Tales of the Wilderness | Page 4

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