The story
Antonov Apples Festival in Yelets
Yelets built its Antonov Apples festival directly around Ivan Bunin's life and writing, since the city's concept for the event draws on the author's depictions of Russian national life, staging craft workshops, painting lessons, and literary contests along the same old streets and buildings Bunin described in his fiction.
Yelets, in Russia's Lipetsk region, built its Antonov Apples festival around a specific literary anchor: the city's own festival concept is grounded in the works of Ivan Bunin, the Nobel Prize-winning Russian writer whose fiction captured a particular vision of Russian national life, and whose descriptions of Yelets's own streets and architecture still map onto the city as it stands today.