Several years ago I was teaching an honors Russian literature course in the winter quarter. When I assigned a short analytical essay, my students seemed confused, so I offered to sit down and write a sample for them. The resulting 4 page paper explored the 1944 Ivan Bunin story "Cleansing Monday" in light of what I was working on at the time -- my book on war and the Russian literary hero. Ivan Bunin in 1937 Bunin fled Russia after the Revolution, and was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1933. But during the war he was trapped in occupied Grasse in southern France, and he kept thinking about the German army advancing further and further. As much as he hated the Bolsheviks for what they had done to his country, he began to root for Stalin and the Red Army to save Russia from further devastation at the hands of the Nazis. I revised that paper and continued to work on it, and it was published last week in the Slavic Review . How fitting that my analysis of "Cleansing M...
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