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The war years

As World War II broke out, Bunin's friends in New York, anxious to help the Nobel Prize laureate get out of France, issued officially-endorsed invitations for him to travel to the US, and in 1941 they received their Nansen passports enabling them to make the trip. But the couple chose to remain in Grasse. They spent the war years at Villa Jeanette, high in the mountains. Two young writers became long-term residents in the Bunin household at the time: Leonid Zurov (1902–1971) (ru), who had arrived on a visit from Latvia at Bunin's invitation earlier, in late 1929, and remained with them for the rest of their lives, and Nikolai Roshchin (1896–1956), who returned to the Soviet Union after the war.

Members of this small commune (occasionally joined by Galina Kuznetsova and Margarita Stepun) were bent on survival: they grew vegetables and greens, helping one another out at a time when, according to Zurov, "Grasse's population had eaten all of their cats and dogs". A journalist who visited the Villa in 1942 described Bunin as a "skinny and emaciated man, looking like an ancient patrician". For Bunin, though, this isolation was a blessing and he refused to re-locate to Paris where conditions might have been better. "It takes 30 minutes of climbing to reach our villa, but there's not another view in the whole world like the one that's facing us," he wrote. "Freezing cold, though, is damning and making it impossible for me to write," he complained in one of his letters. Vera Muromtseva-Bunina remembered: "There were five or six of us... and we were all writing continuously. This was the only way for us to bear the unbearable, to overcome hunger, cold and fear."

Ivan Bunin was a staunch anti-Nazi, referring to Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini as "rabid monkeys". He risked his life, sheltering fugitives (including Jews such as the pianist A. Liebermann and his wife) in his house in Grasse after Vichy was occupied by the Germans. According to Zurov, Bunin invited some of the Soviet war prisoners ("straight from Gatchina ", who worked in occupied Grasse) to his home in the mountains, when the heavily guarded German forces' headquarters were only 300 metres (980 ft) away from his home.

The atmosphere in the neighbourhood, though, was not that deadly, judging by the Bunin's diary entry for 1 August 1944: "Nearby there were two guards, there were also one German, and one Russian prisoner, Kolesnikov, a student. The three of us talked a bit. Saying our farewells, a German guard shook my hand firmly".

Under the occupation Bunin never ceased writing but, according to Zurov, "published not a single word. He was receiving offers to contribute to newspapers in unoccupied Switzerland, but declined them. Somebody visited him once, a guest who proved to be an agent, and proposed some literary work, but again Ivan Alekseyevich refused." On 24 September 1944, Bunin wrote to Nikolai Roshchin: "Thank God, the Germans fled Grasse without a fight, on August 23. In the early morning of the 24th the Americans came. What was going on in the town, and in our souls, that's beyond description." "For all this hunger, I'm glad we spent the War years in the South, sharing the life and difficulties of the people, I'm glad that we've managed even to help some", Vera Muromtseva-Bunina later wrote.