The World of Russian Language and Culture: Vera Muromtseva: "…The life is not enough even for one love"

Have you ever thought what it means to be a wife? Where can you learn this art? I would say, to be a wife means to just love. The story of one life and one love, those of Vera Muromtseva, serve to confirm that...

Due to her all-forgiving love, infinite devotion and self-sacrifice, the world got one of the greatest Russian writers. I am fully convinced that Ivan Bunin would not have become who he was without his Vera. Memoir writer Vasily Yanovsky wrote about Vera Bunina: ‘It was a Russian (‘saint’) woman, whose destiny was to unconditionally and selflessly follow her hero to Siberia, to mining camps, or to Monte Carlo and Stockholm, anywhere!.. She shared the fate of any poet, journalist or just any person she knew who got into trouble, she ran to help them through severe frost, slush and darkness…’

Her contemporaries described her as a woman of tireless and inexhaustible tenderness, simple lifestyle, kindness, modesty, but at the same time they mentioned queenliness and light that she radiated. Marina Tsvetaeva wrote in one of her letters to Vera Muromtseva-Bunina: ‘‘Vera Muromtseva’. ‘Bunin’s wife’. You see that these are two different persons that don’t know each other.’ Why? Let’s work it out together.

Vera Muromtseva

‘‘Vera Muromtseva’ is my early childhood… I am writing to ‘Vera Muromtseva’, HOME…’, Marina Tsvetaeva wrote in a letter to Vera Muromtseva. For Tsvetaeva, ‘Vera Muromtseva’ embodied the life of Moscow nobility at the turn of the century.

She was born in 1881 to an old Moscow noble academic family. Her uncle, Sergey Muromtsev, was the chair of the First State Duma. Vera got an excellent education. She studied chemistry, spoke four languages, did translations and was very interested in modern literature. Moreover, she was a rare beauty. Some mentioned her resemblance to Madonna. Valentin Kataev described her appearance:

‘…at the first time I saw … Vera Muromtseva, a young beautiful woman, not a lady from the high society, but a woman: a tall, with a cameo-like face, smoothly-combed, blue-eyed blonde with a topknot falling down her neck, who was dressed like a student, a Moscow soft beauty from the intellectual academic community that has always seemed to me even more unattainable than, for example, ‘Vestnik Evropy’ (‘Messenger of Europe’), a fat magazine with a bricky cover and a name written in Slavic ligature, published under the editorship of a professor with a meaningful, kind of extremely scientific surname Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky.’

Hard to believe that a man can ignore such woman and not fall in love at first sight. However, in 1896 in Tsaritsino, where they first met, Ivan Bunin paid no attention to Vera Muromtseva. Another woman had occupied his thoughts. But Vera memorized this encounter ‘on a beautiful day in June by a flowery meadow.’ She even remembered his face, so ‘fresh and healthy-looking’. Their real first meeting that happened on November 4, 1906 in the apartment of a young writer Boris Zaitsev was very different. Hosts arranged a literary soirée, where Bunin was invited as a writer (though at that time he was little known). And it was there when he finally noticed a ‘quiet lady with eyes from Leonardo’s paintings.’

Leonardo da Vinci Woman's Head. 1473

‘Having talked and laughed in spades, they tumultuously left the dining room. I came up to the opposite wall and stopped, thinking of going home.

Bunin appeared in the doorway.

‘How did you get here?’ he asked.

I flamed up, but replied quietly:

‘The same way as you did.’

‘But who are you?’

‘A human being.’

‘What do you do?’

'Chemistry.'

‘What’s your surname?’

'Muromtseva.'

‘Are you a relative of general Muromtsev, a landlord in Predtechevo?’

‘Yes, he is my first cousin once removed.’

‘I sometimes see him at the Izmalkovo station.’

We talked about him for a while. Then Bunin told me that last year he witnessed trashing in Odessa.

‘Where can I see you again?’

‘Only at my family’s house. We receive guests on Saturdays. I am busy on all other days. Today is an exception: everybody thinks I’m still in Petersburg…’

Vera’s parents were against her relationship with Bunin, which is understood: their beloved daughter was dating a still married writer whose lifestyle was quite free. Her mother was vigorously opposed to Bunin, as well as all their friends and acquaintances in the academic community. At that time, Vera Muromtseva was in the final year at the university, and she had to pass the exams and write her graduation work. When she asked a family friend to give her a graduation paper, he said: “No, I am not giving you the paper, you have to choose either Bunin or the paper…”

So Vera began to date Bunin secretly. “Once, when I came to Bunin, he told me about his dearest wish – to visit the Holy Land.

‘It would be wonderful to go together!’ he said. ‘I can spend hours with you and never get bored, while I cannot stand listening to others even for an hour.’

Soon after that Bunin decided to completely change not only her life, but also her occupation: ‘I have an idea, you need to start translating, it would make our life and journeys more enjoyable: each of us would have something to do, we wouldn’t get bored and interfere with each other’s work…’

‘When my friends and relatives told me that the decision to live with him outside the marriage meant self-sacrifice, I was very surprised,’ - Vera Muromtseva wrote in her diary.

Her father was the only person who knew she was going to travel to the Holy Land with Bunin without disguise. It was sore news for him, but he tried to conceal it. Vera’s brothers who believed their sister was always right comforted their mother. On the day of departure, to dissipate the tension, one of the brothers read a long list of who he believed were former Vera’s admirers singing ‘peace to Thee with the saints’.

The last night before her new life ‘Vera had ambivalent feelings, she was both joyful and sad. Deep inside she was struggling with her doubts.’

Bunin’s wife

On April 10, 1907, Vera and Ivan went on their first journey. For all their friends and relatives they had already become husband and wife. However, they lived together outside of marriage for a long time. They got married in church only in 1922 in France.

Egypt, Syria, Palestine, Greece, Turkey, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, France… One journey followed another, and more and more… They led a nomadic life for almost twenty years. They settled down in Grasse, a small town in southern France. It was well known as the generally recognized perfumery capital of the world.

They had different times during the years spent together. Watching Vera and Bunin’s relationship, Bunin’s literary secretary Andrey Sedykh wrote: ‘He had love affairs, but he loved his wife Vera with a true and even sort of superstitious love… He would never have traded her for anyone. Yet he liked having young talented women around, paying court to them, flirting, and this need was growing with the course of time… It seemed to me that she… believed the writer Bunin to be a special man, whose emotional needs went beyond the bounds of normal family life. In her eternal love and devotion to ‘Yan’ she was ready to make her greatest sacrifice…’

Yan – this is how Vera decided to call him at the dawn of their relationship, ‘because no other woman had ever called him this way, …he was very proud that his family came from a Lithuanian who had come to Russia, he liked this nickname’. However, Valentin Kataev wrote that Vera called him Ioann. ‘I remember being greatly surprised with this pretentious Ioann addressing Bunin. Nonetheless, soon I realized that it was perfectly in accordance with the spirit of Moscow at that time, where love of the antique had always been in fashion. Calling her husband Ioann instead of Ivan conformed the Moscow style, and perhaps partly implied Ivan the Terrible with his lean, gall face, goatee, seven wives and haughtily screwed-up eyes. Anyway, it was obvious that Vera stood in awe of her overlord, who didn’t actually bear any resemblance to Ivan the Terrible, loving awe probably akin to idolization."

Who actually was Vera for Bunin? Alas, we will not find out. Nevertheless, according to Georgy Adamovich, ‘he was endlessly thankful for her eternal faithfulness and deeply appreciated her. Late Ivan Bunin was not an easy-going person in day-to-day life, and he was certainly aware of this. The deeper he felt everything he was obliged to his wife with. I think if someone in his presence had offended or hurt Vera, he, given his great passion, would have killed the offender – not only as an enemy, but also as a calumniator, a morally depraved person unable to discriminate between good and evil, light and darkness".

Vera Muromtseva-Bunina

Vera outlived Bunin by eight years. Eight long years without him against forty-seven, when she was not only the Wife of the writer, but, having a talent for literature, Vera Muromtseva also translated and wrote articles. She translated ‘Sentimental Education’ and ‘The Temptation of Saint Anthony’ by Flaubert, short stories by Maupassant, ‘Graziella’ by Lamartine, poems by André Chénier, the poem ‘Enoch Arden’ by Tennyson. She wrote articles such as ‘In memory of S. N. Ivanov’, ‘Naydenov’, ‘L. N. Andreyev’, ‘Piccolo Marina’, ‘Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky’, ‘Yushkevich’, ‘Kondakov’, ‘Moscow Wednesdays’, ‘Ertel’, ‘At Old Pimen’s. (Ilovaysky)’, ‘S. A. Muromtsev’, ‘Guest from overseas. (Verharn)’, ‘Testament’, ‘Sensible Heart. (O. A. Shmeleva)’, ‘Quisisana’, ‘Muscovites’, ‘Collective Courses’, ‘Evenings on Knyajeskaya. (Voloshin)’.

After Bunin passed away, she lived on her memories about him, receiving a merit pension from the USSR as a Russian writer’s widow. Vera Muromtseva wrote two books: ‘Life of Bunin’ and ‘Conversations with my memory’, which are filled with love for her husband, her favorite writer.

By a strange quirk of fate Vera Muromtseva-Bunina was buried… at her husband’s feet…

"The graveyard warden, scruffily dressed Russian gentleman, with a bit ironic smile on his worn out yet still decent face… took us down a straight path past orthodox crosses and large gravestones and stopped next to a grey granite cross of a peculiar form, reminiscent of some kind of stone decoration, maybe even St’ George’s Cross, but stocky, dark, and heavy.

Here’s your Bunin, look, – said the warden. – As for the cross, experts assure that this is a copy of an Old Russian, Pskovian, or Byzantine relic of the past, found somewhere somehow during some excavations – I can’t say where and how because I know absolutely nothing about archeology – but as for the location of the grave, you see it’s not in the outskirts and the company is rather respectable, – he said pointing at the neighboring graves with a hospitable gesture where you could read a few once-popular Russian surnames who had fallen from grace long ago. – They are brought here from all over the world: from England, Switzerland, even from America by water. There’s no helping it. This is the most respectable orthodox cemetery for emigrants. There won’t be any more room left soon. We have already started to bury two in one grave, with the same surname, of course. For example, we have recently had to bury Vera in Ivan Bunin’s grave at his feet. So now they will be together forever, lying under one cross…"

‘I suddenly realized that I cannot forbid Yan to love whoever he wanted… I only wish this love to be delightful for his soul… A person’s happiness is not to want anything for oneself… Then your soul calms down and you find something good where you least expected it…”

P.S. I do not like the film ‘His Wife’s Diary’, because after watching it many people turn away from Bunin’s work often without becoming familiar with it. Ivan Bunin is my favorite writer. And I admire his wife, Vera Muromtseva-Bunina.

Russian version:

http://www.etoya.ru/lady/2011/4/23/15921/#Вера_Муромцева:__…Жизни_мало_и_для_одной_любви_