The Gentleman from San Francisco

"The Gentleman from San Francisco" is a short story by the Nobel Prize-winning Russian author Ivan Bunin, written in 1915 and published the same year in Moscow, in the 5th volume of Slovo (Word) anthology. Translated into English by D. H. Lawrence (with Samuil Koteliansky), the story is one of Bunin's best known and regarded as classic. Background Bunin recollected the circumstances that led to the story's inception in a brochure called "The Origins of My Stories", compiled and published by P. Vyacheslavov. Thomas Mann's Death in Venice book sleeve, which had caught Bunin's eye in one of the Moscow book shops, served as a starting point for the story's associative chain. Some time later in Oryol Governorate it came back to him again, this time linked to the sudden death of a certain American citizen which occurred on the island of Capri. "Almost instantly the idea of a story [called initially] "Death on Capri" came to me and in four days I finished the piece. Everything else, San Francisco included, was pure fantasy. Nothing in it was real apart from the fact that once a certain American had really died after dinner in Quisisana hotel", Bunin wrote. The rough copies and alternative versions of the story show the dynamics of its ever-changing history. Over the years Bunin, driven (in Chekhov's words) by the "brevity mania", was methodically cutting the text down in size (the last bout of such activity lasted from 1951 to the early 1953). Among the fragments cut were one lengthy description of a "Belshazzar feast" on board the Atlantida ship and a Tolstoyan monologue which the author deemed, apparently, too straightforward in its condemnation of the main character's way of life.