Tales of the Wilderness | Page 7

German word --means the adverb "instead.")
_Place_: there is no place of action. Russia, Europe, the world,
fraternity.
Dramatis personæ: there are none. Russia, Europe, the world, belief,
disbelief,--civilisation, blizzards, thunderstorms, the image of the Holy
Virgin. People,--men in overcoats with collars turned up, go- alones, of
course;--women;--but women are my sadness,--to me who am a
romanticist--
--the only thing, the most beautiful, the greatest joy.
All this does after all make itself into some sort of sense, but the
process by which this is at length attained is lengthy, tedious, and full
of pitfalls to the reader who is unfamiliar with some dozen modern
Russian writers and is innocent of "Soviet life."
In the impossibility of giving an intelligible English version of the Bare
Year and its companions, the stories contained in this volume have
been selected from the early and less sensational part of Pilniak's
writings and will be considerably less staggering to the average English

intelligence.
* * * * * * *
There are two things an English reader is in the habit of expecting when
approaching a new Russian writer: first he expects much--and
complains when he does not get it; to be appreciated by an English
reader the Russian writer must be a Turgenev or a Chekhov, short of
that he is no use. Secondly in every Russian book he expects to find
"ideas" and "a philosophy." If the eventual English reader approaches
Pilniak with these standards, he will be disappointed; Pilniak is not a
second Dostoyevsky, and he has singularly few "ideas." It is not that he
has no ambition in the way of ideas, but they are incoherent and cheap.
The sort of historical speculations he indulges in may be appreciated at
their right value on reading A Thousand Years. In later books he is still
more self-indulgent in this direction, and many of his "stories" are a
sort of muddle-headed historical disquisitions rather than stories in any
acceptable sense of the word. Andrey Bely and his famous Petersburg
are responsible for this habit of Pilniak's, as well as for many others of
his perversities.
Pilniak is without a doubt a writer of considerable ability, but he is
essentially unoriginal and derivative. Even in his famous novels of
"Soviet life," it is only the subject matter he has found out for
himself--the methods of treating it are other peoples'. But this
imitativeness makes Pilniak a writer of peculiar interest: he is a sort of
epitome of modern Russian fiction, a living literary history, and this
representative quality of his is perhaps the chief claim on our attention
that can be advanced on behalf of the stories included in this book.
Almost every one of them can be traced back to some Russian or
foreign writer. Each of them belongs to and is eminently typical of
some accepted literary genre in vogue between 1910 and 1920. The
Snow and The Forest Manor belong to the ordinary psychological
problem-story acted among "intellectuals"; they have for their ancestors
Chekhov, Zenaide Hippius, and the Polish novelists. _Always on
Detachment_, belongs to the progeny of A. N. Tolstoy, with the
inevitable blackguardly seduction of a more or less pure girl or woman

at the end. The Snow Wind and Over the Ravine are animal stories, for
which, I believe, Jack London is mainly responsible. In A Year of Their
Lives the same "animal" method is transfered to the treatment of
primitive human life, and the shadow of Knut Hamsun is plainly
discernible in the background. _Death_, _The Heirs_, and The
Belokonsky Estate are first class exercises in the manner of Bunin, and
only A Thousand Years and The Crossways herald in, to a certain
extent, Pilniak's own manner of invention. From the point of view of
"ideas" The Crossways is the most interesting in the book, for it gives
expression to that which is certainly the root of all Pilniak's conception
of the Revolution. It is--to use two terms which have been applied to
Russia by two very different schools of thought but equally opposed to
Europe--a "Scythian" or an "Eurasian" conception. To Pilniak the
Revolution is essentially the "Revolt" of peasant and rural Russia
against the alien network of European civilisation, the Revolt of the
"crossways" against the highroad and the railroad, of the village against
the town. A conception, you will perceive, which is opposed to that of
Lenin and the orthodox Communists, and which explains why official
Bolshevism is not over-enthusiastic about Pilniak. The Crossways is a
good piece of work (it can hardly be called a story) and it just gives a
glimpse of that ambitious vastness of scale on which Pilniak was soon
to plan his bigger Soviet stories.
* * * * * * *
But taken in themselves and apart from his