Alexander Kuprin was born in 1870. He attended the Cadet School and
the Military College at Moscow, and entered the Russian Army as a
lieutenant in 1890. Seven years later he resigned his commission to
devote himself to literature.
He achieved fame by a novel, _The Duel_, in which he described with
a ruthless realism the army life in a garrison town upon the Western
Frontier. The book, which in reality falls into line with the rest of
his work as a severely objective presentation of a life which he has
found vivid and rich, was, fortunately for his success, interpreted
as an indictment of the Russian Army and the ill-starred Manchurian
campaign. He was accepted by the propagandists as one of themselves,
and though he protested vigorously against his unsought reputation, his
position was thenceforward assured.
But the interest of Kuprin’s talent is independent of the accidents
of his material. He is an artist who has found life wide and rich and
inexhaustible. He has been fascinated by the reality itself rather
than by the problems with which it confronts a differently sensitive
mind. Therefore he has not held himself aloof, but plunged into the
riotous waters of the River of Life. He has swum with the stream and
battled against it as the mood turned in him; and he has emerged with
stories of the joy he has found in his own eager acceptance. Thus
Kuprin is alive as none of his contemporaries is alive, and his stories
are stories told for the delight of the telling and of the tale.
They may not be profound with the secrets of the universe; but they
are, within their compass, shaped by the perfect art of one to whom
the telling of a story of life is an exercise of his whole being in
complete harmony with the act of life itself.