SOURCE: “Works,” in Boris Pilniak: Scythian at a Typewriter, Ardis, 1985, pp. 95–114, 127–131.

[In the following excerpt, Browning provides a thematic and stylistic analysis of several short stories by Pilnyak.]

In general, Pilniak wrote rapidly and prolifically. His mind and pen raced from work to work; many were typeset prematurely, while their author hurried on to new projects.¹ Consequently, Pilniak's performance is uneven. When writing with great vigor, concentration, and integrity, he produced excellent art, occasionally with surprising speed but usually only after the discipline and refinement characteristic of longer periods. In what follows I examine what are, in my opinion, [a few of] the author's … best works. … The selection is, certainly, subjective. The criteria used were essentially whether the work is of consistently high artistic merit and whether its message is significant. Many good but not superior works are omitted, as is all of Pilniak's weaker writing. Where appropriate, however, reference is also made to salient artistic and thematic features of other works in the writer's corpus.

“ABOUT SEVKA” (COMPLETED BY 1915; PUBLISHED 1915)²

Although little that distinguishes Pilniak's subsequent style (sound orchestration, rhythmic word chains, implicit allegories or symbols) is present in “About Sevka,” the story is important. Here in 1915 are essentially the same style, setting, composition, and thematics as in Salt Barn, Pilniak's final work written twenty-two years later.³ In fact, Sevka and several of his comrades again figure as characters in the 1937 novel. In both works the narrator is omniscient, though in “About Sevka” he is not “above” the story but, as with Karamzin, very much a part of it. He laments, at times sentimentally, Sevka's early loss of intellectual innocence and of his naive belief in the embellished world of fairy tales and epic heroes. This story features several characters from Pilniak's standard repertoire: the innocent and vital child (or youth); the stern, unloving, hypocritical, and unfaithful mother; the wise, melancholic, and vulnerable father; and a superficial “intellectual” or artist who proclaims a harsh, sterile “wisdom” and is alien to nature and genuine culture.

The central theme of “About Sevka” is barbarity, especially violence and hypocrisy. Pilniak depicts Sevka's dramatic disillusionment in his romantic fantasies about war, which had led him to organize a street battle involving nearly one hundred children in a vicious and bloody brawl: “You, Sevka, recalled that intoxicating thrill of happiness that you felt during the battle. But you also recalled those patches of blood on the faces and hands of your comrades. Yes, yes! These patches of crimson blood made your heart convulse with sorrow and confront something infinitely terrible which should not be! Which should not be for anyone!” (337). Sevka's tutor and his mother's lover, Evgenii Nikolaevich, piously insists that the war with Germany (WWI) is a valuable opportunity to demonstrate to the world the “Slavic spirit of great culture,” and to fight against a combination of “utilitarianism, barbarity, and force (kulak)” (330). But when he sees wounded soldiers returning from the front, Sevka clearly realizes that he will never again be able to require suffering in the name of a dream: “This one small soldier is worth more than any benefit or the joys of millions of advantages to war” (341). Sevka's father reinforces this sentiment; he eventually returns from the front wounded, convinced that the suffering of war is too great a price to pay for “these cultural inventions” (343).

This story, written and published during the war, made a strong pacifist statement. Pilniak unfurls a banner proclaiming his life-long opposition to any form of cruelty or force and his support of brotherhood among all men. But Pilniak understands that his ideal of brotherhood is a quixotic illusion—so indicates the lament at both the beginning and end of the story. With Sevka's disabusement from his childish, romantic imagination he surrenders his freedom: “You have already become life's cog. And you are a slave” (321); and “After all, you are already on your own. And your fairy tales are smashed. But in life there are only slaves. And you are already a slave. You, kind, kind Sevka, so like a tulip on the steppe which blooms early in the spring” (344).

“A COMPLETE LIFE” (COMPLETED JULY 1915; PUBLISHED 1916; ORIGINALLY ENTITLED “OVER THE RAVINE”)⁴

The heroes of this animal allegory are simply Male Animal and Female Animal, two large predatory birds, presumably owls. The traditional omniscient author provides a coherent chronicle of brief highlights from their lives in a primeval forest where physical fitness is one's only hope for survival. Although the chronology is not strictly linear, transitions are logically motivated and well marked. The story begins with an opening panoramic description of the forest and then proceeds to a description of a pair of birds within that whole, a flashback describing the male's battle for his mate, the ongoing struggles for survival against cold and hunger, mating and giving birth to offspring, and the denouement as the female is won by a younger and more vital male while her old companion dies and falls into the ravine. Here Pilniak enshrines the natural life cycle wherein instincts reign: the instincts to mate, to propagate one's species, to survive despite nature's raw caprice, and, finally, to die.

Seasons organize life. Spring is the time to win one's companion and to mate. Summer is for hatching and training the new birds that will soon fly away. Fall turns cold, presaging the hazardous winter. But in each season, “all life was saturated with instinct” (15). The story illustrates no artificial ideology, ignores entirely the destiny of Russia, and issues no condemnation of violence. The sole theme is natural, biological instinct.

Nowhere is the allegory of man's condition more convincing than in Pilniak's subtle emphasis on the precarious nature of life. The flickering moments of passion and joy are fully balanced by a general atmosphere of unavoidable doom. In his battle for a mate, the male damages his wing. This injury seems trivial for a time but finally renders him prematurely vulnerable to death.

Earlier the female selects a location for their nest in the roots of an old pine tree. This tree, which had nearly toppled over the side of the ravine, now hangs precariously with its roots protruding “like an immobile octopus” (74).⁵ The story's most important and frequently repeated leitmotif is the tree's “paw of the root” (lapa kornia), or, metaphorically, hand of fate, in which the male sits in solitude looking down into the dark ravine. Finally, after thirteen years, death claims its victim. Nevertheless, the victory is only partial, for the male has unconsciously but admirably succeeded in life's highest purpose, in propagating his species.

“A Complete Life” abounds in sensuous nature description. Colors, scents, sounds, and textures all play important roles in creating the atmosphere of a somber natural luxuriance. The twenty-year-old Pilniak carefully crafts this story with an ear to sound and rhythmic organization, and his disposition toward lengthy series of nouns and adjectives or, less frequently, other parts of speech appears highly developed. Consider the first lines of the story:

The ravine was deep and silent (glubok i glukh).

Its clayey and yellow cliffs, covered with red-trunked pines, dropped straight down like a precipice, and at the very bottom flowed a spring. Over the ravine, to the left and right, was a pine forest,—silent, ancient, wrapped in mosses and overgrown by an alder thicket. The sky overhead was heavy, grey, misty.

Man rarely came here …

Lightning, water, and time had uprooted trees; they fell in place, strewed the earth, rotted, and from them issued a thick, rather sweet aroma of decomposing pine. Thistles, chicory, rowan berries, and wormwood grew for years and covered the earth like prickly bristles. At the bottom of the ravine stood a bear's lair; wolves roamed in the forest.

(74)

Several other stories restate the thematic aspects of this work, including “A Year of Their Lives” (written 1915), in which Pilniak provides a human pair parallel to the animals in “A Complete Life.” In “A Year of Their Lives” Pilniak depicts not thirteen years but a single one, the first of their union as man and wife. “Snow Wind” (1918) features the contest for leadership between an older wolf and his pack, possibly allegorical of Russia after the March revolution. “Arina” (1919) is the story of a wild, elemental, anarchist girl who revels in the natural principle of “survival of the fittest.” The latter story is partially included in Naked Year as “In the Eyes of Irina.”

“DEATHS” (COMPLETED AUGUST 1915; PUBLISHED 1917)⁶

In Leo Tolstoi's “Three Deaths” (1859), the author contrasts the falsity and faithlessness of a wealthy dying woman, professing but not inwardly accepting Christianity, to the dignity and courage of a poor coachman on his deathbed and to the natural simplicity of a tree that is cut down to make a cross for the coachman's grave.

Pilniak's “Deaths” treats a similar theme but without moral posturing or heavy-handed thematic manipulation. “Deaths” portrays the approaching death and eventual demise of Ippolit, a wealthy 99-year-old man whose life has been full. Within this story Pilniak contrasts three attitudes toward death: that of Ippolit; of his 36-year-old nurse Vasena (one of Pilniak's frequent models of simplicity and fecundity), who is “strong, healthy, ruddy-complexioned” and possesses “broad hips and colossal breasts” (35); and of Il'ia, Ippolit's unmarried son, an artist.

Ippolit is prepared to die. In fact he is now closer to death than to life; his biological purposes long fulfilled, he no longer has any “sensations, for all his organs of perception have become dulled” (29). Ippolit at present lives in only one room of his huge mansion, all others being covered by dust and overrun with rodents. Vasena calmly performs her duties of bathing, feeding, and comforting old Ippolit; she considers his eventual death natural, for “why not—think of how old he was. We all die” (36). Il'ia, however, is terrified because he is alienated from nature and estranged from his family. He has no posterity, for all his life has been devoted to his art, trivial in comparison with life. Now he senses the inexorable approach of his own end.

“Deaths” is effectively framed by the description of an Indian summer. Nature and Ippolit are living in a temporary bulge on the surface of the life cycle. It is also time for nature to pass on to her next phase: “The fruit had all been picked in the gardens; the leaves had fallen” (27). Pilniak concludes his story with a description of a second death: “The Indian summer died, but another earthly joy was born—the first white skiff of snow” (36). One phase passes, another is born that will also yield to its inevitable successor. Pilniak is not concerned with the “big” questions of life after death or of God's existence. Rather, he provides a comforting parallel to nature, with its continuous reaffirmation of life.

This story is an excellent example of Pilniak's concise, elliptical, paratactic style, commonly referred to as “dynamic” in the 1920s. As usual, he avoids “superfluous detail,” providing only the most essential. The depiction of Ippolit's death, for example, is brief: “Vasenka enters, calm, strong, with broad hips and colossal breasts loosely covered with a red blouse. ‘Ippolit Ippolitovich, time to eat,’ she says matter-of-factly. But Ippolit Ippolitovich does not respond, does not say his usual—‘Oh!’… [sic] They rush, lathering the horses, to get the doctor. The doctor takes his pulse,—puts a mirror up to his lips. Soon he says, precisely and solemnly:—‘Dead’” (35). Pages of additional description would be possible but alien to Pilniak, who prefers the quick tempo and drama of solitary, telling details over epic exhaustiveness.

“SPRING FLOODS” (COMPLETED APRIL 1917; PUBLISHED 1918; REVISED IN SEPTEMBER 1922, AND RENAMED “FOREST DACHA”)⁷

At the heart of “Spring Floods” is a contrast between sincere and spontaneous love, expressed by the simple folk, and debauched love, perverted by the egotism and superficiality of “cultured” man. The provincial nobleman Polunin, having agonized over the persistent infidelity and frequent absences of his wife Lydia, an actress, discovers life's meaning in the love of a young, unpretentious, passionate peasant woman, Alena. Alena is now pregnant with Polunin's child and will remain his life's companion. Lydia returns to the countryside with her latest lover, the artist Brilling, for the Easter holidays. On the aging estate both she and Brilling recognize that their youth is past and death is approaching. Lydia tells Polunin that she “came here playfully, not thinking about you, but suddenly I felt sadness and boredom” (128). Brilling admits their common deficiency is that “one cannot live without faith” (124), but neither can give allegiance to any belief or to other persons. Now they sorrowfully look back upon their trivial lives and sense that their love is empty. It has only led to childless oblivion.

“Spring Floods” is an example of Pilniak's use of implicit allegory. Polunin represents the class of disillusioned noblemen who seek to regain their faith in life by drawing closer to the peasants; Lydia stands proxy for women who trade their birthright of maternal fulfillment for a mess of pottage in promiscuity, and who realize their error too late; Brilling in turn embodies features of the effete artist standing apart from life.

The omniscient narrator relates a clear and coherent story in language carefully crafted for sound. Pilniak's nature descriptions are especially rich in rhythmic parallelism and imagery. “Spring Floods” begins with this passage: “In the ravine still lay snow, bluish-greyish-brown and crumbly. From underneath flowed icy springs, but on top the snow had already melted, and last year's grass, like yellow arrows, peered up at the sky; in sunny patches the first yellow flowers appeared. The sky was flooded with dusk's heavy leaden translucence” (112). And the story concludes with an echo from “A Complete Life”: “Near a birdhouse on a tree in front of the porch, a female starling lighted and began making her drawn-out, single-toned ‘pee-ee’ call; two male starlings flew up, ruffled their feathers, whistled menacingly, and then began to fight” (129). The birds are a contrast to human relations, which are far more subtle and complex than those of the merely instinctive starlings.

When in 1922 “Spring Floods” was retitled “Forest Dacha,” Polunin's name became Ivanov; Brilling's, Mintz; and Alena's, Arina; Lydia remained Lydia. While stylistic changes were minor and infrequent (for example, the adjective “bluish” was dropped from the story's first sentence), one addition is significant. In “Forest Dacha” the atmosphere of lost youth and perverted love surrounding Lydia and Mintz is strengthened by their realization that in art the revolution had “passed us by, thrown us overboard”; and Polunin, formerly a landowner, has now become a forester. Whereas in “Spring Floods” the anguish of Lydia and Brilling seemed somewhat contrived, in “Forest Dacha” they have much more reason to despair. In the earlier story Polunin's disregard for his estate was mildly perplexing. Why would a hero, so positive in many ways, be rather lethargic, especially after his rebirth through Alena's love? But in “Forest Dacha” Polunin merely serves on another's abandoned, neglected estate. His responsibilities are different: presumably he is to preserve the estate from further deterioration against a time when it can be improved and again made productive. These and other changes improve “Spring Floods” and indicate one way in which Pilniak skillfully revises his previously written work.

The author wrote several related stories that constitute a “Polunin” cycle in which an honest man suffers at the hand of a scheming and debauched woman. “Snows” (March 1917) portrays a contented Polunin and Alena with their daughter, Natasha. Their life is momentarily disrupted when a former lover, Kseniia, returns from abroad and attempts to persuade Polunin at a New Year's party to save her from barrenness by fathering her child. This story, written during the early part of Pilniak's first marriage, ends happily as the ascetic Polunin resists temptation and returns to the embraces of his wife and child.

Polunin and Arina are contrasted to Lydia and Brilling in an unpublished story written in 1920 and entitled “Ivan and Mary” (another story by the same name was written in 1921), in which Lydia is killed by wolves after tempting Polunin. Much of this unpublished “Ivan and Mary” was incorporated into Naked Year, where Lydia abandons Brilling and returns from abroad to Russia with her child Kseniia.

“Alone” (1917) is related to this same cycle. Here the Polunin-figure, Turchaninov, suffers because his actress wife, Stefaniia, and her lover, the writer Luchitskii, conspire to deprive Turchaninov of his daughter, Alia. This story was significantly reworked in 1924 into “Africans,” in which Sentishchev and his daughter Alia wish to return to Russia from their exile abroad among Vrangelites, while Stephaniia and her French lover Dore abduct his daughter and arrange to have Sentishchev sent to a white concentration camp in Africa.

Of all these stories, however, “Spring Floods,” revised as “Forest Dacha,” remains the best in Pilniak's most extensive cycle.

“DEATH BECKONS” (COMPLETED MARCH 1918; PUBLISHED 1918)⁸

Unlike “Deaths,” this story treats the phenomenon of death in the context of folk belief and custom. Although Polunin, Alena, and their baby Natal'ia are again the central characters of the story, now Alena's experiences are paramount. Pilniak introduces much that is exotic in Alena's rich country background, including a long list of July flowers and herbs, together with their folk remedies. But this is only one corner of the much more important picture illustrating the peasant's mystical unity with nature. The instinct to love and bear children persists, but, more important for this story, death also beckons. As a girl, Alena stands on a bridge high above a river “and senses that it beckons to her—the water beckons—the unknown, death—and she perceived, understood that death beckons everywhere, that this is life. Blood beckons, the earth beckons—God beckons” (99).

In her maidenhood she falls in love with a country lad, Aleksei, but is prevented from marrying him by her mother, who confesses that Aleksei is her child by a man whom she loved briefly while Alena's father was in the army. Deeply troubled by this revelation, Alena withdraws from her comrades and seeks solace in God. When Polunin returns to his estate from foreign travel and his unhappy union, he marries the now twenty-four-year-old Alena, and they live together for five years while searching for “truth and God.” After their child, Natal'ia, mysteriously dies one April, Alena leaves home to wander the earth as a pilgrim in search of holy places: “Life was behind, in which remained July with its herbs, her love for Aleksei, her daughter Natal'ia, perhaps Polunin, her mother's secret—ahead what remained was death—God and the road” (102).

Pilniak is usually very successful in his vivid portrayals of the customs and everyday life of the folk. “Death Beckons” is his earliest attempt in this direction and the only one to include a prominent reference to God. Typically, Pilniak's peasants are pagans who exemplify an innate closeness to life, mother earth, and nature in general. Much in “Death Beckons” presages that emphasis: “June hay, really, smells bad—but still there is no sweeter aroma; in June the birches smell bitter, and the dawns in June are crystalline. How the earth greets a man always remains with him” (97). This leitmotif is associated with one's irrational and immutable devotion to natural surroundings, heritage, beliefs, family, and fate, whether happy or sad, sweet or bitter. Near the end of this brief story covering two decades, the leitmotif recurs: “Year replaced year. Springs create much in the life of man—Alena experienced still another June that smelled of herbs, with bitter birch tree dawns and a crystalline sickle over the horizon. The little girl Natal'ia died” (102). This great sorrow becomes another bittersweet emotion in Alena's life and leads to the seemingly inevitable decision to walk the earth in pursuit of God and death.

Here Pilniak's style is more elliptical, lyrical, and impressionistic than in his earliest works. He describes Alena's birth with allusive economy: “Alena was born in a forest cottage where there were sky, pines, sand, and a river” (97). And a central episode in Alena's life, her love for Aleksei, requires only a few lines:

The girl went across the river, to the village, to celebrations, sang songs and danced on the slope with girls, met a lad and fell in love, and there should have been a wedding but her mother, Arena, suddenly resisted and then, confessing to her daughter, said:

“Alenushka, this young man is your blood brother. A sin. … it was long ago, I was young, at haying I sinned with his father. And your father was in the army. I committed a sin,” she spoke quietly, in a whisper, wiping the corner of her once beautiful lips with the end of her kerchief

(99)

This style is common to the works in which Pilniak explores life's essential meanings through long periods of time. He also uses it frequently in his later stories on the revolution. Pilniak reduces to an essential few the details that make the prose of the great Russian realists pulsate with human life. He portrays the instincts, nerves, and muscles that move man along peculiar paths to death.

“THINGS” (COMPLETED MAY 1918; PUBLISHED 1922)⁹

The art of this story is as simple and direct as its message. The style is again paratactic and “biblical” in its leaping and lingering technique. While the main action covers a brief span, flashbacks and memories encompass three decades. Quiet, deep, human sorrow permeates this work's four pages. The sorrow arises from unfulfilled love. For a few days in September thirty years earlier, a nameless woman had been engaged to a Mikhail D. Now, an old woman, she prepares to leave her small home and move across Russia “into the same kind of old house, in the same kind of old kremlin, to travel, in order to die there” (119). The story is entirely free of judgment. The reader does not learn why her engagement was broken on the evening of September 29th, or why she is now required to move “forever” (118). Pilniak's only impulse is to portray sensitively the effects of this woman's personal tragedy. For thirty years she had feared confronting her sadness and had filled her life with activities to divert her attention. When she was twenty-eight she began studying English, and at the age of thirty-two she bought a piano, but neither ambition had borne fruit. From a distance of thirty years she now tenderly probes the old wound to her soul. Preparations for her move condition a willingness to remember, but, as in her house, the dusty double windows to her soul are finally opened by the discovery of three notes in a bottom desk drawer. These notes unlock memories of her former love and unexpectedly forge a resolve to bring several things with her which she had intended to leave, including a washstand, double bed, and alarm clock, precious engagement gifts from her aunt, and the piano and English books. What for others would be merely things are for this woman life's dear melodies, echoes of former happiness. These “things” alone witness to her of life, and she cannot part with them.¹⁰

“ALONG THE OLD ROAD” (COMPLETED BY 1918; PUBLISHED 1918)¹¹

Like Ippolit in “Deaths,” old Prince Andrei Ratchinskii is moribund, but in “Along the Old Road” it is not the dignity of death in man and nature that concerns Pilniak. Here Ratchinskii allegorizes an entire class of impoverished landed aristocracy that now totters at the brink of death.

The author draws a gently sympathetic portrait of the proud, old prince living entirely alone on a dilapidated estate, straining to maintain the pretense of his family's former wealth and position, and constantly reliving the memories of his valorous days in military service when, as an officer of the Royal Guards, the tsar had once shaken his hand. His son and two daughters are married and live far away, and the prince spends hours composing letters to them, first in his imagination and then, less frequently, on paper. He fills these letters with comforting but fictitious reports of his important civic activities. In reality the prince has survived for years by collecting “fees” at night from black marketeers who use an old road passing through his property. In this “civic activity” he is assisted by Erepin, a village marshall, who generously expresses awe at the “ruffled sparrow's” tales and admiration for his once magnificent military uniform, but who cunningly contrives to collect two rubles for every one the prince receives. The story ends in March 1917 as Ratchinskii spends an entire day writing birthday greetings to his youngest and favorite daughter, for whom he hopes to be able to order a special fruit basket, including bananas, from the famous Eliseev grocers. Erepin rides up with the startling news that rebels have compelled Nicholas II to abdicate: “The prince, ready to go collect ‘fees,’ stood in the middle of the room in his overcoat and three-cornered hat looking about with unseeing eyes. ‘What?! A rebellion? I don't understand! Nicholas abdicated—I don't understand!’ The prince stood there a few minutes more, then his face lit up, he slapped himself on the hip and confidently exclaimed: ‘Nikolai abdicated—it's maneuver!’ And he set off alone, without the village marshall, for the old road—to collect bribes … But wagons were no longer drawn out along the road” (5).

Pilniak later incorporated “Along the Old Road” into a much longer story entitled “Tatar Earrings,”¹² which was slightly revised in August 1921 and renamed “Dates and Times.” The story was often republished under this title. In the longer works the author prefaces “Along the Old Road” with a substantial section of historical, documentary material on the rise of the landed aristocracy and the bourgeoisie. Pilniak avows his purpose is to illustrate changing “dates and times,” or the inconstancy of wealth and position in comparison with nature. In nature, for example, the Tatar's Earring flower blooms annually regardless of man's trivial laws and social ranks.

This later revision shows the author's proclivity to combine the documentary with the fictional (Ratchinskii's name is changed to Smolenskii to agree with the documents). But here the results are less than satisfactory, principally because the documentary portion overwhelms the fictional. It does not enlighten and enrich the context as in Pilniak's best bellettristic works containing documentary passages, but usurps the story's position of eminence and obscures its fundamental message of compassion for a gullible, stubborn, but sympathetic human being who is blindly devoted to the superseded values of his class and age. For him and his fellows it is the end of the old road. For Pilniak it is the birth of a new theme: Russia and revolution.

“A MONASTERY LEGEND” (COMPLETED BY 1918; PUBLISHED 1918)¹³

Pilniak treats another aspect of the theme of Russia, her heritage, travail, and destiny in “A Monastery Legend.” What emerges is not Russia as an enervated nobility but Holy Russia, preserver of cultural values.

Here Pilniak frames a folkloric founding legend with a scene of thousands of people trying to board a ferry to a monastery. One swaggering bolshevik apparently intends to humble the beleaguered ferry operator with a none-too-subtle reminder: “We're all equal now ‘cause of socialization. Alongside this here whole socialization we're introducing a whole program and Soviet power. I'm warning you plain, you fool, we'll have cooperatives soon.” The reply must have been appreciated by all readers who had endured such braggadocio: “You're a fool yourself. You were a fool and an ass before, and you still are. Do you think you've got smarter from that there star? Soviet power!” (8).

Against this backdrop the narrator tells of visiting the monastery with an old man who has come from the city to worship. His companion returns from the service with the news that some of the monastery wealth had been confiscated: “Do you know that this monastery has stood from the first Time of Troubles? I wonder if it will be able to make it through the present one?” (9). The narrator then relates the romantic legend of the monastery's founding by a repentant murderer who had killed two monks and then been tormented by miracles, visions, and his own conscience. The final lines of “A Monastery Legend” communicate a quiet confidence in Holy Russia's powers of survival: “The fog thickened; like a vision in the clouds the quiet, white monastery shone dimly: will it last through this second Time of Troubles? The listeners sat quietly; quietly flowed the night, quietly pealed the church bells, striking every quarter hour. One's soul was quiet. ‘Don't worry, Russia won't perish. … Only, Lord, when will this cup pass?’” (11). But this delicate, worshipful reverie is shattered next morning by a repetition of the pushing and cursing at the ferry landing.

In “A Monastery Legend” Pilniak skillfully combines a realistic scene of bickering at the ferry, a romantic legend of a murderer and monks,¹⁴ a lyrical meditation on Russia's destiny, and a direct appeal to the reader for courage and confidence in the face of uncertainty. The style is colloquial, vulgar, poetic, or “biblical” as appropriate. The narrator may be absent or on center stage, objective or declamatory. All of these features point forward to Pilniak's ornamental prose of the early 1920s, whose seeds have already begun to germinate in this fine story.¹⁵

“VARANGIAN TIMES” (COMPLETED BY OCTOBER 1918; PUBLISHED 1918)¹⁶

In the subtitle to “Varangian Times” Pilniak suggests that this work is a travel sketch. It is the first, briefest, and perhaps best of many he would write. The author's trip by train as a “bagger” in search of food provides material for impressionistic, elliptical descriptions of specific events, people, and remote areas. These are interspersed with lyrical generalizations of his time and country.

“Varangian Times” begins: “To get wheat. Not Russia but a raging sea, the depths of the sea. I want to write about my travels to get wheat and flour, but the ‘Lay of Igor's Campaign’ springs to mind—an epic and not a journey for wheat” (15). Pilniak writes “Varangian Times” as though it were an extraordinary epic quest, replete with adventure and peril (Whites shoot Red sympathizers; Reds confiscate money, food, and goods for barter; a stationmaster must be bribed; railroad inspectors collect “fees”; peasants with food dicker for cloth; Pilniak is sick, and another traveler is asphyxiated). All this is economically but engagingly narrated. Pilniak sees in these experiences that which occupies the attention of his countrymen:

Somewhere there is a revolution; somewhere they debate, think, plan conspiracies and revolts … Nothing of the kind! Here's grain—if for cloth—maybe about ten rubles will do it, but for money—a hundred. And also those Red Guards, the hell with their mothers!—the scourge of baggers. The Russian people are quiet—a sphinx—We travel, keep quiet, sweat, from time to time someone curses. All around are fields, ours, Russian—endless, good, sorrowful; dry valleys, impoverished villages—and in them there is no revolution—what an idea!—rather, murky waves of ignorance, of ancient malice, suspicion, hunger … and—absurdity, absurdity!”

(15)

The title and leitmotif, the Varangian Times, suggests this theme of barbarism. Blind, beast-like viciousness has engulfed Russia. Centuries-old traditions, accomplishments, and ethical imperatives have been smothered in barbaric foulness as though culture never existed. At train stations workers sell liquor, sugar, and flour confiscated from their former employers. Pilniak is disgusted: “Socialization, equalization! I went to look at the remains of a ‘divided-up’ estate—it had been completely ‘socialized’—to ashes. Only the walls and columns of the dead house still stood—a home built, perhaps, during the time of Catherine the Great; but soon even the walls will be gone, for the home had been sold for salvage—to a tavern owner” (16).

When Pilniak wrote Naked Year he portrayed this trip again and selected and reworked scenes from “Varangian Times” for the “Part Three of the Triptych (the Darkest)” episode. Yet most of the “Varangian Times” was not incorporated and, together with Russia in Flight (1925), remains the high water mark of Pilniak's lyrical travel sketches.

As an example of how Pilniak adapts material into later works, consider the following passage taken from “Varangian Times” for Naked Year:

“Varangian Times”

This also happened:

At one of the stations a woman approaches the train car. I am standing at the door. She says to me:

“Honey, let me on board. For Christ's sake,” she says pleadingly and her face is puckered up. “The kids're hungry.”

“It's crowded, there's no more room,” I say, “but crawl up if you can.”

Behind me stands a soldier. He makes a startled-displeased-cunning-meaningful face, tugs me by the sleeve: “What's up comrade?” He shoves me aside and says to the woman:

“You can't get on, sister. No room. Sorry.

“For Christ's sake, honey,”—the woman's face looks pleadingly.

“What will you give me for it,” the “comrade” asks severely.

“Well, I don't know. I don't have a thing,” the woman's face lights up.

The soldier winks the whole side of his ugly face: “How're you at makin' love?”

The woman smiles, “I'll bet we can strike up a deal.”

“Then crawl onto that bunk. My overcoat's on it … Hey, Semen! Get this woman! …”

The woman crawls over the people and says, as if justifying herself:

“How else could I? You gotta eat. There's no other way …”

The soldier makes his way over next to her on the plank bunk. The curious onlookers move closer—and, of course, without any attempt at discretion, describe everything in detail.

Naked Year

Yesterday at a little station a woman came up to the train. A soldier was standing at the door.

“Honey, let me on, for Christ's sake! I just can't get a place, honey,” said the woman.

“No room, sister. Sorry. No place!” answered the soldier.

“For Christ's sake …”

“How'll you pay?”

“Somehow …”

“How're you at makin' love?”

“Somehow … I'll bet we can strike up a deal …”

“Ah! Well, crawl onto that bunk. My overcoat's on it. Hey, Semen! Get this woman!”

The soldier crawled onto the bunk, the people crowded around, and the men's hearts contracted with a boundless, pleasant pain, bestial—they wanted to shout, hit, and lunge at the nearest woman, be boundlessly powerful and cruel, and here, in front of people, rape, rape, rape! Thought, nobility, modesty, decorum—to hell with them! Beast!

In the novel an already elliptical description is significantly tightened. More descriptive and transitional material is excised. The style becomes even more “dynamic,” paratactic, and impressionistic. In Naked Year the ending of the scene functions to draw attention to a more universal rather than individual or exceptional bestiality. Starvation and raw passion, “barbarity,” deprive man of his humanity.

“A THOUSAND YEARS” (COMPLETED APRIL 6, 1919; PUBLISHED 1919)¹⁷

In Chekhov's own favorite story, “Student” (1894), a central theme is the timelessness of ignorance and misery. From Rurik to Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great, Russia has suffered from the “very same vicious poverty, hunger, the very same leaky straw roofs, ignorance, sorrow and boredom, the very same emptiness all around, darkness, and feeling of oppression … another thousand years will pass and life will not become better” (393).¹⁸ Yet later the student perceives that “truth and beauty … have continued uninterrupted to our day and, evidently, have always been most important in man's life and, in general, on earth” (395). Pilniak's “A Thousand Years” appears to be a polemic with the “Student.” The author continues Chekhov's emphasis on man's tenaciously miserable existence of “death, hunger, and barbarity” (10), but contends that it is love, the “law of birth” (13), rather than truth and beauty to which man owes deepest allegiance. Pilniak's excellent short story contains important elements of all four of his major themes: instinct (to love and give birth), ideology (the anguish of disillusionment), heritage and destiny of Russia (the moribund aristocracy), and barbarism (violence and poverty).

In “A Thousand Years” the fastidious Russian nobleman Konstantin comes from abroad (England) to be with his stocky, broad-shouldered, heavily bearded, “Varangian” brother Viliashev. Their reunion is occasioned by the death of their hostile, suspicious, hypocritical “Christian” sister, Natal'ia. The family members were descended from the valiant Varangians and Vladimir Monomakh (ruling twelfth-century prince in Rus'), but now their class is being destroyed, a “nest of carrion vultures” (9). Allegorically, Konstantin and Viliashev represent two sides of the dying Russian aristocracy. Konstantin is spiritually exhausted and believes in nothing. He is without a homeland and even resembles a corpse. Conversely, Viliashev is very Russian. He has the strength of a bogatyr' and wants to destroy the old ways in order to rebuild life, but the revolution treats him as incapable and unreliable (13). His fate is tragic and wanton for he is not enervated but merely confused and neglected.

While walking with his brother, Konstantin contends that the burial mound to which they had come is emblematic of Russia's static and stagnant history. Here a thousand years ago heathens with a thin veneer of Christianity sacrificed children to “Jesus, Perun, and the Mother of God” (11) in behalf of a dying prince. A learned Arab scholar, Ibn-Sadif, witnessed these nominal Christians' human sacrifice in Kiev and observed: “Tonight it is exactly one thousand years since the Archangel in Nazareth told the Virgin of the imminent arrival of your God, Jesus. Misery! A Thousand Years!” (12). Now almost an additional millennium has passed, and the same barbarism still stalks the land, much of it now in the name of “brotherhood, equality, freedom”; but, Konstantin insists, if “brotherhood has to be established with a rifle butt—then … it would be better not to have it” (11).

Nevertheless, at the end of the story the brothers are moved by the singing of peasant girls celebrating the Annunciation. Their song is in the manner of a spring fertility rite: “And, certainly, both felt that that church song was immutable, as spring was immutable with its law of birth,” and both acknowledged inwardly that, regardless, “noble blood still flowed in man” (13). Deepest meaning lies not in history or ideology, but in biology, in nature, in that most powerful instinct and moving force—sex and birth.

In addition to the romantic features of nature's higher truth, the exotic setting and broad expanse of time, and man's disillusionment with progress, Pilniak perceptibly manipulates the style. Early in the story he describes the countryside: “It was spring, the sky arched over the earth like a deep blue cupola; brisk winds blew, portentous like a reverie. The swollen earth breathed like a forest spirit. At night birds flew over, at twilight the cranes honked by the burial mound, at twilight their voices seemed glassy, transparent, miserable. Spring was coming, robust and abundant—immutable, that is the main thing” (8). Two of these adjectives are later repeated, creating a narrative rhythm, a leitmotif of fecundity: “The abundant, swollen earth is mired in frost” (13), and “The earth wafted—damp, abundant, swollen” (13). Konstantin hears her “groaning,” and Viliashev agrees: “Yes, she is awakening. Spring. Earthly joy” (10). Here, in Pilniak's reality, are the solitary, elemental, immutable truth and beauty to which Chekhov alluded.

“THE HEIRS” (COMPLETED 1919; PUBLISHED 1919)¹⁹

One of Pilniak's very best implicit allegories, “The Heirs” depicts the lives of four distrustful, selfish Rastorov heirs and their families living in an old estate on the Volga. They have fled here from hunger and the Razin- and Pugachev-type, popular, lawless, elemental uprising. This incompatible conglomerate is an allegorical microcosm of the dying, backward-looking, impoverished Russian aristocrats. They are “malicious, bored, trivial, superfluous, cursing the revolution and life; they live alienated from life, outside of life, facing the old and awaiting the old” (148). Pilniak uses irony to excellent effect as he portrays the husband of one of the heirs, a former general, who regards himself as a commander unjustly deprived of obedient soldiers. In fact a surly, vulgar, one-eyed “Cyclops,” hired as a servant by an heir who managed to dispose of his property before the revolution, occupies a considerably greater position in the home than does the general Kirill. If annoyed she alarms all by threatening to report the heirs to the labor exchange.

The families spend their time arguing, playing games, gossiping, and searching for more goods to sell the “Tatars” in order to purchase food. They are “preserving” the family jewelry, which they have divided among them and wear day and night, “fearing searches and theft” (151), even though they appear ridiculous with rows of rings on each finger. They all pray that the anarchic uprising will be over very soon. The egotistical old Kirill is near desperation: “If they told me the bolsheviks would last another year, I would shoot myself. I'm suffering, you know. It's hard on me” (154).

Only young Kseniia, an heir's ward, has intimations of a fulfilling future life as she sleighs down a snowy hill: “The sled flew resolutely, and in this resolute flight, in the snowy gusts and screeching, in the biting, breathtaking frost—Kseniia dreams of happiness:—of embracing, embracing the world! blessed life!” (154).

But for most, the closing allegorical allusion foretells disaster, not reconciliation. The general recognizes that the estate's waterpipes will freeze unless a trickle of water is allowed to drip during the frosty night. But the superficial “worker,” Leont'evna, sleeps in the kitchen and refuses to endure the slightest inconvenience on their behalf. Predictably, “the plumbing froze during the night and burst” (156). Similarly, the chilling political climate of the times and vengeful “proletarian” obstreperousness were causing pointless misery not only to the former nobility but to all the heirs sharing the house of Russia.

“COUNTRY ROADS” (COMPLETED JULY 1919; PUBLISHED 1920)²⁰

The story “Country Roads” nominally concerns three archetypal peasant families in backwater Russia. Pilniak portrays their closeness to nature in the life cycle, their work (farming, producing tar and bast shoes), and prevailing folk customs and beliefs. By way of contrast, he also shows the sterile artificiality of the lives of the city folk who, like those in “Varangian Times,” now stream to the country with all manner of goods (including a record player) to barter for food.

“Country Roads” is exceptional, however, not as much for its content as for its manner. Here for the first time Pilniak successfully demonstrates the major devices of ornamental style that he will use extensively in the early 1920s. To the tightly elliptical manner of “Varangian Times” and “Kolymen' City” (1919) he now adds a rich, rhythmic prose and ornamental imagery.²¹ Soon after “Country Roads,” still in 1919, Pilniak develops the potential for combining various genres and authorial points of view into an allusive montage, and ornamental prose results.²²

“Country Roads” begins with a memorable image of Russia's history and destiny. Pilniak returns to this image for inspiration in both Naked Year and Machines and Wolves:²³

Forest, groves, swamps, fields, calm sky—country roads. The sky is at times gloomy with grey-blue clouds. The forest at times honks and groans, other years it burns. Swampy peat burns. The country roads crawl, wind like a crooked thread, without end, without beginning. Some people yearn for another way, they want to take a more direct route—they turn off, become lost, return to the former place! … Two ruts, weeds, a path, and all around besides the sky are rye, or snow, or a forest a country road without end, without beginning, without limits. They traverse this country road with quiet songs:—some feel those songs are yearning like the country road—Russia was born in them, with them, from them.

Our paths—were and are along the country roads. All Russia is in country roads, fields, groves, swamps, forests.

But there were these others who were tired of traversing the swampy paths, who got the idea of standing Rus' on her heels, of going through the swamps, of building thoroughfares straight as a ruler, of covering them with granite and steel, of forgetting hut-strewn Rus'—and they set off.

At times the country roads intersect a thoroughfare. And from the country roads to the thoroughfare came—and set off on the thoroughfare the people's long cherished Revolt, popular anarchy, in order to sweep away the unnecessary and again disappear in the country roads.

(65)

In this work the revolt is considered a popular rebellion only tangentially connected with the forces of civilization and with the city-dwelling bolsheviks. Later in the story the introductory image is partially repeated, together with an important accretion: “Forest, groves, fields, calm sky—country roads. At times the country roads intersect a thoroughfare. Near a thoroughfare ran an iron foundry. The iron foundry led to the cities, and in the cities lived those—the others—who were tired of traversing the country roads, who built thoroughfares as straight as rulers, fronting them with granite and iron. And into the cities the popular, country road revolt brought—death” (71). Now people from the towns must return to the country roads to barter for food.

The story concludes with a third incremental repetition of the refrain, providing the message of Russia's immutable legacy: “Forest, groves, swamps, fields, black sky filled with autumnal heavenly bodies—a country road: two ruts, weeds, a path—without end, without beginning, without limits, crawling, twisting like a snake. Some are tired of traversing it, they want to take a more direct route: they turn off, become lost, return to the former place!” (73). The implicit message is that the bolshevik revolt is, like all the others, transitory. Essential Russia will again assert herself and return to her former station.

Among other devices of euphony and rhythm, Pilniak for the first time makes extensive use of paramoion (“i chugunka umirala, raslagaias' smradno, kak vsiakaia posledniaia smerdniaia smert'” [“and the iron foundry was dying, decomposing with a stench like every last peasant death”], 72); paregmenon (“—byli obory, pobory, nabory” [“There was trash, taxes, type”], 68); and homoioptoton (“na ulitsakh—razgrablennykh, rastashchennykh, zakharkannykh.” [“on the streets—robbed, dismantled, covered with spittle”], 71). Imagery becomes elaborately ornamental: “The huts stood with their backs to the forest, looking sullen from under the pines with their pock-marked mugs, their dull window-eyes peering like a wolf's, teary. The grey logs lay like wrinkles. The ruddy-colored straw—hair in parentheses—fell to the earth” (66). And substandard dialectical speech is reproduced with a flourish: “Ta-peria my—shami. Ta-peria my- sha-mi! Shvaem manerom. Shvaem mirom! Zhemlia teper'—nasha. Taperia my shami- kha-zia-va! … Bunt, zhnachit” (“Nowadays we're a bossin'. Now-a-days we're a-bossin'! Ar own way. Ar own world! The earth now is ars. We're ar own bos-s-iz! … Yep, it's a revolt” [68–69]). In “Country Roads” the style has become emancipated from its subservience to theme and story. Now it occupies a place of equal honor and competes vigorously for the attention of the reader. …

“SPERANZA” (COMPLETED SEPTEMBER 1923; PUBLISHED 1923)²⁴

Pilniak wrote several stories about people at sea.²⁵ “Speranza” is the best. These stories, meditations on what is most important and permanent in life, contain much that is situationally exotic. In “Speranza” Pilniak primarily depicts life aboard an aging coal transport ship and the crew's experiences on shore at South Wales, England. At sea the crew is buffeted by raging storms (an elemental “evil spirit, hostile to man” [28], striving against them) and exploited by the mean-spirited officers; yet, cut off from all the world, the more alert among them contemplate life's meaning and conclude that “one cannot believe in anything in the world: everything in the world flows and passes” (8). Still, they are inveterate dreamers, even capable of transforming love with a prostitute into a pure ideal (23).

An Estonian who has not been home for seventeen years and a new Russian crewman both long to return to Russia, where “people live without money and the workers rule.” This oft-repeated refrain characterizes the romantic days immediately following the revolution, which by 1923 had become for most a fading memory. However, through a refrain introduced on the first page and repeated on the last, Pilniak emphasizes a theme that will remain prominent in his writing until the end of the decade:

But seamen know that in a storm, when the indigo wind buffets the shrouds and people, when waves wash over the washboards and strike the spar-deck,—when the ship is tossed by the waves like a vegetable in boiling water,—then one must keep one's eyes on the horizon, for it alone is like the earth, immovable and firm, and woe to him in whose eyes the horizon, the only unwavering thing, wavers,—then he will become seasick with an awful, turbid, beastly nausea. … And seamen are always far-sighted!

(7–8 and 30)

The author suggests that storms (revolutions), powerful as they are, are intrusive and fleeting, while the horizon, like man and his instincts or the earth and the natural cycle, are steadfast, unchanging, and triumphant. The message evokes restraint, calmness, tolerance, stability, and philosophical distance, none of which characterized the new captains aboard Russia's turbulent ship of state.

Some of the most lyrical and poetic pages of this short story provide impressionistic glimpses into the exotic customs in foreign ports, the mechanized coal-loading operations in South Wales, the seamy life around the docks, and the remarkable personal experiences of the crew members. Discreet but frequent and searing reminders of man's cruelty are provided by the little Jewish dishwasher who is sexually and otherwise abused by the ship's steward, and by a pathetic black prostitute crying “pleez” to passersby. The story is lightly ornamental in style. Rhythmic series occasionally heighten the unobtrusively poetic quality of “Speranza”:

And at night—a storm. The sky is starry, in the sky is the Big Bear and the North Star, but below the sky all was insane. Walls of waves attack the ship, foam, thunder, roar like the wind, crash over the decks, crawl onto the bow and the stern, onto one another, onto the sky,—the wind sunders the foam and, like thousands of hoses, it washes over the water, over the ship, to the stars. The darkness is black. The wind, like an insane man in an insane asylum driven by his idea, fastens on the vessel, blows, spits frenziedly at this one speck as though intending to blow the ship to hell. The whole ship is bolted down, staved down, tied down (zavinchen, zaklepan, zaviazan)

(28)

Yet contrasting with this elemental energy are the human powers demonstrated at the loading docks, where one encounters everything to which “men can oppose the elements of the sea, forests, steppes, skies, and blizzards” (19), that is, technology or civilization. Pilniak will increasingly align himself with the positive features of civilization in his battle against barbarism, but the wildly elemental forces will forever maintain their irresistible appeal to this romantic author.

“YE OLDE CHESHIRE CHEESE” (COMPLETED SEPTEMBER 16, 1923; PUBLISHED 1923)²⁶

An excellent example of ornamental prose in a short form, “Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese” tells of two young brothers, their wives, and mother living on the trans-Volga steppe among Kirghiz tribesmen. Their homestead is essentially an isolated anarchists' commune where science, culture, and art are nourished irrespective of ideology: “We know nothing of what is happening in the world—we live without any money, on a primitive level of [material] culture” (200), although as “colonists bringing [spiritual] culture to the lands of savages” (201). Their existence is idyllic and pastoral. They live a hundred kilometers from the nearest railroad in the heart of nature's raw, elemental forces, in a setting much like that of “A Complete Life.”

The story is superbly composed. Beginning with a 1918 letter from Mariia (the wife of an inventor named Andrei) to a Russian émigré acquaintance living in London, and followed by two diary entries in September 1918 by Ol'ga (married to the artist Nikolai), Pilniak presents these women's innocent, idealistic, and rather naive dreams. The chapter ends with Kirghiz renegades entering the settlement and then abruptly leaving. That evening a shot is heard; Nikolai's brother Andrei goes to investigate. The second chapter, narrated in a stylized, ornamental manner, includes the report of a Kirghiz uprising, and an impressionistic account both of the murder of Andrei and Nikolai and the raping of the women, and of the Red Army's ambush of the marauders. The final chapter portrays the elderly Russian émigré to whom Mariia had written as he converses with a friend in 1922 in the London tavern Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese. The émigré relates the story of his unfortunate Russian acquaintances. From this additional perspective the reader learns that Ol'ga, pregnant at the time of the raid, had miscarried, while Mariia had conceived and given birth to a baby fathered by one of her Kirghiz attackers.

A principal theme of “Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese” is the sanctity of motherhood and the innate irresistibility of blood relationships. Until the baby's birth, Mariia did not know whether the father was her husband or his murderer. Some feared to show the baby to Mariia, but, without hesitation, she took the child, pressed him to her heart and “beamed like all mothers holding their babies for the first time” (212). The émigré realizes that while great monuments to human achievement inspire reverence, “how much more ancient, more significant,—and more frightening—is human life” (212); he is now determined to return to his homeland in time to die there. The story ends with a contemporary postscript as spring embraces the steppe and three women, Mariia, Ol'ga, and their husbands' mother, work at their settlement “with energy and joy” (214). Life, renewed and reaffirmed, continues despite the cruel barbarism that threatened it.

Stylistic ornamentation is frequent, though it is modulated by less elaborate sections. One of Pilniak's finest examples of ornamental style occurs as the author describes revolution on the steppes:

In party executive offices, in emergency committees, in army headquarters, on squares, on streets, on country roads, on railroad lines, at stations—across villages, farms, wildernesses, fields, steppes, ravines, rivers,—during the night, fog, rain,—at fall, by thousands of convulsions, thousands,—they walked, crawled, dragged cannons, wagons, cattle,—they shouted, sang songs, prayed, cried, cursed,—slept on roads, in ravines, on the steppes,—burned fires, villages, fields, cities,—died with cups in their hands, sleepy, alert, sick,—they killed with disease, cannons, hunger—From the Urals and across the steppes came the Whites in English uniforms with Old Believer crosses, bearded. From Moscow and Piter, from cities and machines came the Reds in workers' jackets, shaven, with stars and no prayers”

(203–04)

This brief bravura is surrounded by a more conventional, less poetically artificial style of prose writing. By contrast, the ornamental excursus appears aesthetically resplendent. In “Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese” Pilniak strikes a satisfying balance among styles, compositional arrangements, narrative voices, and themes characteristic of his best works of the 1920s. The resulting art is not smooth and lustrous but, in its seemingly elemental roughness, natural, free, and serendipitous.

“NENASHIN SIDE” (COMPLETED BY 1924; PUBLISHED 1924)²⁷

Banality, avarice, and boredom saturate the five brief pages of this literary gem. Pilniak musters a subtle irony to expose the petty ambitions and ethical destitution of provincial officials, merchants, and their wives. In “Nenashin Side” the author confronts the “barbaric” philistinism that paralyzes and strangles all on its path. The temporal setting is the Soviet NEP in the year 1925, but the people and situations are ages old. Drakin, a heavy-drinking land office foreman, accidently discovers a cache of church valuables in a monastery cellar now used to store cabbage. He connives with two NEP merchants to liquidate these assets. Subsequently the merchants are forced to bribe a court officer who learns too much while investigating a quarrel between their wives. Eventually all these and others, both guilty and innocent, are arrested when Drakin, jailed on another charge, “in the Russian-Shchedrin manner, drowning, decides to drown as many others as he could” (161). As the story ends, “several of them are shot—right there behind the prison in the courtyard of the prison church,” and the choking dust of mediocrity and melancholy again settles over the backwater region.

This story is one of Pilniak's finest examples of sustained elliptical, dynamic prose, preeminently colloquial in flavor but perceptibly literary in organization. After brief impressionistic sections entitled “God,” “Monastery,” “City,” “People,” “Years,” and “The Year,” Pilniak describes Drakin's discovery in the monastery cellar:

The girls carried out trash, and on the floor of the cellar (it was August, heat) in the corner they saw planks, the planks were rotting, the girls sat down to rest, a girl and a plank fell into a hole,—Drakin crawled down to look. In the hole were trunks, in the trunks were church valuables, silver and gold and wonder-working ikons.

Drakin filled in the hole, replaced the planks, and to the girls—five gold rubles each to be quiet. The girls bought themselves new outfits: in the land office there was no end to local girls—they too applied for work: you're paid well in the land office!

(160)

Yet the intent of the story is not merely to amuse or to ridicule. Its understated intent is entirely serious, framed by a scene of death and absurdity. The story begins:

God: over-advertised, over-gossiped, no one believes, they dragged too much from heaven to earth, they stare as at a strange drowned man beside a river—The drowned man is blue:—the sun is July, but it seems like the drowned man is cold, as though it's forty below zero … and still, in July, in the baking heat, it is terrifying because all around is the never incomprehensible death,—and a January chill runs up one's spine: death!

(159)

The seriousness of the story's poshlost' is further emphasized by a surreal ending in which a fire tower overlooking (and observing) the town can no longer tolerate its barbaric environment, goes berserk, tears itself from its foundation and dashes at top speed “from melancholic boredom, from stupidity, from sorrow, from Smerdiakovism—dances around the peoples' court and fills the skies with such scorching swearing that even heaven turns hot!” (163). The message is that Nenashin's and Russia's vulgar foolishness, greed, and violence are intolerable. In his next major work [Machines and Wolves], Pilniak conditionally endorses technology, the machine, as a means to elevate Russian material and spiritual culture. …

Notes

1. For an autobiographical story which emphasizes the author's “fast and easy” technique, see “Space and Time” (1934).

2. Quotations are from Zhatva, Bk. VI-VII (1915), pp. 321–44. Translations are mine throughout this section, except as noted.

3. Iurii A. Andreev, in his excellent Revoliutsiia i literatura (L: Nauka, 1969), pp. 157–67, posits that Pilniak developed from an ornamentalist to a socialist realist. Considering “About Sevka,” one might best view such an evolution as cyclic rather than linear.

4. Quotations are from Byl'e, 2nd ed. (1922; rpt. München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1970), pp. 7–18.

5. In a revision for the 1935 edition of short stories, Pilniak changed this image to “an immobile, uprooted forest spirit” (leshii).

6. Quotations are from Sobranie sochinenii v vos'mi tomakh, V (M: Gosizdat, 1929), 27–36.

7. Quotations are from Spolokhi, Bk. 12 (1918), pp. 112–29.

8. Quotations are from Byl'e, pp. 104–12.

9. Quotations are from Krasnoe derevo i drugie (Chicago: Russian Language Specialties, 1968), pp. 118–21.

10. Two earlier stories written by 1916, “With the Last Steamer” and “On a Frosty Evening,” also portray women past their prime who now sense the tragedy of their lost opportunities for love. However, neither of these stories is as subtle and poignant as “Things.”

11. Quotations are from Rabochii mir, No. 19 (8 Dec. 1918), pp. 4–5.

12. He also used it in “Riazan' Apples,” which eventually became a part of Machines and Wolves.

13. Quotations are from Mirskoe delo, No. 16–17 (Nov. 1918), pp. 8–11.

14. Pilniak uses an abbreviated form of the founding legend in “Riazan' Apples,” subsequently incorporated into Machines and Wolves.

15. A more blatant appeal for restraint, selflessness, and love is found in “Righteous Juliania” (1919).

16. Quotations are from Put', No. 4 (31 Oct. 1918), pp. 15–17.

17. Quotations are from Sobranie sochinenii v vos'mi tomakh, V (M: Gosizdat, 1929), 7–14.

18. Quotations are from A. P. Chekhov, Izbrannye proizvedeniia v trekh tomakh, II (M: Khudozh. Lit., 1964), 392–95.

19. Original title: “Hedged Life”; name changed to “The Heirs,” January 1920; first published as “The Heirs,” 1920. Quotations are from Sobranie sochinenii v vos'mi tomakh, III (1929; rpt. München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1970), 145–56.

20. Quotations are from Byl'e, pp. 65–73.

21. An image is ornamental if it not only pleases and informs but startles, perplexes, or in other ways momentarily decelerates the speed of narration and reading and fixes attention on the segment. See Browning, “Russian Ornamental Prose,” p. 348.

22. In “Arina” (completed in August 1919) and “Stories About Seas and Mountains” (completed by 1919), Pilniak attains this astonishing versatility. “Arina” contains five chapters. The first is a lyrical, first-person account; the second and third are portrayals by an omniscient author (omniscient but elliptical and stylized); the fourth is a document—a section from a book on sectarian belief; and the fifth returns to the initial lyrical, first-person narrator. This story is incorporated in its entirety into Naked Year, although here the former order of the chapters is changed to 2, 3, 1, 5, 4—a better arrangement for the novel's purposes. The four works in “Stories About Seas and Mountains” (first published as “Simple Stories”) further demonstrate in microcosm the artistic peculiarity of Pilniak's later “novels.” Here he collects several stories into a lyrical, cyclical montage, loosely united by a common theme, love. The third story, “First Day of Spring,” Pilniak completed by 1916, and the first, “Always on Assignment,” he adapted from “A Wind Before March,” completed in February 1919. To these Pilniak added the second story, “Wolf Ravine”, which, judging by its manner, although not yet published, must have been written by 1918, and the fourth, “Seas and Mountains,” probably written late in 1919 as he drew the other stories together. The first two stories have an elliptical but omniscient narrator, the third story is a first-person narration, and the fourth is much more ornamental in construction and narration and combines a lyrical oracular, omniscient narrator with a poetic, first-person diary entry. In this compositional and narrative welter, Pilniak experiments with the artistic range and freedom characteristic of his novel Naked Year and subsequent works.

23. In Naked Year (1929; pp. 158–60) Pilniak focuses on the artificiality and sterility of the city; in Machines and Wolves (1925; p. 7) the author recalls the vital rebel forces that are building thoroughfares and rocking Rus' back on her heels.

24. Quotations are from Sobranie sochinenii v vos'mi tomakh, VI (1929; rpt. München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1970), 5–30.

25. See “With the Last Steamer” (1916), “The Wreck of the Sverdrup” (1925), “Grego-Trimuntan” (1925), “A Story About Springs and Clay” (1925), “Lord Byron” (1927), “Blue Sea” (1928), and “Twenty-Eight Thousand Printer's Marks” (1929).

26. Quotations are from Krasnoe derevo i drugie (Chicago: Russian Language Specialties, 1968), pp. 197—214.

27. Quotations from Sobranie sochinenii v vos'mi tomakh, III (1929; rpt. München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1970), 159—63.