In 1938 Bunin began working on what would later become a celebrated cycle of nostalgic stories with a strong erotic undercurrent and a Proustian ring. The first eleven stories of it came out as "Dark Avenues" (or "Dark Alleys", Тёмные аллеи) in New York (1943); the cycle appeared in a full version in 1946 in France. These stories assumed a more abstract and metaphysical tone which has been identified with his need to find refuge from the "nightmarish reality" of Nazi occupation. Bunin's prose became more introspective, which was attributed to "the fact that a Russian is surrounded by enormous, broad and lasting things: the steppes, the sky. In the West everything is cramped and enclosed, and this automatically produces a turning towards the self, inwards.""