In the summer of 2017, a monument to the Russian writer and poet Ivan Alekseevich Bunin, a Nobel Prize laureate in literature, was unveiled in the city of Grasse in southern France. The monument was gifted to the city by Russian sculptor Andrei Kovalchuk at the initiative of the organization 'Renaissance Francaise.' The two-meter bronze sculpture of Bunin is located in the park of the Villa Saint-Hilaire, where the Grasse city library is situated. A few hundred meters away is the Villa Belvedere, where Bunin lived.

Ivan Bunin became the first Russian writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize in 1933. He spent a total of sixteen years in Grasse, four of which he lived at the Villa Belvedere. It was here that he created his beloved 'Dark Alleys' and learned of his Nobel Prize award.

In the autumn of 1933, news arrived from Stockholm at the Villa Belvedere, where Bunin lived, announcing that he had been awarded the Nobel Prize. The Swedish Academy noted him 'for the strict artistic talent with which the writer recreated in literary prose a character typically Russian.' The initiative for the award came from the French Nobel laureate Romain Rolland.