A summary of Ivan Bunin’s "At the Source of Days"

This collection of early stories and essays by Ivan Bunin encompasses works created between 1890 and 1906. This book is a gallery of peasant and noble lives, capturing the fading of old Russian life and the harsh reality of the remote provinces. This book is published in the "Exclusive: Russian Classics" series. This series also includes other famous collections by the author, such as "Dark Alleys" and "Cursed Days." This edition does not have a precise serial number.

Events in the provinces and villages

In the story "Day by Day," Tikhon Ivanovich Kondaurov, a Yelets court official, enjoys his material well-being. He smokes expensive cigarettes and carefreely plays the waltz "Tiger Cub" on a German accordion. His wife, Nadezhda Fyodorovna, suffers from the spiritual emptiness of their marriage. She longingly recalls her life with her father and thinks about the modest teacher at the district school who is in love with her. A heated argument erupts between the spouses, and Tikhon goes out to a restaurant. Nadezhda Fyodorovna intends to write a letter to the teacher, but instead meekly falls asleep when her drunken husband returns home in the early morning.

The essay "The Shaman and Motka" paints a vivid portrait of Olimpiada Markovna. This degraded spinster landowner dresses in shabby rags and meekly endures the abuse of her drunken worker, Motka. One day, the drunk worker even aggressively threatens to strangle the old woman with a thick belt, forcing her to recite psalms in terror before her impending death.

In "Smallholders," Kapiton Nikolaevich Shakhov and his wife, Sofya Ivanovna, are busily hosting guests for the Feast of the Sign at the Prudki estate. Neighbors gather: Ulya, the old lancer Bebutov, and the wealthy landowner Korotayev. The impoverished candidate of science, Yakov Savelyevich, gets very drunk at the table. He publicly exposes the ignorance of the assembled landowners, who are mired in outright drunkenness. At the end, the guests loudly sing to the accompaniment of a guitar, and the enraged Yakov Savelyevich smashes the heavy instrument over the head of the laughing Ivan Ivanovich.

The elderly widow Fedoseevna from the story of the same name unexpectedly loses her husband, Lukyan, and daughter, Aksyuta. Left without a breadwinner, she spends the eight rubles she had saved for the funeral and goes begging in the surrounding villages. She comes to Kamenka to visit her married daughter, Parashka, but her son-in-law, Osip, cruelly drives the ailing old woman away, openly hating her suffocating cough at night. Fedoseevna quietly leaves the yard and freezes to death in a cold potato field.

Grandfather Kastryuk remains to guard the empty house in Zalesny with his little granddaughter, Dasha. The old man is acutely aware of his growing physical weakness and impending death. Nikolai Petrovich, the landowner, passes by in a droshky and indifferently refuses to hire him as a permanent worker. At night, while keeping watch over the horse herd, Kastryuk prays earnestly under the starry sky and humbly accepts his harsh peasant lot. In the essay "On the Farm," the lonely Kapiton Ivanovich mourns his lost youth. He remembers his deceased beloved Anna Grigoryevna, wanders alone through the dark spring fields, listens to the monotonous chirping of grasshoppers, and contemplates eternity under the night sky.

The essay "Landowner Vorgolsky" describes the cruel Pavel Petrovich. Out of sheer noble tyranny, he harasses random peasants on a country road with a long whip. Later, during a forest hunt, Vorgolsky pursues and brutally beats the inspector Sergei Sergeyevich Pavlovsky on horseback, having become jealous of the young official’s relationship with his wife.

In the story "Tanka," the girl’s parents, desperate and starving, sell their last horse to the cruel tradesman Taldykin. Hungry, Tanya wanders out into the bitter cold to a frozen pond. There, she is met by chance by a passing landowner, Pavel Antonovich. He takes the ragged girl to his warm estate, feeds her hearty prunes, and plays her old tunes on the guitar, fondly remembering his own children.

Student Volkov, in the story "News from the Homeland," receives a letter from his son-in-law about the death of his childhood friend, Mishka Shmyrenok, by starvation. Volkov painfully recalls how Mishka, ravaged by poverty, begged for small change at the winter camp. The young student clearly understands the deadly aridity of his agronomic research against the backdrop of terrible national tragedies.

Roads, wanderings and the search for meaning

At Khartsyzskaya station, the peasants Fedka and old Kirill agonize over their distant home on Easter night ("On a Foreign Land"). They are forced to sit on the cold platform, waiting for a freight train. At midnight, the poor pray fervently at the open station doors, gazing longingly at the lit candles and the young priest. The residents of Velikiy Perevoz depart en masse for the distant Ussuri region ("To the End of the World"). Old Vasily Shkut, unable to find the necessary seventy rubles for the journey, remains to live out his final days in a hut sold to strangers, listening to the quiet evening singing across the river.

In snowy Mozharovka ("The Teacher"), teacher Nikolai Nilych Turbin dreams of going to see his father for Christmas. However, he dutifully sends all his savings to his ailing parent. At a festive party hosted by the wealthy Lintvarev landowners, Turbin becomes extremely drunk from internal embarrassment. He suddenly breaks into a wild dance to the tarantella, shocking the society guests. The next day, overcome with shame, the teacher goes with Kondrat Semyonich to drink at the stove-maker’s, where he finally loses his humanity and falls asleep on dirty straw.

During a snowstorm on the farmstead of Luchezarovka ("In the Field"), old Yakov Petrovich Baskakov and his former orderly, Kovalev, are chopping chairs for firewood with an axe. The old men reminisce about the difficult Crimean War, sing old romances to the guitar, and loudly blow a hunting horn, trying to rescue any lost travelers in the thick snowy darkness. The northern legend "Velga" tells the story of a brave girl. She passionately loves Irvald, but the young man prefers her sister, Sneggar. Irvald disappears in the raging Ice Sea. Velga immediately turns to the dwarf Charne for help. The girl transforms into a white bird, saving her beloved at the cost of her own earthly life.

Grisha Primo ("At the Dacha") meets the Tolstoyan carpenter Kamensky. That evening, Father Grisha’s guests, the student Ignatius and the drunken Podgaevsky, argue rather aggressively with Kamensky about the lofty meaning of spiritual life. Grisha silently sympathizes with the carpenter’s pure ideas.

Essays, legends and lyrical sketches

The narrator visits the chalk cliffs and ancient monasteries on the Donets River ("The Holy Mountains"). He then crosses the raging Nenasytets Rapids on a barge loaded with firewood, manned by fearless pilots ("Cossack Pass"). Later, he recalls a grueling nighttime trek through rocky mountains and an icy snowstorm on a tired horse ("Pass"). The hero of the story "Without Clan or Tribe" is deeply distressed by the wedding of his beloved Zina to the lawyer Bogaut. He angrily rejects the sincere feelings of the student Elena, packs his old student suitcase, and leaves his hometown forever.

The old watchman, Kukushka, retrieves two wolf cubs from a deep ravine for the young masters, Mitya and Kolya. The steward brutally beats the old man for cutting down young birch trees. Kukushka goes begging in neighboring villages and freezes to death on a frosty winter night ("Kukushka"). Two former enemies reconcile in Paris at night under the bright moonlight ("Late Night"). Another secret couple travels in a closed carriage to the stormy autumn sea, where the woman frankly confesses her forbidden love ("In Autumn").

In "A Little Romance," a young girl, before her wedding to the consumptive Count Mammuna, takes a walk in the forest with the narrator. In the autumn, she writes him a despairing letter from the snowy Alps, and in early spring, she dies in Geneva. In winter, in Platonovka ("Pines"), the forest hunter Mitrofan quietly fades away. The narrator observes the deceased man’s nephew reading the Psalter for a long time in a smoky hut, and the modest funeral of a peasant amidst the majestic snowy landscape and the tall pines.

In dense fog on the Black Sea ("Fog"), passengers on a steamship narrowly avoid a nighttime collision with an oncoming vessel. The narrator ponders the pale moon, deep antiquity, and the approach of death. Touring the ruined estates of Kologrivov and Baturina with his coachman, Kornei ("Golden Bottom"), the hero witnesses utter poverty on the richest black-earth lands. An abandoned pregnant princess resolutely drowns herself in a murky pond ("The Tenth of September"), while her lover, Masalsky, serenely departs for Moscow.

In a shaky train carriage ("Dreams"), a commoner nervously hurries to his dying wife. A red-haired man sitting next to him tells a mystical story about red, white, and black roosters that appeared to a deceased priest. Student Voronov ("Birds of the Air") gives a silver fifty-kopeck piece to the sick beggar Luka. The old man is completely indifferent to his impending death and is willing to spend the night right in a snowdrift. That night, Luka, predictably, freezes to death on a dirt road.

The description of a horse fair ("Podtorzh’e") depicts the wild, passionate bargaining between wealthy hucksters and cunning gypsies at the walls of a yellow prison. "The New Road" describes a long train journey through dense forests: the laying of steel rails brings inevitable changes to this quiet, patriarchal land. In the miniature "New Year," a husband and wife tenderly reconcile in a half-abandoned, snow-covered Tambov estate. The sketch "Above the City" describes the pure delight of boys who climb the dilapidated city bell tower to see the old bell ringer, Vaska.

The essay "Epitaph" bitterly laments the disappearance of peasant fields and wooden crosses: new people are drilling deep into the earth for iron ore. The miniature "From Above" conveys the rapturous feeling of a lonely traveler standing on a spring mountain pass under a blue sky. The book concludes with the crucial autobiographical story "At the Source of Days." A boy on a steppe farm first becomes aware of his existence by looking into the mirror of an old toilet. Soon after, his younger sister Nadya dies suddenly in the log house.

According to a superstitious folk custom, the mirror is hastily covered with black calico. Trying to unravel the great mystery of hidden life, the growing boy secretly scratches the red paint on the back of the glass amalgam. This childish gesture leaves a permanent physical trace of his first agonizing thoughts of inevitable death and cold oblivion.