Bird's Shadow

Bird's Shadow is a collection of short stories by a Nobel Prize-winning Russian author Ivan Bunin, based on memories and impressions of the vast tour over the Middle East he and wife Vera Muromtseva undertook in the 1900s. Written between 1907 and 1911, these stories were published as a book in Paris in 1931, although most of them have made it into the Temple of the Sun 1917 compilation (which featured many of the poems too).

The book's working title was Fields of the Dead, for, as the author argued, "aren't they all fields of the dead – Baalbek and Palmyra, Babylon and Assyria, Judea and Egypt?.. But the East is the realm of the Sun, and future belongs to the East," he added.

Critics praised Ivan Bunin's traveler's sketches, seeing them as an integral and highly important part of his legacy. Bunin's "longing for the ceaseless, unrelenting wandering" and his "insatiable perceptiveness" (as he himself put it, in the foreword to The Scream, 1921 Paris compilation) was something he's been long obsessed with. Later scholars saw it as part of his artistic philosophy, aiming at "the understanding of all times and peoples' tribulations." In his "Liberation of Tolstoy" essay Bunin wrote about some artists' ability to "feel other times... better than that of their own" and, critics argued, this "transformational" quality was something he's made very much of his own.