Cursed Days (Окаянные дни, Okayánnye Dni) is a book by Nobel Prize-winning Russian author Ivan Bunin, compiled of diaries and notes he made while in Moscow and Odessa in 1918-1920.

"[3] Using Cursed Days as a forum to castigate the CPSU's leaders, publishers, and the intellectuals like Aleksandr Blok and Maxim Gorky who joined their ranks, Bunin labeled the Soviet elite criminals.

[4] Bunin also cited parallels between the Red Terror and the peasant uprisings of the 17th and 18th century, led by Stenka Razin, Emelian Pugachev, and Bohdan Khmelnitsky.

By the end of July 1925 fragments of Cursed Days were already being published for almost two months by the recently opened Pyotr Struve's newspaper.

According to the book's translator, professor of Russian at Notre Dame University (who had already published the first two of three volumes of a biography of Bunin in his own words) Thomas Gaiton Marullo, - The work is important for several reasons.

Unlike the works of early Soviets and emigres and their self-censoring backdrop of memory, myth, and political expediency, Bunin's truth reads almost like an aberration.

Cursed Days also preceded the "rebellious" anti-Soviet tradition that began with Evgeny Zamyatin and Yury Olesha, moved on to Mikhail Bulgakov, and reached an apex with Boris Pasternak and Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

One can argue that, in its painful exposés of political and social utopias, Cursed Days heralded the anti-utopian writing of George Orwell and Aldous Huxley.

"Unlike the works of early Soviets and emigres, with their self-censoring backdrop of memory, myth, and political expediency, Bunin 's uncompromising truths are jolting", full of "pain and suffering in witnessing the takeover of his country by thugs and the chaos of civil war", the reviewer argues.