Boris Pilniak (or in more correct transliteration, Pil'nyak) is the
pseudonym of Boris Andreyevich Wogau. He is not of pure Russian
blood, but a descendant of German colonists; a fact which incidently
proves the force of assimilation inherent in the Russian milieu and
the capacity to be assimilated, so typical of Germans. For it is
difficult to deny Pilniak the appellation of a typical Russian.
Pilniak is about thirty-five years of age. His short stories began to
appear in periodicals before the War, and his first book appeared in
1918. It contained four stories, two of which are included in the
present volume (_Death_ and _Over the Ravine_). A second volume
appeared in 1920 (including the _Crossways, The Bielokonsky Estate,
The Snow Wind, A Year of Their Lives_, and _A Thousand Years_). These
volumes attracted comparatively little attention, though considering
the great scarcity of fiction in those years they were certainly
notable events. But _Ivan-da-Marya_ and _The Bare Year_, published in
1922, produced a regular boom, and Pilniak jumped into the limelight
of all-Russian celebrity. The cause of the success of these volumes,
or rather the attention attracted by them, lay in their subject-
matter: Pilniak was the first novelist to approach the subject of
"Soviet _Byt_," to attempt to utilise the everyday life and routine
of Soviet officialdom, and to paint the new forms Russian life had
taken since the Revolution. Since 1922 editions and reprints of
Pilniak's stories have been numerous, and as he follows the rather
regrettable usage of making up every new book of his unpublished
stories with reprints of earlier work the bibliography of his works
is rather complicated and entangled, besides being entirely
uninteresting to the English reader.
The most interesting portion of Pilniak's works are no doubt his
longer stories of "Soviet life" written since 1921. Unfortunately
they are practically untranslatable. His proceedings, imitated from
Bely and Remizov, would seem incongruous to the English reader, and
the translation would be laid aside in despair or in disgust, in
spite of all its burning interest of actuality. None of the stories
included in this volume belong to this last manner of Pilniak's, but
in order to give a certain idea of what it is like I will attempt a
specimen-translation of the beginning of his story _The Third
Metropolis_ (dated May-June 1922), reproducing all his typographical
mannerisms, which are in their turn reproduced rather unintelligently,
from his great masters, Remizov and Bely. The story, by the way, is
dedicated "To A. M. Remizov, the Master in whose Workshop I
was an apprentice."