About the author:
Margarita M. Abolina, PhD in Philology, independent scholar, St. Petersburg, Russia.
ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5844-1381
E-mail:
Abstract:
The paper deals with an episode from the long history of Ivan Bunin’s cooperation with Russian publishers in exile. The first emigrant publishing house in which Bunin’s books were published was called “Russian Land” — it was a Parisian cooperative enterprise that continued the “self-publishing” of Russian writers: Alexey Tolstoy, Aleksander Kuprin, Konstantin Balmont et al. took part in it just like Bunin. The director of the publishing house was Tikhon Polner, a journalist and historian, — it’s in his archive documents, now stored in the Bakhmeteff Archive of Russian and Eastern European History and Culture of Columbia University, that we find information on the circulation of three Bunin books published by “Russian Land” as well as the writer’s fee. The books were poorly sold as potential buyers did not have money. The collections “The Village”, “The Gentleman from San Francisco” and “The Cup of Life” included works, that were printed and became famous before revolution, but emigré readers saw in them something of a “touch of the motherland”.