CONSTABLE’S RUSSIAN LIBRARY UNDER THE
EDITORSHIP OF STEPHEN GRAHAM
THE REPUBLIC OF
THE SOUTHERN CROSS
| CONSTABLE’S RUSSIAN LIBRARY |
| Edited with Introductions |
| By STEPHEN GRAHAM |
| THE SWEET SCENTED NAME |
| By Fedor Sologub |
| WAR AND CHRISTIANITY |
| THREE CONVERSATIONS |
| By Vladimir Solovyof |
| THE WAY OF THE CROSS |
| By V. Doroshevitch |
| A SLAV SOUL AND OTHER STORIES |
| By Alexander Kuprin |
| THE EMIGRANT |
| By L. F. Dostoieffshaya |
| THE JUSTIFICATION OF THE GOOD |
| By Vladimir Solovyof |
| THE REPUBLIC OF THE SOUTHERN CROSS |
| AND OTHER STORIES |
| By Valery Brussof |
THE REPUBLIC OF
THE SOUTHERN CROSS
AND OTHER STORIES
BY
VALERY BRUSSOF
WITH AN INTRODUCTORY ESSAY BY
STEPHEN GRAHAM
LONDON
CONSTABLE AND COMPANY LTD.
1918
| [CONTENTS] |
INTRODUCTION
VALERY BRUSSOF
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.