: Tales of the Wilderness by Pilniak Boris - Pilniak Boris 1894-1937 Translations into English; Soviet Union Social life and customs Fiction

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THE SNOW A YEAR OF THEIR LIVES A THOUSAND YEARS OVER THE RAVINE ALWAYS ON DETACHMENT THE SNOW WIND THE FOREST MANOR THE BIELOKONSKY ESTATE DEATH THE HEIRS THE CROSSWAYS

INTRODUCTION

RUSSIAN FICTION SINCE CHEKHOV

The English reading public knows next to nothing of contemporary Russian Literature. In the great age of the Russian Realistic Novel, which begins with Turgeniev and finishes with Chekhov, the English reader is tolerably at home. But what came after the death of Chekhov is still unknown or, what is worse, misrepresented. Second and third- rate writers, like Merezhkovsky, Andreyev, and Artsybashev, have found their way into England and are still supposed to be the best Russian twentieth century fiction can offer. The names of really significant writers, like Remizov and Andrey Bely, have not even been heard of. This state of affairs makes it necessary, in introducing a contemporary Russian writer to the English public, to give at least a few indications of his place in the general picture of modern Russian Literature.

The date of Chekhov's death may be taken to mark the end of a long and glorious period of literary achievement. It is conveniently near the dividing line of two centuries, and it coincides rather exactly with the moment when Russian Literature definitely ceased to be dominated by Realism and the Novel. In the two or three years that followed the death of Chekhov Russian Literature underwent a complete and drastic transformation. The principal feature of the new literature became the decisive preponderance of Poetry over Prose and of Manner over Matter--a state of things exactly opposite to that which prevailed during what we may conveniently call the Victorian age. Poetry in contemporary Russian Literature is not only of greater intrinsic merit than prose, but almost all the prose there is has to such an extent been permeated with the methods and standards of poetry that in the more extreme cases it is almost impossible to tell whether what is printed as prose is really prose or verse.

Contemporary Russian Poetry is a vigorous organic growth. It is a self-contained movement developing along logically consistent lines. It has produced much that is of the very first order. The poetry of Theodore Sologub, of Innocent Annensky, of Vyacheslav Ivanov, and of Alexander Blok, is to our best understanding of that perennial quality that will last. They have been followed by younger poets, more debatable and more debated, many of them intensely and daringly original, but all of them firmly planted in the living tradition of yesterday. They learn from their elders and teach their juniors--the true touchstone of an organic and vigorous movement. What is perhaps still more significant--the level of minor poetry is extraordinarily high, and every verse-producer is, in varying degrees, a conscious and efficient craftsman.

All this literature appealed to certain sides of the "intellectual" heart, but it could not slake the thirst for fiction. It was rather natural that the reading public turned to foreign novelists in preference to the native ones. It may be confidently said that three- quarters of what the ordinary Russian novel-reader read in the years preceding the Revolution were translated novels. The book-market was swamped with translations, Polish, German, Scandinavian, English, French and Spanish. Knut Hamsun, H. G. Wells, and Jack London were certainly more popular than any living Russian novelist, except perhaps the Russian Miss Dell, Mme. Verbitsky. In writers like Jack London and H. G. Wells the reader found what he missed in the Russian novelists--a good story thrillingly told. For no reader, be he ever so Russian, will indefinitely put up with a diet of "problems" and imitation poetry.

While all these things were going on on the surface of things and sharing between themselves the whole of the book-market, a secret undercurrent was burrowing out its bed, scarcely noticed at first but which turned out to be the main prolongation of the Russian novel. The principal characteristic of this undercurrent was the revival of realism and of that untranslatable Russian thing "byt," but a revival under new forms and in a new spirit. The pioneers of this movement were Andrey Bely and Remizov. There was little in common between the two men, except that both were possessed with a startlingly original genius, and both directed it towards the utilization of Russian "byt" for new artistic ends.

Few have been able to follow him in this path; for in the present state of linguistic chaos and decomposition few writers have the necessary knowledge of Russian, the taste and the sense of measure, to write anything like his pure and flexible Russian. In the hands of others it degenerates into slang, or into some personal jargon closely related to Double Dutch.

When the Revolution came and brought Russia that general impoverishment and reversion to savagery and primitive manners which is still the dominant feature of life in the U.S.S.R., literature was at first faced with a severe crisis. The book market was ruined. In the years 1918-1921 the publication of a book became a most difficult and hazardous undertaking. During these years the novel entirely disappeared from the market. For three years at least the Russian novel was dead. When it emerged again in 1922 it emerged very different from what it had been in 1917. As I have said, the surface "literature" of pre-Revolutionary date was swept away altogether. The new Realism of Remizov and Bely was triumphant all along the line. The works of both these writers were among the first books to be reprinted on the revival of the book-trade. And it soon became apparent that practically all the young generation belonged to their progeny. The first of these younger men to draw on himself the attention of critics and readers was Pilniak, the author of the present volume, on whom I shall dwell anon in greater detail.

In Petersburg there appeared a whole group of young novelists who formed a sort of professional and amicable confraternity and called themselves the "Serapion Brothers." They were all influenced by Remizov; they were taught by Zamyatin; and explained the general principles of Art by the gifted and light-minded young "formalist" critic, Victor Shklovsky. Other writers emerged in all ends of Russia, all of them more or less obssessed by the dazzling models of Bely and Remizov.

All the writers of this new school have many features in common. They are all of them more interested in Manner than in Matter. They work at their style assiduously and fastidiously. They use an indirect method of narrating by aid of symbolic detail and suggestive metaphor. This makes their stories obscure and not easy to grasp at first reading. Their language is elaborate; it is as full as possible of unusual provincial words, or permeated with slang. It is coarse and crude and many a page of their writings would not have been tolerated by the editor of a pre-Revolution Russian magazine, not to speak of an English publisher. They choose their subjects from the Revolution and the Civil War. They are all fascinated by the "elemental" greatness of the events, and are in a way the bards of the Revolution. But their "Revolutionism" is purely aesthetical and is conspicuously empty of ideas. Most of their stories appear on the pages of official Soviet publications, but they are regarded with rather natural mistrust by the official Bolshevik critics, who draw attention to the essentially uncivic character of their art.

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