Echoes of a Lost World

MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS (217 pp.)--Ivan Bunin--Doubleday ($3).

Where are they now--the Russian intellectuals who sat at Tolstoy's feet (he encased them in square-toed boots), talked the hours away with Chekhov and listened to first-hand yarns about Dostoevsky and Gogol?

Ivan Bunin, poet, novelist and aristocrat, is one of the last of these echoes of the old Russia. He is 80, almost bedridden with asthma, and he lives out his last years of exile in a Paris flat, half-forgotten by the world since he received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1933. What he has to say now, in Memories and Portraits, does more than evoke the people and places of his own past. Sometimes gently, sometimes tartly, it conveys the tragedy of a whole generation of intellectuals of good will.

"I Think, Vanusha . . ." Memories is brief; its range is long. Bunin was a worshipful youth when he ran over snowy fields with old Tolstoy and heard that vigorous sage (who had just lost a son) shouting defiantly to the winds: "There is no death, there is no death!" But with Chekhov, Bunin was more of an intimate contemporary. They conducted the sort of dialogue that used to make men of other nations scratch their heads in wonder at the odd Russian mind. "Do you like the sea?" Bunin asked. "Yes," said Chekhov. "Only it's so empty."

No man could be gayer than Chekhov in his gay moments, but his deeper, sadder convictions were never concealed for long. "For 25 years," he complained, "they tear a man to shreds, and then they come and present him with a quill pen made of aluminum." He had little faith in any triumph of human goodness. "In nature," he assured Bunin, "a repulsive caterpillar turns into a lovely butterfly. But with human beings it's the other way round . . ."

Feodor Chaliapin, the great basso, was a friend of a different stamp--one who devoured life with all the resources of his huge frame. As this was an expensive business, Chaliapin greatly resented being asked to give his services gratis. "Only little birds sing for nothing," he loved to say. But nothing pleased him more than to phone his friend, Pianist Rachmaninoff, and invite him to an all-night session of duets. One night when Chaliapin was in his cups, he fixed Bunin with a beady eye, and saying, "I think, Vanusha, that you are very tight indeed," humped him on to his back and carried him up five flights of stairs to bed.

"What a Pity that Kolya . . ." Such were Bunin's friends. His enemies were Russian writers who preferred a pampered life in the Soviet Union to weedy exile. One such was Maxim Gorky, who "walked lightly, toes first, with a certain slinking gracefulness typical, if I may say so, of thieves."

Bunin saw clearly that there was no common ground for supporters of the old and new regimes (he refused two Soviet invitations to return to Russia). But the most touching personal history in his book is that of the Prince of Oldenburg, a man too saintly and naive to realize this. "Oh, what nice, charming people you all are!" cried the good old simpleton after spending an evening chatting with revolutionaries. "And what a pity that Kolya never spent an evening like this! Everything, everything would have been different if you and he had come to know each other!"

But "Kolya," who was an old friend of the Prince, had long since been shot to death with his family in a cellar. He was better known as Czar Nicholas II.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.