When the Revolution came and brought Russia that general impoverishment and reversion to savagery and primitive manners which is still the dominant feature of life in the U.S.S.R., literature was at first faced with a severe crisis. The book market was ruined. In the years 1918-1921 the publication of a book became a most difficult and hazardous undertaking. During these years the novel entirely disappeared from the market. For three years at least the Russian novel was dead. When it emerged again in 1922 it emerged very different from what it had been in 1917. As I have said, the surface "literature" of pre-Revolutionary date was swept away altogether. The new Realism of Remizov and Bely was triumphant all along the line. The works of both these writers were among the first books to be reprinted on the revival of the book-trade. And it soon became apparent that practically all the young generation belonged to their progeny. The first of these younger men to draw on himself the attention of critics and readers was Pilniak, the author of the present volume, on whom I shall dwell anon in greater detail.
In Petersburg there appeared a whole group of young novelists who formed a sort of professional and amicable confraternity and called themselves the "Serapion Brothers." They were all influenced by Remizov; they were taught (in the very precise sense of the word— they had regular classes) by Zamyatin; and explained the general principles of Art by the gifted and light-minded young "formalist" critic, Victor Shklovsky. Other writers emerged in all ends of Russia, all of them more or less obssessed by the dazzling models of Bely and Remizov.
All the writers of this new school have many features in common. They are all of them more interested in Manner than in Matter. They work at their style assiduously and fastidiously. They use an indirect method of narrating by aid of symbolic detail and suggestive metaphor. This makes their stories obscure and not easy to grasp at first reading. Their language is elaborate; it is as full as possible of unusual provincial words, or permeated with slang. It is coarse and crude and many a page of their writings would not have been tolerated by the editor of a pre-Revolution Russian magazine, not to speak of an English publisher. They choose their subjects from the Revolution and the Civil War. They are all fascinated by the "elemental" greatness of the events, and are in a way the bards of the Revolution. But their "Revolutionism" is purely aesthetical and is conspicuously empty of ideas. Most of their stories appear on the pages of official Soviet publications, but they are regarded with rather natural mistrust by the official Bolshevik critics, who draw attention to the essentially uncivic character of their art.
The exaggerated elaborateness and research of their works makes all these writers practically untranslatable; not that many of them are really worth translating. Their deliberate aestheticism—using as they do revolutionary subjects only as material for artistic effect— prevents their writings from being acceptable as reliable pictures of Russian post-Revolutionary life. And it is quite obvious that they have very few of the qualities that make good fiction in the eyes of the ordinary novel-reader.
There are marked inequalities of talent between them, as well as considerable differences of style. Pilniak is the most ambitious, he aims highest—and at his worst falls lowest. Vyacheslav Shishkov, a Siberian, is notable for his good Russian, a worthy pupil of Remizov and Prishvin. Vsevolod Ivanov, another Siberian, is perhaps the most interesting for the subjects he chooses (the Civil War in the backwoods of Siberia), but his style is, though vigorous, diffuse and hazy, and his narrative is lost in a nebula of poetically-produced "atmosphere."
Nicholas Nikitin, who is considered by some to be the most promising of all, is certainly the most typical of the school of Zamyatin; his style, overloaded with detail which swamps the outline of the story, is disfigured by the deliberate research of unfamiliar provincial idioms. Michael Zoshchenko is the only one who has, in a small way, reached perfection in his rendering of the common slang of a private soldier. But his art savours too much of a pastiche; he is really a born parodist and may some day give us a Russian Christmas Garland.
The most striking feature of all these story-tellers is their almost complete inability to tell a story. And this in spite of their great reverence for Leskov, the greatest of Russian story-tellers. But of Leskov they have only imitated the style, not his art of narrative. Miss Harrison, in her notable essay on the Aspects of the Russian Verb, [Footnote: Aspects and Aorists, by Jane Harrison, Cambridge University Press, 1919.] makes an interesting distinction between the "perfective" and "imperfective" style in fiction. The perfective is the ordinary style of an honest narrative. The "imperfective" is where nothing definitely happens but only goes on indefinitely "becoming." Russian Literature (as the Russian language, according to Miss Harrison) has a tendency towards the "imperfective." But never has this "imperfective" been so exclusively paramount as now. In all these stories of thrilling events the writers have a most cunning way of concealing the adventure under such a thick veil of detail, description, poetical effusion, idiom, and metaphor, that it can only with difficulty be discovered by the very experienced reader. To choose such adventures for subjects and then deliberately to make no use of them and concentrate all attention on style and atmosphere, is really a tour de force, the crowning glory and the reductio ad absurdum of this imperfective tendency.
These extremities, which are largely conditioned by the whole past of Russian Literature, must naturally lead to a reaction. The reading public cannot be satisfied with such a literature. Nor are the critics. A reaction against all this style is setting in, but it remains in the domain of theory and has not produced work of any importance. And it is doubtful whether it will. If even Leskov with his wonderful genius for pure narrative has failed to influence the moderns in any way except by his mannerisms of speech, the case seems indeed desperate. Those who are most thirsty for good stories properly told turn their eyes westwards, towards "Stevenson and Dumas" and E. A. T. Hoffmann. Better imitate Pierre Bénois than go on in the way you are doing, says Lev Lunts, one of the Serapion Brothers, in a violent and well-founded invective against modern Russian fiction. [Footnote: In Gorky's miscellany, Beseda. N3, 1923.] But though he sees the right way out pretty clearly Lunts has not seriously tried his hand at the novel. [Footnote: As I write I hear of the death of Lev Lunts at the age of 22. His principal work is a good tragedy of pure action without "atmosphere" or psychology (in the same Beseda, N2).] A characteristic sign of the times is a novel by Sergey Bobrov, [Footnote: The Specification of Iditol. Iditol being the name of an imaginary chemical discovery.] a "precious" poet and a good critic, where he adopts the methods of the film-drama with its rapid development and complicated plot, and carefully avoids everything picturesque or striking in his style. But the common run of fiction in the Soviet magazines continues as it was, and it is to be feared that there is something intrinsically opposed to the "perfective" narrative in the constitution of the contemporary Russian novelist.