Best Russian Short Stories

Best Russian Short Stories, by
Various

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Title: Best Russian Short Stories
Author: Various
Release Date: September 11, 2004 [EBook #13437]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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[Illustration: ANTON P. CHEKHOV, RUSSIA'S GREATEST
SHORT-STORY WRITER]
BEST RUSSIAN SHORT STORIES

Compiled and Edited by THOMAS SELTZER

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION
THE QUEEN OF SPADES A.S. Pushkin
THE CLOAK N.V. Gogol
THE DISTRICT DOCTOR I.S. Turgenev
THE CHRISTMAS TREE AND THE WEDDING F.M. Dostoyevsky
GOD SEES THE TRUTH, BUT WAITS L.N. Tolstoy
HOW A MUZHIK FED TWO OFFICIALS M.Y. Saltykov
THE SHADES, A PHANTASY V.G. Korolenko
THE SIGNAL V.N. Garshin
THE DARLING A.P. Chekhov
THE BET A.P. Chekhov
VANKA A.P. Chekhov
HIDE AND SEEK F.K. Sologub
DETHRONED I.N. Potapenko
THE SERVANT S.T. Semyonov
ONE AUTUMN NIGHT M. Gorky
HER LOVER M. Gorky

LAZARUS L.N. Andreyev
THE REVOLUTIONIST M.P. Artzybashev
THE OUTRAGE A.I. Kuprin

INTRODUCTION
Conceive the joy of a lover of nature who, leaving the art galleries,
wanders out among the trees and wild flowers and birds that the
pictures of the galleries have sentimentalised. It is some such joy that
the man who truly loves the noblest in letters feels when tasting for the
first time the simple delights of Russian literature. French and English
and German authors, too, occasionally, offer works of lofty, simple
naturalness; but the very keynote to the whole of Russian literature is
simplicity, naturalness, veraciousness.
Another essentially Russian trait is the quite unaffected conception that
the lowly are on a plane of equality with the so-called upper classes.
When the Englishman Dickens wrote with his profound pity and
understanding of the poor, there was yet a bit; of remoteness, perhaps,
even, a bit of caricature, in his treatment of them. He showed their
sufferings to the rest of the world with a "Behold how the other half
lives!" The Russian writes of the poor, as it were, from within, as one
of them, with no eye to theatrical effect upon the well-to-do. There is
no insistence upon peculiar virtues or vices. The poor are portrayed just
as they are, as human beings like the rest of us. A democratic spirit is
reflected, breathing a broad humanity, a true universality, an unstudied
generosity that proceed not from the intellectual conviction that to
understand all is to forgive all, but from an instinctive feeling that no
man has the right to set himself up as a judge over another, that one can
only observe and record.
In 1834 two short stories appeared, The Queen of Spades, by Pushkin,
and The Cloak, by Gogol. The first was a finishing-off of the old,
outgoing style of romanticism, the other was the beginning of the new,

the characteristically Russian style. We read Pushkin's Queen of Spades,
the first story in the volume, and the likelihood is we shall enjoy it
greatly. "But why is it Russian?" we ask. The answer is, "It is not
Russian." It might have been printed in an American magazine over the
name of John Brown. But, now, take the very next story in the volume,
The Cloak. "Ah," you exclaim, "a genuine Russian story, Surely. You
cannot palm it off on me over the name of Jones or Smith." Why?
Because The Cloak for the first time strikes that truly Russian note of
deep sympathy with the disinherited. It is not yet wholly free from
artificiality, and so is not yet typical of the purely realistic fiction that
reached its perfected development in Turgenev and Tolstoy.
Though Pushkin heads the list of those writers who made the literature
of their country world-famous, he was still a romanticist, in the
universal literary fashion of his day. However, he already gave strong
indication of the peculiarly Russian genius for naturalness or realism,
and was a true Russian in his simplicity of style. In no sense an
innovator, but taking the cue for his poetry from Byron and for his
prose from the romanticism current at that period, he was not in
advance of his age. He had a revolutionary streak in his nature, as his
Ode to Liberty and other bits of verse and his intimacy with the
Decembrist rebels show. But his youthful fire soon died down, and he
found it possible to accommodate himself to the life of a Russian high
functionary and courtier