Welcome to Russian history we told.

Episode 240 Ivan Boonen, Russia's first Nobel Prize winner in literature.

Last time we covered the development of literature in Russia.

Today we continue in the same genre by talking about one of the greatest authors in Russian

history Ivan Boonen and this is a part of a three-part series where next week we'll be talking

about Alexander Solgenitsin and finally Maxim Gorky. My sources include Natasha's dance,

a cultural history by Orlando Fijis and Boonen's own words from the biography he wrote for his Nobel

Prize about his early life. Here is the quote from Boonen found at NobelPrize.org.

I come from an old and noble house that is given to Russia a good many illustrious persons in politics

as well as in the arts among whom two poets of the early 19th century stand out in particular.

Anna Bonina and Vasily Zhukovsky, one of the greatest names in Russian literature, the son of

Athenae's Boonen and the Turk Salma. All my ancestors had close ties with the soil

and the people. They were country gentlemen. My parents were no exception. They owned

the states in central Russia and those fertile steps in which the ancient Muscovites are

had settled colonists from all over the country for their protection against

tar invasions from the south. That is why in that region they developed the richest of all Russian

dialects and almost all of our great writers from Tragenyev to Leo Tolstoy have come from there.

I was born in Boronezh in 1870. My childhood and youth were spent almost entirely in the country

on my father's estates. During my adolescence the death of my little sister caused a violent religious

crisis but it left no permanent scars on my soul. I had a passion for painting which I think

shows in my writings. I wrote both poetry and prose fairly early and my works were also published

from an early date. Ivan Alexeiovich Boonen was the son of Alexei Nikolayovich Boonen and

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