Ivan Bunin Short Novels In English. Cleansing Monday, Pure Monday Bunin Free Text Read Online

Pure Monday Ivan Bunin

Moscow gloomy grey winter day was getting darker.
The gas street lamps was starting to lit coldly, the shop windows were warmly illuminated.

Freeing from the day’s noises and hustle, evening Moscow life started to heat up: the cabmen’s sledges were rushing more densely and vigorously, the overcrowded, diving trams were rattling more intensely.

In the twilight the green stars were already dropping from the wires with a hiss, while passers hurrying along the snowy pavements, dessapearing into murky shadows in the mist …..

At this hour every evening my coachman delivered me on a pacing trotter – from the Red Gate to the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour: SHE lived against it.

Every evening I took her to dine in Prague, Hermitage or Metropol. After the dinner we went to theatres, to concerts, and then to “Yar”, to “Strelna”…..

I did not know what to eventually expect, and how all this going to end, and I tried not to think and not to speculate.

It was useless anyway, just as it was useless to talk to her about it, she turned off any conversation about our future.

She was mysterious, incomprehensible to me, our relations with her were strange also – we were still not quite close, and all this kept me in unresolvable tension, in agonising expectation – and at the same time I was thrilled for every hour I can spend near her.

She was attending a some course, without obvious purpose, quite infrequently, but she did attend.

I asked her once: “Why?”

She shrugged her shoulder: “Why is everything done in the world? Do we fully understand our behavior ? Besides, I have interest for history …..”

She lived alone, – her widowed father, an educated man from a noble merchant family, lived at rest in Tver, collecting something, like all these merchants.

In Moscow she rented a corner flat with a beautiful view on the fifth floor in the house, just opposite the Church Of The Saviour. There were only two rooms, but spacious and very well furnished.

In the first room there was standing a wide Turkish sofa and an expensive piano, on which she kept slowly and lazy
studying, the somnambulistically charming beginning of the “Moonlight Sonata” – only the beginning.

On the piano and on the mantelpiece under mirror there were blooming pretty flowers in cut vases, by my order new ones were delivered to her every week, – and when I came to see her on a Saturday evening, she was lying on the Turkish sofa under the portrait of a barefooted Tolstoy hung there for some misterious reason, would leisurely extend her hand to me for a kiss and say looking absent: “Thank you for the flowers ….. ”

I brought her boxes of chocolates, new books – Hoffmannsthal, Schnitzler, Tetmajer, Przybyszewski – and received from her the same “Thank You” and her warm hand extended, and sometimes an order to sit down near the sofa without taking off my coat.

“I don’t know why” – she said thoughtfully, stroking my beaver collar – “but it seems that nothing can be better than the smell of winter air you bring when you enter the room from the courtyard …..”

It seemed as she needed nothing: nor flowers, nor books, nor lunches, nor theatres, nor dinners outside of the city; though still she had her favourite and unfavorite flowers, she always read all the books I brought to her, she ate a whole box of chocolate a day, at lunches and dinners she ate as much as I did, liked rasstegai with burbot ukha soup, pink grouses in deep-fried smetana cream.

Sometimes she said: “I don’t understand why people aren’t getting tired of eating all their lives, while they have lunch and dinner every single day”.

But still herself she ate with appetite both lunch and dinner with a Moscow style understanding of the matter.

Her obvious weakness was only good clothes, velvet, silks, expensive furs …..

We were both rich, healthy, young, and so good-looking that people followed us with eyes in restaurants, at concerts.

I, born in Penza province, was at that time somehow really handsome with a southern, hot look.

“Obscenely handsome,” a famous actor, a great glutton and monstrously fat, but very clever man, once said to me.

“The only devil knows who you are, a Sicilian of some sort ….. ” he said with sleepy voice.

My personality was also southern, lively, loud, I was always ready for a happy smile, for a good kind joke.

Her beauty was some kind of Indian or Persian : a dusky amber face, gorgeous hair somehow sinister in its thick blackness, eyebrows softly shining like black sable fur, eyes as black as velvet charcoal; her seductive satin dark poppy red mouth was slightly shaded with cute fuzz.

When going out, she most often wore a dress of pomegranate velvet and the same color shoes with gold clasps.

To her courses she went as a modest student girl, eating breakfast for thirty kopeks in the vegetarian canteen on Arbat.

And as much as I was talkative, open hearted and cheerful, she was most often silent: lying on the sofa with a book in her hands, always in her thoughts, trying to comprehend something, she often put it down and looked with question in her eyes in front of her.

I saw all this when I visited her sometimes in the daytime, in every month there were three or four days, when she didn’t go out and leave her house at all, just lying and reading, forcing me to sit down in an armchair near the sofa and also to read in silence.

“You’re awfully chatty and fidgety” she said “Let me finish this chapter …..”

“If I hadn’t been chatty and fidgety, I might never have met you ” I replied, reminding her of our first encounter: Once in December, visiting an Art Circle by Andrei Bely, who sang a lecture while running and dancing on the stage, I was twirling and laughing so much, that she, who happened to be just in the chair next to me and at first glanced at me with some bewilderment, also eventually laughed, and I immediately turned to her for a jolly talk.

Clean Monday Ivan Bunin.
Cleansing Monday Ivan Bunin.
Pure Monday Ivan Bunin.
Ivan Bunin Novels In English Free Book Read Online Free.
Translation Angelita Fiona Chiara Di Luna (copyrighted) 2025 @dreamlandica.com