Bunin's one. Galina Kuznetsova in her Grasse Diary remembered: "In the neighbouring Kolontayevka estate, according to Bunin, there was this pine-tree alley which one particular summer was filled with some kind of special jasmine aromas... 'This alley I carried away with me to later put into Mitya's Love and - to such a sad and tragic effect!' I remember him saying." At least once the novel has been changed without its author's consent. Lithuanian poet Kostas Korsakas remembered Bunin in a conversation with him relating how an Italian translation altered the finale into something more optimistic, so as "to let young boy instead of killing himself, drive his love home to full realization." Bunin bitterly ridiculed this "lump of official optimism which had been added to his novel by a fascist regime's translator." Critical reception Upon its release the book was generally praised by the European critics and writers. Danish writer and historian of literature Georg Brandes wrote: "I read Mitya’s Love in French and got very excited. I am amazed by the way how subtly the depths of love are being examined and can but express my delight." The French poet and novelist Henri de Régnier held Mitya's Love as equal to best examples of the classical Russian literature. "Bunin's fine book is the work of one of the Russian masters of an old novel - the kind that prospered in those times when Russia was the homeland of Tolstoy and Turgenev... Bunin, for all his peculiarities, belongs to this family of high quality masters", de Régnier wrote. German poet Rainer Maria Rilke sent a letter to Russkaya Mysl magazine in which he methodically analysed the main character's behaviour and motives. "The beloved Katya, this tender and impressionable Katya for the first time provides him with the outlook close to the unconsciously all-knowing outlook of a wild animal. Once he abandons the one he loves, he has to fill in these infinite immaterial reaches, this heavenly bliss which is quite special, - with a substance of the world he knows and loves. Once he loses Katya, he loses the world with her; left with nothing but a non-being, néant, courageously and logically chooses to die. One infinitesimal measure of curiosity (and I use this lowly concept consciously in this context) aimed at what might have followed this bout of desperation, could have saved him. Problem was, he put his