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| | Guardian Unlimited | Archive Search |
 | | A warts-and-all portrayal of the revered Russian writer Ivan Bunin - as a bullying, drunken egotist - is being hailed as the most important film to come out of Russia this year. |
 | | Far from being a tabloid exposé, this is a sensitive account of the emotions that overwhelmed the writer in his last years, loosely based on documentary evidence from Bunin's memoirs and the diary kept by his wife, Vera, as a form of escapism. |
 | | Bunin's Nobel prize in 1933, the onset of the second world war, unsettling reports from Stalin's new regime in the Soviet Union - all these are background events, overshadowed by the writer's infatuation with the young poet Galina Plotnikova (actually Galina Kuznetsova, whose name has been changed to spare the feelings of surviving relatives). |
| www.guardian.co.uk /Archive/Article/0,4273,4085078,00.html (963 words) |
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