Although I’m not sure about the historical context of both of these works, I found the theme of hopelessness in both Bunin’s “Caucasus” and Lermontov’s “Farewell to Russia” to compliment each other in an interesting way.

Lermontov’s “Farewell to Russia” seems to speak to Soviet Russia from a post-exile perspective. The speaker refers to Russia in many unfavorable ways, such as “unwashed” and a “land of knaves.” He also addresses the soviets directly as the people in “neat blue uniforms” who “live like cringing slaves!” The speaker’s tone is resentful, which implies that he preferred Russia as it was before the revolution. The second stanza deals with the speaker’s exile from Soviet Russia, presumably for his dissenting opinions. Although exile is normally seen as a fate worse than death, the speaker says that he “may find / peace beneath Caucasian skies, – / Far from slanderers and tsars, / Far from ever-spying eyes” (1840). The speaker’s preference for exile shows how unfavorable his view of Soviet Russia truly is.

Bunin’s short story “Caucasus” is about a woman who runs away from her oppressive husband with her lover. In the conclusion of the story, the scorned husband searches for his wife at all the false locations she gave him. When he does not find her he “drank a bottle of champagne and coffee with Chartreuse, slowly smoked a cigar. Then he went back to his room, lay down on the couch, put a pistol to each of his temples, and fired” (285).

Though the Bunin story does not deal as directly with Soviet Russia, the feeling of hopelessness comments on how collectivization affected all sectors of life at the time. Additionally, both works appreciated the vast expanses of nature that make Russia has and allude to some sort of pastoral beauty that was lost through industrialization.