The first book which I hurl at my friend is Andreyev’s The Little Angel. It is a collection of short stories. There are fifteen stories in the new volume brought out by Mr. Alfred Knopf, and all of them are little masterpieces. There is one story about a dog, Snapper. Only Anatole France has equaled it. There is another story, The Marseillaise. It is a perfect story. It is Kipling at his very best plus a flavor, a note, a something serious and deep that the Russians alone know how to command, that Kipling never reached. There is one story, In the Basement. I hope my friend chokes on this story. It would serve him right.
But The Little Angel stands out from the fifteen. It is about a little boy, a bitter, lonely-hearted fellow whose mother drinks and beats him, whose father is dying of consumption, and who in turn snarls and bullies his playmates and weeps at night because his heart is so empty and heavy. In this story Andreyev attains a poignant delicacy of touch and a grim beauty which even his one-time contemporary Chekhov never surpassed.
The Little Angel is the most beautiful short story I ever have read.
Chekhov has also been translated again. A collection of fragments, vibrating episodes, moods, and exquisite children stories called Russian Silhouettes has been issued by Scribners’.
A better artist than Andreyev, keener, more reserved, more subtle, Chekhov to my notion nevertheless lacks the vibrancy which the author of The Seven Who Were Hanged flings into his tales. Andreyev wields the pen of Dostoevsky with a little thinner ink. Chekhov is Turgenev fragmentized. He has left behind him a series of little canvases so finely done, so skilfully passionate ... well, I hurl him at my friend without further ado....
... It is that consumptive rogue of an Artzibashef who has caused most of the trouble. The devil take him and his erotic suicides. His latest translated book brought out by Huebsch is a tasteless joke. It is called The Breaking Point. In it all the characters but one commit suicide, all the women are “ruined.” Whenever two or more of its genial personae come together they forthwith fall into an argument concerning the futility of life, the idiocy of existence and so on and so on. And the trouble is that Artzibashef can write, beautifully, keenly, and sometimes gloriously. In Sanine, for instance, in The Millionaire, there are passages better than Andreyev, better than Chekhov, better than any writer has written. But the books are distorted, full of puerile moralizings, breathing a diseased lust and a sentimentalized violence—and The Breaking Point is the worst of them to date. Artzibashef’s work stands in the same relation to the Russian realism that Paul De Kock’s work stands to the French sensual finesse.
AMERICA’S COMING-OF-AGE
by VAN WYCK BROOKS
A study of American ideals and reality: aspirations and performance.