[Sidenote:_18 Mar. '09_]
One of the most noteworthy of recent publications in the way of fiction is
Anton Tchehkoff's "The Kiss and Other Stories," translated by Mr. R.E.C.
Long and published by Duckworth (6s.). A similar volume, "The Black Monk"
(same translator and publisher), was issued some years ago. Tchehkoff
lived and made a tremendous name in Russia, and died, and England recked
not. He has been translated into French, and I believe that there exists a
complete edition of his works in German; but these two volumes are all
that we have in English. The thanks of the lettered are due to Mr. Long
and to his publisher. Tchehkoff's stories are really remarkable. If any
one of authority stated that they rank him with the fixed stars of Russian
fiction--Dostoievsky, Tourgeniev, Gogol, and Tolstoy--I should not be
ready to contradict. To read them, after even the finest stories of de
Maupassant or Murray Gilchrist, is like having a bath after a ball. Their
effect is extraordinarily one of ingenuousness. Of course they are not in
the least ingenuous, as a fact, but self-conscious and elaborate to the
highest degree. The progress of every art is an apparent progress from
conventionality to realism. The basis of convention remains, but as the
art develops it finds more and more subtle methods fitting life to the
convention or the convention to life--whichever you please. Tchehkoff's
tales mark a definite new conquest in this long struggle. As you read him
you fancy that he must always have been saying to himself: "Life is good
enough for me. I won't alter it. I will set it down as it is." Such is the
tribute to his success which he forces from you.
* * * * *
He seems to have achieved absolute realism. (But there is no absolute, and
one day somebody--probably a Russian--will carry realism further.) His
climaxes are never strained; nothing is ever idealized, sentimentalized,
etherealized; no part of the truth is left out, no part is exaggerated.
There is no cleverness, no startling feat of virtuosity. All appears
simple, candid, almost childlike. I could imagine the editor of a popular
magazine returning a story of Tchehkoff's with the friendly criticism that
it showed promise, and that when he had acquired more skill in hitting the
reader exactly between the eyes a deal might be possible. Tchehkoff never
hits you between the eyes. But he will, nevertheless, leave you on the
flat of your back. Beneath the outward simplicity of his work is concealed
the most wondrous artifice, the artifice that is embedded deep in nearly
all great art. All we English novelists ought to study "The Kiss" and "The
Black Monk." They will delight every person of fine taste, but to the
artist they are a profound lesson. We have no writer, and we have never
had one, nor has France, who could mould the material of life, without
distorting it, into such complex forms to such an end of beauty. Read
these books, and you will genuinely know something about Russia; you will
be drenched in the vast melancholy, savage and wistful, of Russian life;
and you will have seen beauty. No tale in "The Kiss" is quite as
marvellous as either the first or the last tale in "The Black Monk,"
perhaps; but both volumes are indispensable to one's full education. I do
not exaggerate. I must add that on a reader whose taste is neither highly
developed nor capable of high development, the effect of the stories will
be similar to their effect on the magazine editor.