At that time, Bunin, who had emigrated to France after the revolution, married for the second time to a devoted woman who valued his literary mission, the love to whom had become for him «like air: you can’t live without it, but you don’t notice it,» had already been practicing an original model of marriage for three years, including a romantic supplement in the form of a grateful young student of the venerable writer. The participants in these intimate relationships, which quickly turned burdensome, understood its nature differently and intuitively found their own justification. Vera Nikolaevna Muromtseva-Bunina thought with bitterness that «there is no such thing as shared love in life. And the whole drama is that people do not understand this and suffer especially.» She humbly realized that «has no right to prevent» Bunin «to love whom he wants,» that «human happiness is in not wanting anything for yourself.» The position of the young writer Galina Kuznetsova in the Bunin household was unenviable, despite the even, benevolent attitude of the official wife. She «felt hopeless…, lonely as in a desert,» in fear of «a dark future.» After eight years of «a difficult path» and suffering, she would leave the sixty-four-year-old Bunin, falling under the influence of another romantic leader, the singer Margarita Stepun, the sister of the famous philosopher, thereby causing him «a heavy feeling of resentment, vile insult» and «mental illness.»

      Fyodor Stepun, who was a friend of Bunin, emphasized that the literary works of the Nobel laureate are distinguished by their authenticity, «the primacy of thoughts and feelings,» that for him «truth is not an abstract idea standing above him, but the blood and flesh of his spiritual-mental-physical being.» Stepun, like other philosophers of the early 20th century, noted the unsettled state of man in modern culture and linked «the exit from the lies and torment of this life-destroying wealth, in which thought is indistinguishable from fiction, will from desires, art from entertainment» with a return to authenticity. The paradoxes of love in The Life of Arsenyev and Mitya’s Love, described by Bunin «with the rare power of creative transformation of earthly appearances and accomplishments of our mortal life,» could serve as a vivid illustration of Sartre’s theorizing about the inevitable contradictions that an individual encounters when striving for a genuine (authentic) existence.

      In Sartre’s view, love has two poles of power. On the one hand, love means an attempt to realize an «organic set of projects» generated by an individual’s own capabilities. On the other hand, it is carried out as a «project of unification,» which, being «the ideal of love, its motive and its goal, its own value,» still acts as a source of conflict, since it depends on the changeable freedom of the other. Developing Sartre’s thought, Simone de Beauvoir described the difference in the meaning of love for a man and a woman:

      An individual (a man), who is a subject, a personality, who has a noble aspiration for transcendence, does everything to increase his influence on the world, he is ambitious, active… She (a woman) has only one opportunity: to lose herself with her soul and body in the one who is presented to her as an absolute value… But love does not take up so much space in a woman’s real life. Her husband, children, home, pleasures, vanity, social and sexual relations, and social advancement mean much more to her. Almost all women dream of «great love,» some of them touch it, others get a surrogate, they know it as incomplete, flawed, ridiculous, imperfect, false. But very few really devote their entire lives to it.