E.I. Zil’berberg on the Pages of Diaries and Memoirs of V.N. Muromtseva-Bunina

The memoirs and diaries of V.N. Bunina are unique documents of the era. The memoirs (both widely known and unpublished) cover the pre-revolutionary period of the writer’s life. The “early” “Conversations with Memory” and some newspaper essays tell about her childhood, adolescence, youth and years of study, that is about the life of Vera Muromtseva before meeting I.A. Bunin. The diaries that V.N. Bunina kept throughout her life and with consistency (in some years, entries were kept almost every day) also contain a valuable and unique array of information, especially about the life of Russian emigration in France in the 1920s–1940s. Throughout her life, V.N. Bunina was a member of many intellectual, publishing, literary and religious circles, had a large number of connections and correspondents for personal correspondence. Some of V.N. Bunina’s information is literally the only source that can fi ll in the blanks in the biographies of famous fi gures of the fi rst half of the 20th century. A striking example of this is information about the life of Evgeniia Ivanovna Zil’berberg (1883–1942) from the pages of Bunina’s memoirs and diaries. The article describes in detail the fi rst meeting in the winter of 1900 in the “secret society” of young “revolutionaries”: Vera Muromtseva and Evgeniia Zilberberg, the fi rst years of friendship and study (1900–1906) and the years of joint emigration (1920–1940). In Paris, the friends met again in 1920 and kept in touch until the mid–1930 s. V.N. Bunina observed and recorded in her diary the diffi cult twists and turns of fate that Evgeniia Ivanovna experienced and always admired her willpower. V.N. Bunina did not forget her friend even after her death in 1942.