Tales of the Wilderness | Page 4

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 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