The Republic of the Southern Cross, and other stories

CONSTABLE’S RUSSIAN LIBRARY UNDER THE EDITORSHIP OF STEPHEN GRAHAM THE REPUBLIC OF THE SOUTHERN CROSS
BY VALERY BRUSSOF WITH AN INTRODUCTORY ESSAY BY STEPHEN GRAHAM LONDON CONSTABLE AND COMPANY LTD. 1918

VALERY BRUSSOF is a celebrated Russian writer of the present time. He is in the front rank of contemporary literature, and is undoubtedly very gifted, being considered by some to be the greatest of living Russian poets, and being in addition a critic of penetration and judgment, a writer of short tales, and the author of one long historical novel from the life of Germany in the sixteenth century.
He is a Russian of strong European tastes and temperament, a sort of Mediterraneanised Russian, with greater affinities in France and Italy than in his native land; an artificial production in the midst of the Russian literary world. A hard, polished, and even merciless personality, he has little in common with the compassionate spirits of Russia. If Kuprin or Gorky may be taken as characteristic of modern Russia, Brussof is their opposite. He sheds no tears with the reader, he makes no passionate and “unmanly” defiance of the world, but is restrained and concentrated and wrapped up in himself and his ideas. The average length of a sentence of Dostoieffsky is probably about twenty-five words, of Kuprin thirty, but of Brussof only twenty, and if you take the staccato “Republic of the Southern Cross,” only twelve. His fine virile style is admired by Russians for its brevity and directness. He has been called a maker of sentences in bronze.
It is curious, however, that the theme of his writing has little in common with the virility of his style. As far as our Western point of view is concerned it is considered rather feminine than masculine to doubt the reality of our waking life and to give credence to dreams. Yet such is undoubtedly the preoccupation of Brussof in these stories.
He says in his preface to the second edition of that collection which bears the title The Axis of the Earth , “the stories are written to show, in various ways, that there is no fixed boundary line between the world of reality and that of the imagination, between the dreaming and the waking world, life and fantasy; that what we commonly call ‘imaginary’ may be the greatest reality of the world, and that which all call reality the most dreadful delirium.”