Bunin's first love was Varvara Paschenko, his classmate in Yelets, daughter of a doctor and an actress, whom he fell for in 1889 and then went on to work with in Oryol in 1892. Their relationship was difficult in many ways: the girl's father detested the union because of Bunin's impecunious circumstances, Varvara herself was not sure if she wanted to marry and Bunin too was uncertain whether marriage was really appropriate for him. The couple moved to Poltava and settled in Yuly Bunin's home, but by 1892 their relations deteriorated, Pashchenko complaining in a letter to Yuli Bunin that serious quarrels were frequent, and begging for assistance in bringing their union to an end. The affair eventually ended in 1894 with her marrying actor and writer A.N. Bibikov, Ivan Bunin's close friend. Bunin felt betrayed, and for a time his family feared the possibility of his committing suicide. According to some sources it was Varvara Paschenko who many years later would appear under the name of Lika in "The Life of Arseniev" (chapter V of the book, entitled "Lika", was also published as a short story). Scholar Tatyana Alexandrova, though, questioned this identification (suggesting Mirra Lokhvitskaya might have been the major prototype), while Vera Muromtseva thought of Lika as a 'collective' character aggregating the writer's reminiscences of several women he knew in his youth.