There are writers who are overshadowed as much by their predecessors as by their successors. This has been the perverse fate of Ivan Bunin, the first Russian author to win the Nobel Prize (in 1933). He languishes in the improbable interim between Chekhov, his older friend and mentor, and Nabokov, whom he inspired. Chekhov admired Bunin’s fiction. Just before his death in 1904, he urged a friend to tell Bunin “to keep on writing and writing. He’s going to be really big someday.” But he also saw the younger man as the most gifted continuator of the Chekhovian manner.

Nabokov, coming from a similar landed-gentry background as Bunin and, like him, forced into exile by the Revolution, regarded Bunin to some extent as a model, though he faulted his “brocaded prose” (a fine instance of the samovar calling the kettle black). Among modern Russian writers, Chekhov and Nabokov divide the world between them while Bunin has been relegated to the shadowy limbo of the transitional.

This isn’t only unjust but mistaken. Bunin is, at his best, an astonishing writer whose work cries out for rediscovery. This is now possible, thanks to “Night of Denial: Stories and Novellas” (Northwestern University Press, 720 pages, $24.95), translated by Robert Bowie. Every genre is represented in this plump compilation, from evocative two-page tales to expansive novellas, as is every mood, from bitter nostalgia to otherworldly mysticism. Mr. Bowie provides detailed notes to the stories, as well as a long, rather eccentric afterword, in which he scolds his beloved Bunin almost as much as he celebrates him. Reading Mr. Bowie’s comments, I almost felt as if I were eavesdropping on a wrangle between Bunin and himself. A certain crankiness seems to go with the Russian turf.

Bunin’s range is wide. He writes about country matters on the great landlocked estates in the backlands of Mother Russia as easily as he portrays the forlorn and tangled lives of Russian exiles in 1930s Paris. Born in 1870 in Voronezh to a rich family, he spent half his life in restless exile (he died in November 1953). He was at once rustic and cosmopolitan. He can see life through the eyes of some demented aristocrat imprisoned by the past, but he also knows how the world looks to a brutalized serving girl, or to a hopeless, down-at-heel émigré in Paris. His sympathy extends not only to people, all of whom are presented as vivid and specific individuals, whatever their station in life, but to the natural world.

Of the great Russian writers, Bunin seems to me to have the most immediate awareness of the physical landscape. In “Antonov Apples,” for example (a story in which the fragrant apples play as large a part as the human protagonists), he writes:

The land is level here, you can see far into the distance. The sky is ethereal and so spacious and deep. The sunlight shines obliquely, and the road, rolled smooth after the rains by passing carts, has an oily texture and gleams like railway tracks. All around you the fresh, luxuriantly green winter crops are spread like broad patches of dimity cloth. A baby hawk soars up from somewhere into the crystalline air and freezes in one spot, flicking his sharp little wings. Running off into the clarity of distance, telegraph poles stand out distinctly, and their wires, like the silvery strings of musical instruments, slide along the slope of the clear sky. Merlins are perched upon them, the blackest of black notes on sheet music.

Nostalgia sharpened Bunin’s senses. His nostalgia was never sentimental but corrosive; it dissolved the sediment of feeling around lost places, and lost lives, so that they could shine forth in all their specificity. This gave him a mordant grasp of the telling detail. In “The Grammar of Love,” one of his strangest and most moving tales, an elderly nobleman has moldered in place for decades after the death of the serving girl with whom he fell passionately in love; when the narrator walks through the neglected estate, his boots make a crunching sound in the parlor and he realizes that “the entire floor was encrusted with dead withered bees that crackled underfoot.” This tiny detail tells us all we need to know about the long death of sweetness in a ruined life.

After he left Russia in 1920, carrying with him nothing but “a savage contempt for revolutionaries,” as he put it, Bunin settled in France; but he had extended his fictional range long before that date.

His most famous story, “The Gentleman from San Francisco,” was written in 1915; it is still the story for which he’s best known, and deservedly so. For years it was seen as a withering satire on capitalist excess, especially in its American manifestations. (The Swedish Academy emphasized this aspect of the tale in presenting the Nobel Prize.) But this interpretation strikes me as superficial.

It’s true, the protagonist is an obscenely affluent American businessman much given to conspicuous consumption; his luxury-loving wife and daughter are of the same mould. But as the story unfolds, the characters’ nationality begins to seem incidental. The family are on a voyage by liner from San Francisco to Italy and Bunin takes delight in sumptuous descriptions of all the amenities they enjoy. They are a vulgar trio, yet oddly innocent. Bunin never tells us their names and as the ship ploughs on, their obliviousness to the world outside — huge waves crash against the liner where gala balls are in blithe progress — the gentleman and his family take on emblematic dimensions. We sense that this is Everyman and his family on a final jaunt; their Americanness is merely one more estranging factor in their journey.

This is a story about the hidden juxtapositions of existence, of which we are all as ignorant as the crass gentleman who sits in well-fed contentment “in the golden nacreous glitter of that palatial hall, a bottle of wine on his table.” Meanwhile, below decks, “gigantic furnaces cackled out their hollow call as they gnawed away with red-hot jaws at heaps of coal flung crashing into them by men who were naked to the waist, drenched in acrid, filthy sweat, crimson skinned from the flames.” Bunin’s tale is built around such covert contrasts. The Gentleman is a type and remains so from start to finish; and yet, somehow, in the isolation of his unawareness and his sudden fate, he becomes all too queasily human. By the end, in the very anonymity of his features, we come to recognize our own, but with surprised respect.

eormsby@nysun.com