. I would like to see all this compiled. Every line of Bunin’s is worthy of being preserved. But I feel gratitude toward this collection (by the way, very graceful in its design), for these two hundred Bunin poems.