Produced by Eric Eldred, Charles Franks
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
By
BORIS ANDREYEVICH VOGAU (Boris Pilniak, pseud.)
The English reading public knows next to nothing of contemporaryRussian Literature. In the great age of the Russian Realistic Novel,which begins with Turgeniev and finishes with Chekhov, the Englishreader is tolerably at home. But what came after the death of Chekhovis still unknown or, what is worse, misrepresented. Second and third-rate writers, like Merezhkovsky, Andreyev, and Artsybashev, havefound their way into England and are still supposed to be the bestRussian twentieth century fiction can offer. The names of reallysignificant writers, like Remizov and Andrey Bely, have not even beenheard of. This state of affairs makes it necessary, in introducing acontemporary Russian writer to the English public, to give at least afew indications of his place in the general picture of modern RussianLiterature.
The date of Chekhov's death (1904) may be taken to mark the end of along and glorious period of literary achievement. It is convenientlynear the dividing line of two centuries, and it coincides ratherexactly with the moment when Russian Literature definitely ceased tobe dominated by Realism and the Novel. In the two or three years thatfollowed the death of Chekhov Russian Literature underwent a completeand drastic transformation. The principal feature of the newliterature became the decisive preponderance of Poetry over Prose andof Manner over Matter—a state of things exactly opposite to thatwhich prevailed during what we may conveniently call the Victorianage. Poetry in contemporary Russian Literature is not only of greaterintrinsic merit than prose, but almost all the prose there is has tosuch an extent been permeated with the methods and standards ofpoetry that in the more extreme cases it is almost impossible to tellwhether what is printed as prose is really prose or verse.
Contemporary Russian Poetry is a vigorous organic growth. It is aself-contained movement developing along logically consistent lines.It has produced much that is of the very first order. The poetry ofTheodore Sologub, of Innocent Annensky, [Footnote: The reader willnotice the quotations from Annensky in the first story of thisvolume.] of Vyacheslav Ivanov, and of Alexander Blok, is to our bestunderstanding of that perennial quality that will last. They havebeen followed by younger poets, more debatable and more debated, manyof them intensely and daringly original, but all of them firmlyplanted in the living tradition of yesterday. They learn from theirelders and teach their juniors—the true touchstone of an organic andvigorous movement. What is perhaps still more significant—the levelof minor poetry is extraordinarily high, and every verse-producer is,in varying degrees, a conscious and efficient craftsman.
The case with prose is very different. The old nineteenth centuryreali