Tales of the Wilderness | Page 3

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 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