The Gentleman from San Francisco by Ivan Bunin

First published: "Gospodin iz San Frantsisko," 1915 (English translation, 1922)

Type of plot: Social realism

Time of work: The early 1910's

Locale: Italy

Principal Characters:

• The gentleman, a businessperson from San Francisco
• The gentleman's wife
• The gentleman's daughter

The Story

This short work has a deceptively simple plot: A rich American businessperson travels with his family to Europe for a vacation and dies suddenly of a heart attack on the island of Capri. He then returns home in a coffin on the same ship on which he went to Europe. However, over the sparse frame of this plot, Ivan Bunin weaves an elaborate narrative fabric richly textured with subtle counterpoint and evocative detail. Some critics have interpreted the tale as an indictment of Western capitalism, but such an evaluation is inadequate. Through his title character, Bunin illustrates a pervasive problem afflicting all of modern society: a fatal preoccupation with the self that leaves one coldly indifferent to other people, to nature, and to God.

Bunin's narrative exposes the shallowness and insensitivity of the gentleman and his fellow travelers through a variety of details. Describing the gentleman's shipboard passage to the Old World, he unveils a lifestyle in which everything is devoted to the passengers' comfort. Unmindful of the turbulent realm of nature outside, the passengers pursue one idle distraction after another. For them, eating is a major pastime, and the crown of their existence is dinner. However, beneath this veneer of civility one finds a core of avarice and hypocrisy. An apparently romantic couple admired by all the passengers is revealed to have been hired by the shipping company to act out the role of being in love. Even the most basic and profound of human emotions—love—becomes a hollow travesty in this banal society.

Once in Europe, the gentleman embarks on a numbing routine of sightseeing. The majestic churches of Italy soon become repetitious and boring, and the sightseers discover that "the same thing is found everywhere: . . . vast emptiness, silence . . . slippery gravestones under the feet and someone's Deposition from the Cross, invariably famous." The images of death here foreshadow the gentleman's own impending fate, but he remains as unmoved by them as he is by the religious objects themselves. Even the image of Christ's crucifixion, one of the central mysteries of Christianity, appears only as a museum piece whose fame is noted and nothing more.

The gentleman's insensitivity continues until the very moment of his death. The narrator asks rhetorically what the gentleman was thinking on the night of his heart attack. The answer is ironic: He was thinking only of his supper. He never arrives at the hotel dinner table, however; his heart attack strikes swiftly, causing consternation among the other hotel guests, who selfishly care more about their ruined evening than about the mystery of death itself. The gentleman's family now discovers the extent of the hypocrisy that runs through their social world. Before the gentleman's death, the hotel management had fawned over them. Now, though, the family is treated with cool disdain: The gentleman's body is put in the poorest room in the hotel and later conveyed to the ship in a cheap soda-water crate.

Despite the dark images dominating his portrait of the gentleman and the gentleman's milieu, Bunin does not provide an unrelievedly gloomy vision of human nature in "The Gentleman from San Francisco." In an important scene that occurs after the gentleman's death, Bunin introduces two characters who display an attitude toward the world that differs radically from that of the gentleman. These two are simple peasants descending the side of Monte Solaro. Unlike the gentleman, the peasants see the natural world around them as a resplendent realm of beauty. When they stop to pray at a statue of the Madonna perched amid the rocks, they offer "naïve and humbly joyful" praises to the Madonna, to God and to the world of nature. For these men, attuned as they are to the ineffable beauty of the universe, the realms of God and nature are one. The simplicity and humility manifest in their joyful reverence stand in sharp contrast to the indifference and selfishness apparent in the lifestyle and worldview of the gentleman's group.

Bunin returns to the world of the gentleman's society at the end of his narrative, depicting the ship carrying the gentleman's body back to the United States. Again, one notes the self-centered pursuit of idle pleasure on the ship, but now Bunin's description contains an ominous new element. In the very bowels of the ship he portrays the coffin holding the gentleman's corpse, and he concludes his tale with this image, a vivid emblem of the rank corruption lying at the core of the selfish modern world. Bunin thus suggests in "The Gentleman from San Francisco" that modern society's frantic pursuit of pleasure and satisfaction is really a macabre dance of death, leading ultimately to ruin and perdition.