page_title: Aleksandr Kuprin
section_title: Years in emigration
hierarchical_section_title: Aleksandr Kuprin / Biography / Years in emigration
caption_attribution_description: English: Александр Иванович Куприн
context_page_description: Aleksandr Ivanovich Kuprin was a Russian writer best known for his novels The Duel and The Pit, as well as Moloch, Olesya, "Junior Captain Rybnikov", "Emerald", and The Garnet Bracelet, the latter made into a 1965 movie.
context_section_description: On 16 October 1919, Gatchina was taken by the White Army led by General Nikolai Yudenich. For a fortnight Kuprin was editing Prinevsky Krai (Neva Country), a paper published by Yudenich's army headquarters. In October, as the Whites retreated westward, Kuprin traveled with them to Yamburg, where he joined his wife and daughter. Via Narva, the family reached Revel in Estonia, and in December left for Finland. After half a year in Helsinki, they sailed for France, arriving in Paris in early July 1920.
  The next seventeen years in Paris saw the decline of Kuprin's creativity and his succumbing to alcoholism. Grieved at his separation from Russia, he became lonely and withdrawn. The family's poverty made the situation worse. "I am left naked ... and destitute as a homeless old dog," Kuprin wrote to Ivan Zaikin, an old friend. All this combined to hinder his writing. "The more talented a man is, the harder is for him life without Russia," Kuprin told a reporter in 1925.
  Kuprin's nostalgia explains the retrospective quality of his work in emigration. He returned to familiar themes from his earlier writing and dwelled on personal experiences linking him with the homeland he has lost. His visit to southwest France in 1925 inspired "Crimson Blood" (1926), a colorful account of a bullfight in Bayonne, followed in 1927 by "The Blessed South", four sketches on Gascony and the Hautes Pyrenees. Then came the predominantly urban sketches made in Yugoslavia, the result of Kuprin's visit to Belgrade in 1928 to attend a conference of the Russian writers in emigration. The three major works of Kuprin's Parisian years were The Wheel of Time (13 sketches styled as a novel, 1929), autobiographical The Junkers (1932), and romantic "Jeannette" (1933), describing an elderly professor's affection for a little girl in his neighborhood.
caption: Kuprin in the 1910s
exif: {"Image ExifOffset": "26"}