THANKS to the ubiquitous nature of the inte­rnet, my recent column on the Uru­g­u­ayan writer Felisberto Hernández was seen by some readers in South America who take an educated interest in literature. Made curious that a Latin American writer was given such attention in a newspaper in Pakistan, they were further surprised that the author receiving such high praise was unknown to them, and then, on reading Hernández, even more surprised that he was indeed one of the best. That had precisely been my hope. The function of literary criticism surely is first to bring to a wide audience new works which, because of their original aesthetic approach, initially appear difficult to new readers; secondly, to re-evaluate the tradition in order to relate its relevance to those new masterpieces that come to be seen to be part of its future; and thirdly, to resurrect from the heap of forgotten, neglected or marginalised writers those who are truly superb. Hence, my columns on Felisberto Hernández, Álvaro Mutis, Theodore Roethke, and several others. An associated function of criticism, of course, is to re-evaluate those already considered great to see if they endure the test of time. Hence, my dismissal of the likes of E.M. Forster and Philip Larkin. And now, here is one more writer who is one of the finest but is hardly known outside comparative literature courses: Ivan Bunin.

Living in France among Russian exiles who had fled from their native land after the Bolshevik Revolution, Bunin (1870-1953) was writing and publishing from the late 19th century to the mid-20th, those years that saw an extraordinary outpouring of the avant-garde in all the arts in Europe. In literature there was a dazzling display of unprecedented intensity of great original works, and some of the principal writers of those years — Charles Baudelaire, Rainer Maria Rilke, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, creators all of a radical stylistic shift that was deemed necessary to uncover the layers of darkness within the post-Freudian self in a world bereft of pre-Darwinian certainties — are still guiding influences a century later. Bunin would be a prominent name in a fuller list of the important writers of that time, but in spite of receiving the Nobel Prize in 1933, he fell into neglect.

Ezra Pound remarked that there are two ways for the writer: the old man’s road taken by Thomas Hardy, which is all content, and the other that produces music (in a letter to T.C. Wilson, Oct 30th, 1933). Bunin’s novel, The Life of Arseniev, translated as The Well of Days, and his short stories collected in The Gentleman from San Francisco and Other Stories have the quality of music in that while they engage the reader’s intellect with their ideas they simultaneously insinuate an abstract comprehension in the imagination which, springing in the mind as a convincing intuition and releasing a pleasurable sensation as if one heard a distant melody, brings a metaphysical understanding to the reader.

It is a quality to be found in the very best literature. We hear it as the deeply heard melody expressive of the soul’s anguish, as in the music of Gustav Mahler, in that masterpiece of short fiction, Leo Tolstoy’s novella, The Death of Ivan Ilyich. Its prose is so intense that even in the translation that rare music is to be heard in the language which draws its power from images and the narration of objective facts. While a particular, especially quotable, passage can be strongly persuasive, making the dominant theme sound striking, it is the accumulating force of Tolstoy’s presentation of one vivid scene after another, which makes us experience Ilyich’s pain, which is the unrelieved pain of the human condition that constantly seeks and inevitably finds no meaning in existence, that gives the story its symphonic force.

Pre-eminent among other modern works of short fiction that convey a similar force are ‘The Middle Years’ by Henry James, ‘Il Conde’ by Joseph Conrad, and James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’, the final story in Dubliners. In the James story, an aged and dying novelist named Dencombe is suffering from the artist’s profound regret that though his work has been highly praised yet no one has truly understood him. Before dying, Dencombe’s mind — still stimulated by the novelist’s habitually inventive imagination — creates a new fiction that James presents as actually happening in which a young character appears before the novelist by chance and by coincidence happens to be reading his latest novel; what’s more, the young man shows an understanding which is more than superficial admiration that impresses Dencombe, making him believe that he has at last found his ideal reader. It is a splendid illusion which brings contentment to the dying novelist, but he is soon disabused of the idea, for it’s clear to the novelist that even the wisest reader does not fathom the real depth of his work. In the end, we are alone in the universe; what we experience is a story of which we are the author and sole reader.

The lonely Count who tells his story to the narrator in Conrad’s ‘Il Conde’ is an elegant old gentleman from central Europe spending the winter in Naples where he is accosted by young men in black and persuaded to take the train back to Bohemia. Conrad presents an absorbing story but in a language rich in symbolic force: the music playing in the bandstand, the nearby ocean and the star-filled sky, even the dark young men who threaten the Count’s outwardly serene life, all create an imaginative context for the language to release more than a meaning to be understood, for the text leaves a haunting melody playing in the reader’s mind. Similarly, the surface content of Joyce’s ‘The Dead’, concerned largely with love and death, is common enough; it is the language and the suggestiveness of the physical details that give the story its metaphysical dimension that sends music vibrating in the reader’s mind. And this quality, which we experience in the greatest literature, is what distinguishes the work of Bunin.

His short story, ‘The Gentleman from San Francisco’, has the same power that we observed in Tolstoy, the narrative unfolding vivid events in a language which is woven of an ontological fabric, that, while evoking our sympathy for the unique individual is also relevant to the universal human condition. Known simply as “the gentleman from San Francisco”, he has acquired enough wealth by his 58th year to believe he deserves “a perfect right to rest” and, accompanied by his wife and daughter, travels first-class by ship, “the liner, the famous Atlantis”, to the Old World, anticipating the much vaunted pleasures of Mediterranean Europe with a hedonistic vision of Naples and Capri. He plans to spend carnival in Nice and Monte Carlo, visit Rome during Holy Week, and proceed from the European capitals across the Middle East and return to the New World via Japan. His is to be the pilgrimage of life, man attempting to fulfil his belief that he inhabits an earthly paradise.

He enjoys the attention given to the rich and goes through the motions of a blissful life on the Atlantis, as when he is seen dining “in the pearly-gold radiance” of the “palatial dining-room behind a bottle of wine…and a lush display of hyacinths”. But on entering the Mediterranean, the weather drops a curtain in front of the famous sights. The best suite in the luxury hotel in Capri does not fulfil his anticipated pleasure. Something is wrong. Dressing for dinner, he barely reaches the dining room where an uncontrolled convulsion seizes him and he collapses to the ground.

Bunin’s method is to stay strictly with the objective facts but to load them with ambiguity and irony which the reader hardly notices. If one were to pause on seeing the ocean liner first referred to as “the famous Atlantis”, one would recall Plato’s seminal story in which the island representing Atlantis is submerged in the ocean and lost for ever. The luxury liner the gentleman is travelling on is the Ship of Death.

He is from San Francisco, symbolically the farthest point in the New World, and has undertaken the voyage to the Old World. It is a journey not of discovery but of a return to one’s origins. The ship on which the first-class travellers lie on comfortable deckchairs traverses an ocean described as “the grey-green watery waste swelling heavily in the mist”, and they lie there gazing at “the cloudy sky and foaming ridges” of waves or they fall into “sweet somnolence”, that happy state in which the mind can forget the dreary present. Their greatest excitement is to dress for dinner and enjoy the luxury of the table even though the ship’s siren is emitting “moans of infernal despair”.

The ship’s captain is rarely seen among the passengers and is described as looking like “an enormous idol”; there is the suggestion that the passengers are on some pagan pilgrimage to some ultimate carnival of pleasure. But just as Bunin shows them at the height of sybaritic delight with the string orchestra playing in the glittering dining room, he turns the camera and the microphone to the reality of the ship struggling through “mountainous black ocean waves” and the snowstorm whistling through the rigging; he records the ship’s siren, “muffled by the mist”, groaning “in mortal anguish”; and in the same sentence of extraordinary visual and aural power, goes on to show the frozen men on the watch and cuts to “the underwater depths of the liner, where gigantic furnaces voicelessly cackled” while half-naked men “who were bathed in acrid, dirty sweat and lurid from the flames” shovelled piles of coal into them; we are — Bunin at last spells it out — in “the torrid dark bowels of the last, ninth circle of the inferno”.

But the extraordinary sentence is not finished yet, for just as we recognise where we are, the camera cuts back to the passengers dancing, drinking and smoking in the ballroom. Among them is an elegant couple very much in love, dancing only with each other and displaying absolute happiness, who draw the admiration of the other passengers for their profound devotion to each other; then Bunin adds a final sting: “only the captain knew that they were paid by Lloyds to feign their love for high wages”, performing their act in one ship after another. The Ship of Death is also the Ship of Fools.

The weather worsens, the Mediterranean is filled with mist and darkness though the passengers continue to delude themselves that they are on the journey of their life, which, in a metaphorical, Dantesque sense unknown to them, they indeed are; in Naples, they drive through “crowded, narrow, wet, corridor-like” streets, visit “deadly clean” museums where the light is “as boring as snow”, enter churches inside each one of which there is “a huge empty silence”; expecting to see lemon trees in blossom in Capri, the weather is so bad, “Capri was completely invisible, just as if it had never existed”. When he does see something of it, the gentleman from San Francisco is disappointed that there is only a huddle of “wretched, mould-encrusted stone houses”: it is not “the real Italy which he had come to enjoy”.

Then comes the fatal night in the exclusive hotel. The gentleman, dressing for dinner, has a difficulty with a stud under the stiff collar and after struggling to fix it, his face is flushed, his throat constricted, and he cries out, “God, this is dreadful!” The deity he has invoked does not respond; instead, the gong sounds “as if from a pagan temple”, reminding the gentleman to hurry to dinner. On his way to the dining room, he stops and sits in an adjoining reading room where suddenly he is seized by a convulsion and falls, giving out a “savage” cry. The consequent commotion spoils the evening of the other diners. The gentleman, who used to be fawned upon and lodged in the hotel’s most luxurious suite, is unceremoniously deposited in the “smallest, nastiest, dampest and coldest” room in the hotel where he “lies on a cheap iron bedstead under some coarse woollen blankets”, and dies. And as a final insult, he is shipped back “hidden from the living in a tarred coffin” in the “black hold” of the Atlantis, while above in the glittering ballroom, among the silks, diamonds and bare female shoulders of the new voyagers, the hired couple danced, appearing to be deeply in love.

Is Bunin suggesting that in a world of appearances a human being is nothing but a bundle of self-inflating vanities that must inevitably be discarded out of sight of the living whose grand illusion must not be threatened? Bunin says nothing; he merely creates some of the richest language of such imagistic clarity that on each rereading one’s understanding acquires a new layer of meaning. There are 16 other stories in this collection, each with its own complexity of meaning even when the subject matter is as common as a couple’s adulterous affair: the beauty, the music is all in the language.

A discussion of Bunin’s novel, The Well of Days, either demands a long chapter with a detailed analysis of how by seeming to write a fairly direct autobiographical novel set in a particular time — pre-Soviet Russia — Bunin creates the portrait of a timeless society that could exist anywhere, or it demands that we read it, remain silent and read it again and be haunted by its music. There are comparisons to be made with Vladimir Nabokov and Proust; this is literature at its best, language shimmering with brilliant sensuous details that excite the imagination as if one listened to Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’.