Ivan Bunin made history as the first Russian writer to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. The immediate basis for the award was the autobiographical novel "The Life of Arseniev", but Bunin's legacy is much wider in scope. He is regarded as a master of the short story, described by scholar Oleg Mikhaylov as an "archaist innovator" who, while remaining true to the literary tradition of the 19th century, made huge leaps in terms of artistic expression and purity of style. "[Bunin's] style heralds a historical precedent... technical precision as an instrument of bringing out beauty is sharpened to the extreme. There's hardly another poet who on dozens of pages would fail to produce a single epithet, analogy or metaphor... the ability to perform such a simplification of poetic language without doing any harm to it is the sign of a true artist. When it comes to artistic precision Bunin has no rivals among Russian poets," wrote "Vestnik Evropy".