←Bunin's Yefremov

Bunin's Yefremov

Photo of route “Bunin's Yefremov”
6 points6 km1.5 hours

The town of Yefremov is closely tied to Ivan Bunin, the first Russian Nobel laureate in literature. You'll see old houses that remember the writer and wander through the town grove where Bunin read his poems more than a hundred years ago.

Route author

Susanin Team

Things to do

  • 📜 Learn the city's history
  • 🏛️🕰️ Compare the eras

Route points (6)

  1. Monument to I. A. Bunin at Yefremov Railway Station — point on route “Bunin's Yefremov”

    Monument to I. A. Bunin at Yefremov Railway Station

    🗿 Monument

  2. I. A. Bunin House Museum in Yefremov — point on route “Bunin's Yefremov”

    I. A. Bunin House Museum in Yefremov

    🏛️ Museum · 📜 Historic site

  3. Red Square — point on route “Bunin's Yefremov”

    Red Square

    ⛲ Square · 🌿 Public garden or park

  4. Town Garden on Red Square — point on route “Bunin's Yefremov”

    Town Garden on Red Square

    🌿 Public garden or park · 🕵️ Urban legend

  5. Bunin Family Graves in the Town Grove — point on route “Bunin's Yefremov”

    Bunin Family Graves in the Town Grove

    📜 Historic site · 🗿 Monument

  6. I. A. Bunin Town Park — point on route “Bunin's Yefremov”

    I. A. Bunin Town Park

    🌿 Public garden or park

Monument to I. A. Bunin at Yefremov Railway Station in Yefremov

Point on route “Bunin's Yefremov”

Monument to I. A. Bunin at Yefremov Railway Station — point on route “Bunin's Yefremov”

Point 1

Monument to I. A. Bunin at Yefremov Railway Station

🗿 Monument

Historical Background

The station building at Yefremov was built in early 1874 on a level site, with the platform right next to it. Its central part was built of red brick with handsome decorative trim. On either side were two more buildings, framed with wooden lace and delicate openwork painting. All in all, it was an impressive and beautiful station. Soon, however, it was closed. First a barrack-style wooden station was built on higher ground not far from the first one, and in 1954 a standard two-story brick station appeared.

Monument to I. A. Bunin

In 2010, for Bunin's 140th anniversary, a monument to the writer was put up on the station's viewing platform. It was a joint project of the Tula branch of the Moscow Railway, the company Cargill and the I. A. Bunin House Museum. The monument is made of a special polymer material. Its sculptor, Alexander Burganov, already knew Bunin well: he had earlier created the famous monument to the writer on the Arbat in Moscow. Ivan Alekseyevich certainly passed through this station many times when he came from Moscow to Yefremov to visit his mother. “…I was in Yefremov, in Tula Province — my mother is very ill,” Bunin wrote to M. I. Kuprina in a letter of February 20, 1910. The writer's wife, Vera Muromtseva, recalled how in 1907 she, Bunin and his brothers spent about an hour at the station waiting for a train: following village custom, the brothers had seen them off almost an hour early, and they paced the platform together.

The “Russian Writers and the Yefremov Land” Exhibition

Today the station walls are decorated with modern display boards — an exhibition called “Russian Writers and the Yefremov Land”. The lives and work of such outstanding Russians as Leo Tolstoy, Mikhail Lermontov, N. F. Pavlov and N. V. Uspensky are linked to Yefremov and its surroundings, and visits to these places gave them material for their remarkable works. The Soviet writer Konstantin Paustovsky, who came to Yefremov in February 1917, described arriving at night and waiting until dawn in a cold station buffet painted a dirty lilac, with nothing but cold tea, smoking kerosene lamps and a bearded gendarme who kept walking past, eyeing him sternly and jingling his spurs.