whole world, known and visible, onto this tiny departing boat named 'Katya'... and on this boat the world sailed away from him." There was some criticism, coming mostly from Russians in Paris. Upon having read just part one of the book, Vladislav Khodasevich sent a letter to Sovremennye zapisky, arguing that "Bunin is all right when he doesn't fall for his best-loved recipe: 1% The Kreutzer Sonata, 100% pure water." As Bunin scholar V. Lavrov pointed out, so carried away was the critic with his stream of irony that the fact that the whole totaled up to 101% somehow eluded his attention. More subtle but even less sympathetic was the reaction of Zinaida Gippius who came up with a cycle of essays entitled "Of Love" intended to be published in the Sovremennye zapisky magazine. Gippius compared Bunin's novel both to Goethes' The Sorrows of Young Werther and French writer Charles Derennes's novel Gaby My Love. "Mitya as an intelligent being is all but non-existent. He's got hardly more consciousness than the spring-time nature, white cherry trees and breathing depths of Earth he's filled with," she wrote. Gippius found the Alyonka episode totally unbelievable and incompatible with Mitya's feelings for Katya. Bunin, on having read Gippius' essays, as editor Mark Vishnyak remembered, "lost his temper and, in effect, vetoed their publication in Sovremennye zapisky." Two of the Gippius' articles were published in the Poslednye Novosty newspaper in 1925 as "Love and intelligence" (Любовь и мысль, June 18, No.1579) and "Love and Beauty" (Любовь и красота, June 25, No.1585, July 2, 1591). Writer and historian Pyotr Bitsilli in his article "Notes on Tolstoy. Bunin and Tolstoy" (Sovremennye zapisky, Paris, 1936, Vol. LX, pp.280-281.) compared Mitya's Love to Leo Tolstoy's "The Devil" and commented on many similarities found. In a letter dated March 17, 1936, Bunin wrote: "Dear Pyotr Mikhailovich, it just so happened that I've never read "The Devil"... And of those fragments in it that resemble [my] description of Mitya and Alyonka's rendez-vous I've learned from your article. How these striking resemblances are to be explained? Very simple. We come from virtually the same place, and the village ways... in our respective estates were very similar. We both, apparently, borrowed some "classic" details related to this 'procurement' thing. For me, this episode of Mitya dating Alyonka as procured by starosta, feels like still life, almost. For such was the story of