Tales of the Wilderness | Page 3

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