One of the great achievements of twentieth-century Russian émigré literature, Dark Avenues - the culmination of a life's work of unrelenting challenge to Soviet dogma - took Bunin's poetic mastery of language to new heights. Written between 1938 and 1944 and set in the context of the Russian cultural and historical crises of the preceding decades, this collection of short fiction centres around dark, erotic liaisons.

Love in its many varied forms is the unifying motif in a rich range of narratives, characterized by the evocative, elegiac, elegant prose for which Bunin is rightly renowned.

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'I have been keeping an eye on Bunin’s brilliant talent. He really is the enemy.' Andrei Bely

'Your influence is truly beyond words… I do not know any other writer whose external world is so closely tied to another, whose sensations are more exact and indispensable, and whose world is more genuine and also more unexpected than yours.' André Gide

'He was a great stylist who wrote very suggestively. He didn’t spray us with ideologies or worries. His writing is pure poetry.' Andrei Makine

'A most powerful "connoisseur of colours". One could write an entire dissertation on his colour schemes.' Vladimir Nabokov

'You have, Mr Bunin, thoroughly explored the soul of vanished Russia, and in doing so you have most deservedly continued the glorious traditions of the great Russian literature.' Professor Wilhelm Nordenson, at the 1933 Nobel Prize banquet

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Read an excerpt from Dark Avenues

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