Gentleman from San Francisco, whose name isn’t even mentioned throughout the story, sets off accompanied by his wife and daughter for the Old World. He worked hard and became rich enough to permit himself such time of rest.
That is the beginning of the story unravelled by Ivan Alekseyevich Bunin, an outstanding Russian writer and poet, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1933. The action of his story “Gentleman from San Francisco” takes place on a large passenger ship, which is bound from America to Europe; and the protagonist, an elderly man, dies during this journey. With the aid of this simple story Bunin reveals his attitude to capitalistic society, of which the ship appears to be a model. The hold and the upper deck live completely different lives; rich passengers forget about the powerful ocean outside the ship, about God and death, deceive themselves by false love. By the example of the protagonist the author tells of emptiness and uselessness of a typical capitalist; whose death foreshadows death of the whole this unjust world.