On July 30, 1925, Vera Muromtseva-Bunina, the wife of the Russian writer Ivan Bunin (who was soon to win the Nobel Prize for Literature), wrote in her diary: "Ian [her name for her husband] has torn up and burned all his diary manuscripts. I am very angry. 'I don't want to be seen in my underwear,' he told me." Seeing Vera so upset, Bunin confided to her: "I have another diary in the form of a notebook...".

This is the diary that Bunin published in 1936 with the title Cursed Days. Set against the backdrop of Moscow and Odessa in 1918 and 1919, it is a scathing account of the Bolshevik takeover and of the last days of the Russian master in his homeland. Banned during the years of Soviet power, Cursed Days is now translated into English for the first time, with an introduction and notes by Thomas Gaiton Marullo, Bunin's foremost interpreter in the West.

Cursed Days, Thomas Marullo observes in his introduction, foreshadows the later anti-Soviet memoirs of Nadezhda Mandelstam, Evgeniya Ginzburg, and others, and the rebellions of Bulgakov and Pasternak.