Читать книгу Tales of the Wilderness - Boris Pilniak - Страница 9

(former Church school in garden) for public use with capacity to receive 500 persons in an 8-hour working-day.

Hours of baths:

Monday—municipal children's asylums (free)

Tuesdays, Friday, Saturday—males

Wednesday, Thursday—females

Price for washing adults—50kop.gold children—25kop.gold

DISDEPOPINSTRUCT [Footnote: That is "District Department for popular instruction"—in "Russian," Uotnarobraz.]

Times: Lent of the eighth year of the World War and of the downfall of European Civilisation (see Spengler)—and sixth Lent since the great Russian Revolution; in other words: March, Spring, breaking-up of the ice—when the Russian Empire exploded in the great revolution the way Rupert's drops explode, casting off—Estia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, the Monarchy, Chernov, Martov, the Dardanelles— Russian Civilisation—Russian blizzards—

—and when—

—Europe—

was:

—nothing but one Ersatz

from end to end—

(Ersatz—a German word

—means the adverb

"instead.")

Place: there is no place of action. Russia, Europe, the world, fraternity.

Dramatis personæ: there are none. Russia, Europe, the world, belief, disbelief—civilisation, blizzards, thunderstorms, the image of the Holy Virgin. People—men in overcoats with collars turned up, go- alones, of course;—women;—but women are my sadness—to me who am a romanticist—

—the only thing, the most beautiful, the greatest joy.

All this does after all make itself into some sort of sense, but the process by which this is at length attained is lengthy, tedious, and full of pitfalls to the reader who is unfamiliar with some dozen modern Russian writers and is innocent of "Soviet life."

In the impossibility of giving an intelligible English version of the Bare Year and its companions, the stories contained in this volume have been selected from the early and less sensational part of Pilniak's writings and will be considerably less staggering to the average English intelligence.

* * * * * * *

There are two things an English reader is in the habit of expecting when approaching a new Russian writer: first he expects much—and complains when he does not get it; to be appreciated by an English reader the Russian writer must be a Turgenev or a Chekhov, short of that he is no use. Secondly in every Russian book he expects to find "ideas" and "a philosophy." If the eventual English reader approaches Pilniak with these standards, he will be disappointed; Pilniak is not a second Dostoyevsky, and he has singularly few "ideas." It is not that he has no ambition in the way of ideas, but they are incoherent and cheap. The sort of historical speculations he indulges in may be appreciated at their right value on reading A Thousand Years. In later books he is still more self-indulgent in this direction, and many of his "stories" are a sort of muddle-headed historical disquisitions rather than stories in any acceptable sense of the word. Andrey Bely and his famous Petersburg are responsible for this habit of Pilniak's, as well as for many others of his perversities.

Pilniak is without a doubt a writer of considerable ability, but he is essentially unoriginal and derivative. Even in his famous novels of "Soviet life," it is only the subject matter he has found out for himself—the methods of treating it are other peoples'. But this imitativeness makes Pilniak a writer of peculiar interest: he is a sort of epitome of modern Russian fiction, a living literary history, and this representative quality of his is perhaps the chief claim on our attention that can be advanced on behalf of the stories included in this book. Almost every one of them can be traced back to some Russian or foreign writer. Each of them belongs to and is eminently typical of some accepted literary genre in vogue between 1910 and 1920. The Snow and The Forest Manor belong to the ordinary psychological problem-story acted among "intellectuals"; they have for their ancestors Chekhov, Zenaide Hippius, and the Polish novelists. Always on Detachment, belongs to the progeny of A. N. Tolstoy, with the inevitable blackguardly seduction of a more or less pure girl or woman at the end. The Snow Wind and Over the Ravine are animal stories, for which, I believe, Jack London is mainly responsible. In A Year of Their Lives the same "animal" method is transfered to the treatment of primitive human life, and the shadow of Knut Hamsun is plainly discernible in the background. Death, The Heirs, and The Belokonsky Estate are first class exercises in the manner of Bunin, and only A Thousand Years and The Crossways herald in, to a certain extent, Pilniak's own manner of invention. From the point of view of "ideas" The Crossways is the most interesting in the book, for it gives expression to that which is certainly the root of all Pilniak's conception of the Revolution. It is—to use two terms which have been applied to Russia by two very different schools of thought but equally opposed to Europe—a "Scythian" or an "Eurasian" conception. To Pilniak the Revolution is essentially the "Revolt" of peasant and rural Russia against the alien network of European civilisation, the Revolt of the "crossways" against the highroad and the railroad, of the village against the town. A conception, you will perceive, which is opposed to that of Lenin and the orthodox Communists, and which explains why official Bolshevism is not over-enthusiastic about Pilniak. The Crossways is a good piece of work (it can hardly be called a story) and it just gives a glimpse of that ambitious vastness of scale on which Pilniak was soon to plan his bigger Soviet stories.

* * * * * * *

But taken in themselves and apart from his later work I think the stories in the manner of Bunin will be found the most satisfactory items in this volume. Of these Death was written before the Revolution and, but for an entirely irrelevant and very Pilniakish allusion to Lermontov and other deceased worthies, it is entirely unconnected with events and revolutions. Very "imperfective" and hardly a "story," it is nevertheless done with sober and conscientious craftsmanship, very much like Bunin and very unlike the usual idea we have of Pilniak. The only thing Pilniak was incapable of taking from his model was Bunin's wonderfully rich and full Russian, a shortcoming which is least likely to be felt in translation.

* * * * * * *

The other two Buninesque stories, The Belokonsky Estate and The Heirs, are stories (again, can the word "story" be applied to this rampantly "imperfective" style?) of the Revolution. They display the same qualities of sober measure and solid texture which are not usually associated with the name of Pilniak. These two stories ought to be read side by side, for they are correlative. In The Belokonsky Estate the representative of "the old order," Prince Constantine, is drawn to an almost heroical scale and the "new man" cuts a poor and contemptible figure by his side. In the other story the old order is represented by a studied selection of all its worst types. I do not think that the stories were meant as a deliberate contrast, they are just the outcome of the natural lack of preconceived idea which is typical of Pilniak and of his passive, receptive, plastical mind. As long as he does not go out of his way to give expression to vague and incoherent ideas, the outcome of his muddle-headed meditations on Russian History, this very shortcoming (if shortcoming it be) becomes something of a virtue, and Pilniak—an honest membrana vibrating with unbiassed indifference to every sound from the outer world.

* * * * * * *

The reader may miss the more elaborate and sensational stories of Soviet life. But I have a word of consolation for him—they are eminently unreadable, and for myself I would never have read them had it not been for the hard duties of a literary critic. In this case as in others I prefer to go direct to the fountain-source and read Bely's Petersburg and the books of Remizov, which for all the difficulties they put in the way of the reader and of the translator will at least amply repay their efforts. But Pilniak has also substantial virtues: the power to make things live; an openness to life and an acute vision. If he throws away the borrowed methods that suit him as little as a peacock's feathers may suit a crow, he will no doubt develop rather along the lines of the better stories included in this volume, than in the direction of his more ambitious novels. And I imagine that his opus magnum, if, in some distant future he ever comes to write one, will be more like the good old realism of the nineteenth century than like the intense and troubled art of his present masters; I venture to prophesy that he will finally turn out something like a Soviet (or post-Soviet) Trollope, rather than a vulgarised Andrey Bely.