Ivan Bunin

Born to an impoverished noble family and largely self-taught, Bunin came up in the literary circle around Chekhov and Gorky before the Revolution turned him into one of its fiercest literary enemies. His diary of 1918 and 1919, later published as Cursed Days, records the Bolshevik takeover in Moscow and Odessa with a loathing that never softened; he left Russia for good in 1920 and settled in Grasse, in the south of France.

In 1933 he became the first Russian writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, an honor the Soviet press denounced as bourgeois nostalgia. He stayed in France through the German occupation, reportedly sheltering Jewish refugees at his villa despite his own precarious finances, and wrote the stories of Dark Avenues, his last major work, in his seventies. He died in Paris in 1953, in genteel poverty, still stateless.