A Slav Soul, and Other Stories

“Oh how incomprehensible for us, how mysterious, how strange are the very simplest happenings in life. And we, not understanding them, unable to penetrate their significance, heap one event upon another, plait them together, join them, make acquaintances and marriages, write books, say sermons, found ministries, carry on war or trade, make new inventions and then after all, create history! And yet every time I think of the immensity and complexity, the incomprehensible and elemental accidentoriness of the whole hurly-burly of life, then my own little life seems but a miserable speck of dust lost in the whirl of a hurricane.”
So in a paragraph in one of his sketches Alexander Kuprin gives his feelings about his life and his work, and in that expression perhaps we see his characteristic attitude towards the world of which he writes. One of the strongest tales in this collection, “Tempting Providence,” is very representative of Kuprin in this vein.
After Chekhof the most popular tale-writer in Russia is Kuprin, the author of fourteen volumes of effusive, touching and humorous stories. He is read by the great mass of the Russian reading public, and his works can be bought at any railway bookstall in the Empire. He is devoured by the students, loved by the bourgeois, and admired even by intellectual and fastidious Russians. It is impossible not to admire this natural torrent of Russian thoughts and words and sentiments. His lively pages are a reflection of Russia herself, and without having been once in the country it would be possible to get a fair notion of its surface life by reading these tales in translation. Perhaps the greatest of living Russian novelists is Kuprin—exalted, hysterical, sentimental, Rabelaisian Kuprin. He comes to you with a handful of wild flowers in one red, hairy hand and a shovelful of rubbish in the other—his shiny, lachrymose but unfathomable features pouring floods of tears or rolling and bursting in guffaws of laughter. His is a rank verbiage—he gives birth to words, ideas, examples in tens where other writers go by units and threes.