dynamite Alfred Nobel, who had died five years earlier. Given every fall by the Swedish Academy on the recommendations of the Nobel Committee, it soon became internationally authoritative. It aroused nationalistic and political passions. A ritual developed that continues to this day: the world press begins its guessing game in September and October, publicizing various lists of potential winners and creating an atmosphere of tense anticipation.
Because of the secrecy surrounding the selection, the press is more often wrong than right in its predictions. The lucky winner is hailed and derided and all this adds to the mystic aura of the Nobel.
Much has been written about Alfred Nobel and his family, but the Russian connection is not often remembered. Ludwig, Alfred’s older brother, turned the steel mill founded by their father in St. Petersburg in 1862 into one of Europe’s largest diesel manufacturing enterprises. (It still exists under the name Russkii Dizel.)
The innovative diesel engines ran on oil, so the Nobels built an oil refinery in Baku in the Caucasus. Ludwig’s son, Emmanuel Nobel (1859–1932), ran the family business in Russia for almost thirty years, until the revolution of 1917. His sister, Marta, married a Russian journalist, Oleinikov, her senior by seventeen years. Thus the scene was set for the intrigue around the Nobel Prize that pitted Gorky against Bunin.
Romain Rolland played a direct role in this intrigue from the start. In the early 1920s, Rolland, enraptured by Bunin’s short story “The Gentleman from San Francisco,” agreed to support his bid for the award (“He is zealously, biliously antirevolutionary, antidemocratic, antipopulist, almost antihumanitarian, a pessimist to the marrow of his bones. But an artist of genius!”),20 but with one proviso: “If Gorky were to be nominated, I would vote for him.”21 However, in 1928, when Gorky was one of the finalists, the prize went to the Norwegian writer Sigrid Undset.
During the NEP period (1921–1927), the Soviet government permitted some cultural contacts with the emigres, and works by Bunin—of course, without his permission and without any royalties—were printed in Russia even by state publishing houses. At that time, in an attempt to divide and neutralize the emigration, the Soviet regime was playing complicated games with some intellectual diaspora groups, such as the Eurasianists.
This ambivalent picture changed sharply after 1928, when books by Bunin and other leading emigre writers were banned and even expunged from libraries. (The remarkable writer Varlam Shalamov, sent to Siberian labor camps in 1943, got an additional ten-year sentence for carelessly characterizing Bunin as a “great Russian author” in a conversation.) That was when the real iron curtain fell between Moscow and the diaspora, for a long sixty years (with a brief hiatus in the early postwar years, when the Soviet poet Konstantin Simonov was sent to Paris by Stalin to meet with Bunin).
This explains why it was so politically important which Russian writer would first receive the Nobel Prize. Giving it to Gorky could be interpreted as support from the world cultural community for the revolutionary changes in Russia. Awarding it to Bunin or another emigre (the names of Merezhkovsky, Kuprin, Balmont, and Ivan Shmelev were circulating as possible candidates) would send exactly the opposite message.
The prize would also show whom Europe considered the true heir to Leo Tolstoy in Russian literature. Before the very first Nobel Prize was announced in 1901, the general expectation was that the recipient would be Tolstoy. When instead it was given to the minor French poet Sully-Prudhomme, a group of indignant Swedish writers and artists, including August Strindberg, Selma Lagerlof, and Andreas Zorn, sent Tolstoy a letter that also appeared in the Russian press: “Everyone is outraged by the fact that the Academy out of political and religious considerations that have nothing to do with literature demonstratively ignored the achievements of Tolstoy.”22
Both sides used all their behind-the-scenes resources. Bunin’s most powerful ally may have been Emmanuel Ludwigovich (as the Bunin family called him) Nobel. This is apparent from a close reading of the diaries of Bunin and his wife (and also of Galina Kuznetsova, then Bunin’s mistress) of the early 1930s, when the question of the “Russian Nobel” leaped back on the agenda.
Emmanuel Nobel even sent his Russian brother-in-law, Oleinikov, as an emissary to Bunin in France to discuss the ticklish details—after all, officially Nobel had no right to influence the members of the academy. (Kuznetsova recorded in her diary that Nobel sent a letter in 1931 “where he writes that he is for Bunin: he had read five or six of his books and is delighted by them.”)23 That is why when Oleinikov let them know that his brother- in-law had a brain hemorrhage (he died the following year), Bunin took this as a catastrophe.24
Another important figure who supported Bunin in his quest for the Nobel was Thomas Masaryk, president of Czechoslovakia, an influential patron of the Russian diaspora culture. The Soviet government went on the counterattack, pressuring the Swedes through diplomatic channels: as Bunin was informed, “the Bolsheviks are agitating against an ‘emigre prize,’ and spreading rumors that if it happens they will break the agreement”25 (the Soviet Union and Sweden were close to announcing telephone communications between the two countries).
The Soviet candidate for the Nobel Prize was Gorky, naturally. According to information given to Bunin, the Bolsheviks had support from Germany. The democratic West, especially France, backed Bunin. The Soviet strategy did not succeed: after two unsuccessful attempts, Bunin finally got the Nobel Prize in 1933, thereby beating not only Gorky, but Stalin as well (which was gleefully noted in the international press). The fact that Bunin stayed at the Nobel house in Stockholm instead of a hotel like the other laureates who had come for the ceremonies was not reported widely.
Bunin’s speech, which he delivered in French, after accepting the Nobel medal (and a check for 80,000 francs) from King Gustav V in Stockholm on December 10, 1933, was broadcast all over the world. The thin, gray author, looking like a Roman patrician, was restrained—undoubtedly by previous arrangement with the Nobel family. He did not say a single word about the Bolsheviks, but did stress that this was the first time in the prize’s history that it was given to an exile and that the gesture, politically significant, “proved once more that in Sweden the love of liberty is truly a national cult.” As Kuznetsova wrote in her diary, “the word ‘exile’ created a stir” among the VIPs attending the ceremony, “but everything turned out all right.”26
But once Bunin returned to France, he no longer felt constrained by diplomatic protocol and he spoke out about Bolshevism without euphemisms: “I am personally completely certain that nothing more despicable, lying, evil, and despotic than this regime ever existed in human history, even in the most depraved and bloody times.”27
The presentation of the Nobel Prize to Bunin had to be perceived by Stalin not only as a serious blow to the international authority (and therefore, to his potential usefulness on the international scene) of his most trusted cultural advisor, but also as an unforgivable cultural humiliation for the entire country. And so the extraordinary political mystique of the Nobel Prize for Literature for twentieth-century Russian culture was born. Here is an intriguing note. In Bunin’s published diary for October 1, 1933, that is, almost six weeks before the official announcement of his award, a laconic and somewhat mysterious reference appears to a postcard that he allegedly received from Stalin.28 What could the Communist dictator have had to say to the great White emigre author?
The coolness that arose between Stalin and Gorky, noticed by many observers, affected the result of a notable international cultural and political event: suggested by Ilya Ehrenburg and formulated by Gorky and Stalin, the International Writers’ Congress “in defense of culture from fascism” took place in Paris in June 1935.
