BUNIN IVAN (1870-1953), AUTOGRAPH A dedication inscription on his own portrait – the frontispiece of the book, addressed to Masao Yonekawa. Inscribed in 1953 – the year of I. Bunin’s death.

The photograph on the frontispiece (18x11 cm) is dated by the author: “Moscow 1903” and is glued onto a thick backing (21.5x15.2 cm). “Gospodinu Masao Ionekava – Ivan Bunin / 6. IX. 1953 / Parizh” [“To Mr. Masao Yonekawa – Ivan Bunin / 6 September 1953 / Paris.”] Two months before his death, Bunin signed a portrait from his distant youth. This was an exceptionally late signature – Bunin died two months later, on November 8. The facsimile signature under the portrait highlights the changes in the writer’s handwriting during the last years of his life. Masao Yonekawa (1891-1965) was a Japanese writer and translator of Russian literature. Yonekawa translated the great works of Russian and Soviet literature of the 19th and 20th centuries, including Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky, whose works he continued to translate throughout his career, which reached its peak in the 1950s.