Tales of the Wilderness | Page 5

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