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DISDEPOPINSTRUCT [Footnote: That is "District Department for popular
instruction"--in "Russian," _Uotnarobraz_.]
Times: Lent of the eighth year of the World War and of the downfall
of European Civilisation (see Spengler)--and sixth Lent since the
great Russian Revolution; in other words: March, Spring, breaking-up
of the ice--when the Russian Empire exploded in the great revolution
the way Rupert's drops explode, casting off--Estia, Latvia,
Lithuania, Poland, the Monarchy, Chernov, Martov, the Dardanelles---
Russian Civilisation,--Russian blizzards---
--and when---
--Europe--
was:
--nothing but one Ersatz
from end to end--
(Ersatz--a 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 later work I think the
stories in the manner of Bunin will be found the most satisfactory
items in this volume. Of these _Death_ was written before the
Revolution and, but for an entirely irrelevant and very Pilniakish
allusion to Lermontov and other deceased worthies, it is entirely
unconnected with events and revolutions. Very "imperfective" and
hardly a "story," it is nevertheless done with sober and
conscientious craftsmanship, very much like Bunin and very unlike the
usual idea we have of Pilniak. The only thing Pilniak was incapable
of taking from his model was Bunin's wonderfully rich and full
Russian, a shortcoming which is least likely to be felt in
translation.
* * * * * * *
The other two Buninesque stories, _The Belokonsky Estate_ and _The
Heirs_, are stories (again, can the word "story" be applied to this
rampantly "imperfective" style?) of the Revolution. They display the
same qualities of sober measure and solid texture which are not
usually associated with the name of Pilniak. These two stories ought
to be read side by side, for they are correlative. In _The Belokonsky
Estate_ the representative of "the old order," Prince Constantine, is
drawn to an almost heroical scale and the "new man" cuts a poor and
contemptible figure by his side. In the other story the old order is
represented by a studied selection of all its worst types. I do not
think that the stories were meant as a deliberate contrast, they are
just the outcome of the natural lack of preconceived idea which is
typical of Pilniak and of his passive, receptive, plastical mind. As
long as he does not go out of his way to give expression to vague and
incoherent ideas, the outcome of his muddle-headed meditations on
Russian History, this very shortcoming (if shortcoming it be) becomes
something of a virtue, and Pilniak--an honest membrana vibrating with
unbiassed indifference to every sound from the outer world.
* * * * * * *
The reader may miss the more elaborate and sensational stories of
Soviet life. But I have a word of consolation for him--they are
eminently unreadable, and for myself I would never have read them had
it not been for the hard duties of a literary critic. In this case as
in others I prefer to go direct to the fountain-source and read
Bely's _Petersburg_ and the books of Remizov, which for all the
difficulties they put in the way of the reader and of the translator
will at least amply repay their efforts. But Pilniak has also
substantial virtues: the power to make things live; an openness to
life and an acute vision. If he throws away the borrowed methods that
suit him as little as a peacock's feathers may suit a crow, he will
no doubt develop rather along the lines of the better stories
included in this volume, than in the direction of his more ambitious
novels. And I imagine that his _opus magnum_, if, in some distant
future he ever comes to write one, will be more like the good old
realism of the nineteenth century than like the intense and troubled
art of his present masters; I venture to prophesy that he will
finally turn out something like a Soviet (or post-Soviet) Trollope,
rather than a vulgarised Andrey Bely.