The Gentleman from San Francisco and Other Stories

Powerful, evocative stories from the first Russian author to win the Nobel Prize in Literature

A Penguin Classic

A much neglected literary figure, Ivan Bunin is one of Russia's major writers and ranks with Tolstoy and Chekhov at the forefront of the Russian Realists. Drawing artistic inspiration from his personal experience, these stories are set in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Russia of his youth, in the countries that he visited and in France, where he spent the last thirty years of his life.

In the title story, a family's tour of fashionable European resorts comes to an unexpected end; "Late Hour" describes an old man's return to the little Russian town in the steppes that he has not seen since his early youth; "Mitya's Love" explores the darker emotional reverberations of sexual experience. Throughout his stories, there is a sense of the precariousness of existence, an omnipresent awareness of the impermanence of human aspirations and achievements.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.