Vera Muromtseva Bounine

Vera Muromtseva Bounine is the second wife of the Nobel Prize for Literature Ivan Bunin with whom she lived until the writer's death in 1953. She is also the author of his memoirs.

Her uncle, Sergei Andreevich Muromtsev, was the chairman of the First State Duma.

Vera received an excellent education. She seriously studied chemistry, knew four languages, was engaged in translations, was fond of modern literature. Moreover, she was unusually beautiful. Some have noted her resemblance to Madonna. Valentin Kataev describes her as "a tall, cameo-faced, smoothly combed blonde with a knot of hair sliding down her neck, a blue-eyed Moscow dull beauty".

Ivan Alekseevich Bunin, at the first meeting in Tsaritsyno, the dacha of Muromtsev, in 1896, did not pay attention to the young Vera Muromtseva. All his thoughts were occupied by a completely different woman. But Vera remembered this meeting "on a fine June day near a flowering meadow." I even remembered his face, which was then "fresh and healthy." What can not be said at the time of their real meeting on November 4, 1906 in the apartment of the young writer Boris Konstantinovich Zaitsev. The owners organized a literary evening, where Bunin was invited as a writer (although at that time he was little known). And here Ivan Alekseevich finally noticed “a quiet young lady with Leonardo's eyes.

Vera's parents were against her relationship with Bunin. Moreover, all their friends and acquaintances in the professorial environment also had a negative attitude towards this relationship. At that time, Vera Muromtseva was in her last year and she had to take exams and write her thesis. When she turned to Professor Zelinsky with a request to give her her thesis, he answered her: "No, I won't give you work," he said in his stuttering voice, "either Bunin, or work ..." And Vera and Bunin began to meet secretly from everyone.

On April 10, 1907 Vera Nikolaevna and Ivan Alekseevich set off on their first journey. For all relatives, friends and acquaintances, they became husband and wife. They lived in a civil marriage for a long time. They got married, in France, only in 1922.

Over the years together, they've had all sorts of things. Bunin's literary secretary Andrei Sedykh, observing the relationship between Vera Nikolaevna and Bunin, once wrote: “He had novels, although he loved his wife Vera Nikolaevna with a real, even some kind of superstitious love ... he would not exchange Vera Nikolaevna for anyone. And with all this, he loved to see young, talented women around him, courted them, flirted, and this need only intensified over the years ... It seemed to me that she ... believed that the writer Bunin is a special person, that his emotional needs go beyond normal family life, and in her endless love and devotion to 'Jan' she made this, her greatest sacrifice ... ”.

After the death of Ivan Alekseevich, she lived only in memory of him, receiving a personal pension from the USSR as the widow of a Russian writer. Vera Nikolaevna wrote the book "The Life of Bunin", essays "Conversations with Memory", the book "The Adolescent Years of IA Bunin", published manuscripts from the literary heritage of Bunin.