Tales of the Wilderness

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 (1904) 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, [Footnote: The reader will notice the quotations from Annensky in the first story of this volume.] 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.

The case with prose is very different. The old nineteenth century realistic tradition is dead. It died, practically, very soon after Chekhov. It has produced a certain amount of good, even excellent, work within these last twenty years, but this work is disconnected, sterile of influence, and more or less belated; at the best it has the doubtful privilege of at once becoming classical and above the age. Such for instance was the case of Bunin's solitary masterpiece The Gentleman from San Francisco, and of that wonderful series of Gorky's autobiographical books, the fourth of which appeared but a few months ago. These, however, can hardly be included in the domain of Fiction, any more than his deservedly famous Reminiscences of Tolstoy. But Gorky, and that excellent though minor writer, Kuprin, are the only belated representatives of the fine nineteenth century tradition. For even Bunin is a poet and a stylist rather than a story teller: his most characteristic "stories" are works of pure atmosphere, as diffuse and as skeletonless as a picture by Claude Monet.

The Symbolists of the early twentieth century (all the great poets of the generation were Symbolists) tried also to create a prose of their own. They tried many directions but they did not succeed in creating a style or founding a tradition. The masterpiece of this Symbolist prose is Theodore Sologub's great novel The Little Demon[Footnote: English translation.] (by the way a very inadequate rendering of the Russian title). It is a great novel, probably the most perfect Russian novel since the death of Dostoyevsky. It breaks away very decidedly from Realism and all the traditions of the nineteenth century. It is symbolic, synthetic, and poetical. But it is so intensely personal and its achievements are so intimately conditioned by the author's idiosyncrasies that it was quite plainly impossible to imitate it, or even to learn from it. This is still more the case with the later works of Sologub, like the charming but baffling and disconcerting romance of Queen Ortruda.

The other Symbolists produced nothing of the same calibre, and they failed to attract the public. The bestsellers of the period after 1905 were, naturally enough, hybrid writers like Andreyev. The cheap effect of his cadenced prose, his dreary and monotonous rhetoric, his sensational way of treating "essential problems" were just what the intelligentsia wanted at the time; it is also just what nobody is likely to want again. Another writer of "problem stories" was Artsybashev. His notorious Sanin (1907) is very typical of a certain phase of Russian life. It has acquired a somewhat unaccountable popularity among the budding English intelligentsia. From the literary point of view its value is nil. Artsybashev and Andreyev were very second-rate writers; they had no knowledge of their art and their taste was deplorably bad and crude, but at least they were in a way, sincere, and gave expression to the genuine vacuum and desolation of their hearts. But around them sprung up a literature which sold as well and better than they did, but was openly meretricious and, fortunately, ephemeral. If it has done nothing else the great Revolution of 1917 has at least done one good thing in making a clean sweep of all this interrevolutionary (1905- 1917) fiction.

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," [Footnote: "Byt" is the life of a definite community at a definite time in its individual, as opposed to universally human, features.] 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.

Andrey Bely was, and is, a poet rather than a novelist. His prose from the very beginning exhibits in its extreme form the Symbolist tendency towards wiping away the difference between poetry and prose: in his later novels his prose becomes distinctly metrical, it is prose after all only because it cannot be devided into lines; it can be devided into feet very easily. But, though such prose is essentially a hybrid and illegitimate form, Bely has achieved with it things that have probably never been achieved with the aid of anything like his instruments. The first of the series of his big novels appeared in 1909: it is the Silver Dove, a story of Russian mystical sectarians and of an intellectual who gets entangled in their meshes. At its appearance it sold only five hundred copies. His next novel Petersburg (1913) had not a much greater success. The third of the series is Kotik Letaev (1917). The three novels form a series unique in its way. Those who can get over the initial difficulties and accustom themselves to the very peculiar proceedings of the author will not fail to be irresistibly fascinated by his strange genius. The first novel, the Silver Dove, is in my opinion the most powerful of the three. It combines a daring realism, which is akin to Gogol both in its exaggerations and in its broad humour, with a wonderful power of suggestion and of "atmosphere." One of its most memorable passages is the vast and elemental picture of the Wind driving over the Russian plain; a passage familiarised to satiety by numerous more or less clever imitations. Petersburg is a "political" novel. It is intended to symbolise the Nihilism, the geometrical irreality of Petersburg and Petersburg bureaucracy. The cold spirit of system of the Revolutionary Terrorists is presented as the natural and legitimate outcome of bureaucratic formalism.

A cunningly produced atmosphere of weird irreality pervades the whole book. It is in many ways a descendant of Dostoyevsky-and has in its turn again produced a numerous family of imitations, including Pilniak's most characteristic tales of the Revolution. Kotik Letaev, the last and up to the present the least imitated of Bely's novels, is the story of a child in his very first years. In it the "poetical" methods of the author reach their full development; but at the same time he achieves miracles of vividness and illusion in the realism of his dialogue and the minute, but by no means dry, analysis of the movements of his hero's subconscious Ego. In spite of the enormous difference of style, methods, and aims Bely approaches in many ways the effects and the achievements of Proust.

Remizov is very different. He is steeped in Russian popular and legendary lore. His roots are deep down in the Russian soil. He is the greatest living master of racy and idiomatic Russian. He has also written prose that elbows poetry, and that was looked upon with surprise and bewilderment until people realised that it was poetry. But his importance in the history of the Russian Novel is of another kind. It is firstly in his deliberate effort to "deliteralize" Russian prose, to give it the accent, the intonation, and the syntax of the spoken language. He has fully achieved his ends; he has created a prose which is entirely devoid of all bookishness and even on the printed page gives the illusion of being heard, not seen.

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.

Remizov, however, has been more influential in another way, by his method of treating Russian life. The most notable of Remizov's "provincial" stories [Footnote: In the second edition it is called "The Story of Ivan Semenovich Stratilatov." ] _The Unhushable Tambourine _was written at one time with Bely's The Silver Dove, in 1909. At the time it met with even greater indifference: it was refused by the leading magazine of the literary "party" to which the author belonged, and could appear only some years later in a collection of short stories. But it at once became known and very soon began to "make school." Remizov's manner was to a certain degree a reversion to the nineteenth century, but to such aspects of that century that had before him been unnoticed. One of his chief inspirers was Leskov, a writer who is only now coming into his own. Remizov's Tambourine and his other stories of this class are realistic, they are "representations of real life," of "byt", but their Realism is very different from the traditional Russian realism. The style is dominated not by any "social" pre-occupation, but by a deliberate bringing forward of the grotesque. It verges on caricature, but is curiously and inseparably blended with a sympathy for even the lowest and vilest specimens of Mankind which is reminiscent of Dostoyevsky. It would be out of place here to give any detailed account of Remizov's many-sided genius, of his Tales of the Russian People, of his Dreams (real night-dreams), of his books written during the War and the Revolution (Mara and The Noises of the Town). In his later work he tends towards a greater simplicity, a certain "primitiveness" of outline, and a more concentrated style. Remizov's disciples, as might be expected, have been more successful in imitating the grotesqueness of his caricatures and the vivid and intense concentration of his character painting than in adopting his sympathetic and human attitude or in speaking his pure Russian.

The first of the new realists to win general recognition was A. N. Tolstoy, who speedily caught and vulgarised Remizov's knack of creating grotesque "provincial" characters. He has an easy way of writing, which is miles apart from Remizov's perfect craftsmanship, a love for mere filth, characteristic of his time and audience, and water enough to make his writings palatable to the average reader. So he early became the most popular of the literary novelists of the years before the Revolution.

A far more significant writer is Michael Prishvin. He belongs to an older generation and attracted some attention by good work in the line of descriptive journalism before he came in touch with Remizov. A man of the soil, he was capable of following Remizov's lead in making his Russian more colloquial and less bookish, without slavishly imitating him. He was unfortunately too much absorbed by his journalistic work to give much time to literature. But he wrote at least one story which deserves a high rank in even the smallest selection of Russian stories-The Beast of Krutoyarsk (1913). It is the story of a dog, and is far the best "animal" story in the whole of Russian literature. The animal stories of Rudyard Kipling and Jack London were very popular in Russia at that time, but Prishvin is curiously free from every foreign, in fact from every bookish, influence; his story smells of the damp and acid soil of his native Smolensk province, and even Remizov was to him only a guide towards the right use of words and the right way of concentrating on his subject.

Prishvin stands alone. But in the years 1913-1916 the Russian literary press was flooded with short stories modelled on the Unhushable Tambourine. The most promising of these provincialists was E. Zamyatin, whose stories [Footnote: Uyezdnoe, which may be rendered as "something provincial."] are as intense and packed with suggestive ugliness as anything in Remizov, but lack the master's unerring linguistic flair and his profound and inclusive humanness. Zamyatin's stories are most emphatically made, manufactured, there is not an ounce of spontaneity in them, and, especially in the later work where he is more or less free from reminiscences of Remizov, they produce the impression of mosaic laboriously set together. They are overloaded with pointedly suggestive metaphor and symbolically expressive detail, and in their laborious and disproportionate elaborateness they remind you of the deliberate ugliness of a painting by some German "Expressionist." [Footnote: Zamyatin was during the war a shipbuilding Engineer in the Russian service at Newcastle. He has written several stories of English life which are entirely in his later "expressionist" manner (The Islanders, Berlin, 1922)].

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 (in the very precise sense of the word- they had regular classes) 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.

The exaggerated elaborateness and research of their works makes all these writers practically untranslatable; not that many of them are really worth translating. Their deliberate aestheticism-using as they do revolutionary subjects only as material for artistic effect- prevents their writings from being acceptable as reliable pictures of Russian post-Revolutionary life. And it is quite obvious that they have very few of the qualities that make good fiction in the eyes of the ordinary novel-reader.

There are marked inequalities of talent between them, as well as considerable differences of style. Pilniak is the most ambitious, he aims highest-and at his worst falls lowest. Vyacheslav Shishkov, a Siberian, is notable for his good Russian, a worthy pupil of Remizov and Prishvin. Vsevolod Ivanov, another Siberian, is perhaps the most interesting for the subjects he chooses (the Civil War in the backwoods of Siberia), but his style is, though vigorous, diffuse and hazy, and his narrative is lost in a nebula of poetically-produced "atmosphere."

Nicholas Nikitin, who is considered by some to be the most promising of all, is certainly the most typical of the school of Zamyatin; his style, overloaded with detail which swamps the outline of the story, is disfigured by the deliberate research of unfamiliar provincial idioms. Michael Zoshchenko is the only one who has, in a small way, reached perfection in his rendering of the common slang of a private soldier. But his art savours too much of a pastiche; he is really a born parodist and may some day give us a Russian Christmas Garland.

The most striking feature of all these story-tellers is their almost complete inability to tell a story. And this in spite of their great reverence for Leskov, the greatest of Russian story-tellers. But of Leskov they have only imitated the style, not his art of narrative. Miss Harrison, in her notable essay on the Aspects of the Russian Verb, [Footnote: Aspects and Aorists, by Jane Harrison, Cambridge University Press, 1919.] makes an interesting distinction between the "perfective" and "imperfective" style in fiction. The perfective is the ordinary style of an honest narrative. The "imperfective" is where nothing definitely happens but only goes on indefinitely "becoming." Russian Literature (as the Russian language, according to Miss Harrison) has a tendency towards the "imperfective." But never has this "imperfective" been so exclusively paramount as now. In all these stories of thrilling events the writers have a most cunning way of concealing the adventure under such a thick veil of detail, description, poetical effusion, idiom, and metaphor, that it can only with difficulty be discovered by the very experienced reader. To choose such adventures for subjects and then deliberately to make no use of them and concentrate all attention on style and atmosphere, is really a tour de force, the crowning glory and the reductio ad absurdum of this imperfective tendency.

These extremities, which are largely conditioned by the whole past of Russian Literature, must naturally lead to a reaction. The reading public cannot be satisfied with such a literature. Nor are the critics. A reaction against all this style is setting in, but it remains in the domain of theory and has not produced work of any importance. And it is doubtful whether it will. If even Leskov with his wonderful genius for pure narrative has failed to influence the moderns in any way except by his mannerisms of speech, the case seems indeed desperate. Those who are most thirsty for good stories properly told turn their eyes westwards, towards "Stevenson and Dumas" and E. A. T. Hoffmann. Better imitate Pierre Bénois than go on in the way you are doing, says Lev Lunts, one of the Serapion Brothers, in a violent and well-founded invective against modern Russian fiction. [Footnote: In Gorky's miscellany, Beseda. N3, 1923.] But though he sees the right way out pretty clearly Lunts has not seriously tried his hand at the novel. [Footnote: As I write I hear of the death of Lev Lunts at the age of 22. His principal work is a good tragedy of pure action without "atmosphere" or psychology (in the same Beseda, N2).] A characteristic sign of the times is a novel by Sergey Bobrov, [Footnote: The Specification of Iditol. Iditol being the name of an imaginary chemical discovery.] a "precious" poet and a good critic, where he adopts the methods of the film-drama with its rapid development and complicated plot, and carefully avoids everything picturesque or striking in his style. But the common run of fiction in the Soviet magazines continues as it was, and it is to be feared that there is something intrinsically opposed to the "perfective" narrative in the constitution of the contemporary Russian novelist.