Tikhon and Kuzma Krasoff, brothers from a long line of petty criminals, manage to work together long enough to start a business selling sundries from a roving cart, but a dispute over the division of profits forces them apart. Tikhon is content to stay near the old family village in the southwest of Russia and grow his business, but Kuzma has bigger dreams.

The Village is Ivan Bunin’s first full novel, and portrays the Russian peasantry in a very different light to how they had previously been idealized. While there’s a physical village in the novel, the village of the title is a reference to Russian society: Bunin said that “my novel depicts the life of rural Russia; along with one particular village it is concerned with life of Russia as a whole.” The violence of everyday life (especially with the character nicknamed “The Bride”) is stark and unrelenting, the characters somewhere between idiotic and trapped by their situations. Maxim Gorky declared that the novel poses the question “is Russia to be or not to be?”

Bunin’s writing in The Village also takes a different direction to that of his earlier short fiction . While he had previously been praised for his open prose, The Village is dense to the point that contemporary critics considered it problematic. Bunin was never completely satisfied with the novel, spending many hours rewriting it after its initial publication.

This edition is based on a translation to English first published in 1923, thirteen years after the first Russian edition.