Nobel-winner Ivan Bunin’s most famous short story is also his least characteristic. First translated by D. H. Lawrence, “The Gentleman from San Francisco” tells the story of a triumphant capitalist who, “fully convinced of his right to rest,” brings his wife and daughter to Europe for two years’ vacation. Once in Italy, after a few weeks of hotel life spent in evening dress among generic cosmopolitans, the man from San Francisco suddenly dies. His remains ride home in the black hold of the same august cruise liner that first transported him, as a first-class guest, from America. Devoid of fully painted characters or even the natural detail at which Bunin excelled, “The Gentleman from San Francisco” would have appealed to Lawrence as a critique of a dehumanized existence. The story is schematic — breathtakingly so. The capitalist never truly lives, Bunin suggests, while the random Italian peasants, sketched in almost incidentally, pulse with common sense and palpable pleasure.

Now we have a new and comprehensive volume of the fiction, “Collected Stories of Ivan Bunin” (Ivan R. Dee, 377 pages, $19.95), beautifully translated by Graham Hettlinger. Roughly chronological, the carefully sequenced stories present “The Gentleman from San Francisco” as a turning point in Bunin’s life.

Born into a declining aristocracy in 1870, Bunin was temperamentally nostalgic even before the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, an event that appalled Bunin and convinced him to leave Russia forever. After a few years in Odessa, where he edited a newspaper that supported the White Army against the Bolsheviks, Bunin fled to Constantinople and then to the South of France, where he settled. He never returned to the Soviet Union, but his work was “rehabilitated” posthumously, perhaps because Bunin’s realistic stories suited socialist realist norms. He became a staple of Soviet curricula, but Western readers have found his Chekhovian style anachronistic. In 1938 he was still writing horse-and-buggy stories — with his exile from Russia Bunin seems to have turned his back on time. It is moving, then, to notice that “The Gentleman from San Francisco,” placed toward the beginning of this collection, was written in 1915, like a premonition of the emptiness of exile.

Initially, Bunin’s prose had been rooted in the soil. Early stories such as “The Scent of Apples” (1900) move almost without plot, cycling like an almanac through festivals and harvest, August rains, September winds, cool mornings, sharply colder nights, and the transparent weather of October. Up to 1915, Bunin’s work resembled Ivan Turgenev’s “Hunting Sketches,” most of which require no more dramatic impetus than a desire to hunt.

Like Turgenev, Bunin was interested in the peasants, but he does not get down and talk with them like Turgenev does. Bunin’s voice belongs to the manor house, and the best part of his observations are impressionistic, standing at the barn door to watch the threshing: “hands and rakes, straw, red and yellow headscarves flicker in the darkness of the barn.” He can think about the history of forests and observe “cherry trees sinking in the nettles.” He can step out on a crisp winter morning, and notice that “a dog ran to the cold shade beneath the balcony, its feet crunching sharply over the brittle grass, which seemed to be laced with salt.”

These sentences coincide with Bunin’s best poetic years — between 1903 and 1915, he won the Pushkin Prize three times for his poems. After leaving Russia, however, Bunin’s prose changed, becoming the center of his artistic life. A new sense of suddenness structures the stories he wrote in exile — unexpected deaths, unanticipated love letters, and chance encounters. It is because of these stories that Bunin has been prized as a latter-day Chekhov; Bunin’s abrupt situations recall the blossoming uncertainties of a story such as “The Lady with the Dog” (1898). That tale overshadows a story such as Bunin’s “Sunstroke” (1925): In both, a casual fling soars much farther than the lovers would have liked — it becomes a life-punctuating moment. But where Chekhov ruminates, lingering over his characters’ resistance to love, emphasizing their integrity to highlight their chagrin, Bunin remains physical. “Sunstroke” dazzles us; its love-struck hero marvels at his desperation with imagistic exasperation: “And the Volga shining in the sun while it carries her away on a pink steamer!” he says to himself. Later, he goes for a walk:

The shoulder straps and buttons of his uniform grew too hot to touch. The inside of his cap turned wet with sweat. His face began to burn.. . . When he returned to the inn he felt a certain pleasure as he entered the spacious, cool, and empty dining room on the lower floor.

Bunin plays on multiple senses to create a complete atmosphere, a complicated objective correlative that recalls the more innocent images of his early nature writing.

But Bunin is not a sensualist; rather, he believes that memory fixates on sharp sensations. This suits his exile’s nostalgia — as if life is always only a remembered moment. “What really was your life?” one of his characters asks herself: “Only that cold autumn night,” she replies. She is thinking of her lost love, who went to war — but she remembers the particular cold autumn night of his departure.

Many things about Bunin’s late fiction — the theme of travel, the impermanent affairs, even the brevity of some of the stories — speak to the pain of exile. But it is his love for re-creating an atmosphere, and by extension his whole stubbornness about mimetic realism, that attests to the positive yearning to return.

blytal@nysun.com