[In the following unfavorable assessment of Tales of the Wilderness, Krutch maintains that Pilnyak's stories “are singularly barren of either intellectual or emotional content.”]

Prince Mirsky begins his introduction to Tales of the Wilderness with the statement that the English reading public knows next to nothing of contemporary Russian literature and then, as he proceeds to discuss the prose writers since Chekhov, comes very near to saying that they are not worth knowing. Dismissing Merezhkovsky, Andreev, and Artsybashev as “second- and third-rate writers,” he proposes Remizov and Pilniak as representatives of the best which contemporary Russia has to offer; but of them and their school he says that they have little except a self-conscious and fastidious style to distinguish them. Both from this introduction and from the tales themselves we learn that they are devoted to meticulous, rather pointless studies of the mean and grotesque aspects of contemporary life and that, lacking the social ideas of their great predecessors, they have created a sort of inverted aestheticism which toys with ugliness without exactly knowing why it does so. A certain gift for clear-cut description they certainly have, but their stories are singularly barren of either intellectual or emotional content.

Politically, perhaps, Russia has taken on a new life; but literature is a slower growth than government and artistically she is still (if we may judge from these two writers) hesitating between the dead world and the world which is still powerless to be born. No new impulse, social, intellectual, or artistic, is discernible in these translations, and the old ones seem exhausted. The belief in the people which sustained some of Russia's great writers seems to have vanished before the time came for that faith to translate itself into energy, and Pilniak pictures both the defeated aristocracy and the triumphant proletariat as blundering futilely from one despair to another without having the energy even to suffer. Unsympathetic observers have accused the Russian of loving despair because it relieves him of the necessity of effort, and without taking so unfavorable a view one may at least suggest that Pilniak is too tired to hope. He seems when confronted with the triumph of the revolution to have said merely: “Oh well, you cannot expect anything from the people either,” and then to have sunk back into that conviction of the complete futility of all things which seems to give a sort of peace to those long accustomed to it. Utter lassitude grips his people, whether they be noblemen or peasants; their passions are tired and even their hatreds are languid. They revile one another and they curse at fate, but they do neither with enthusiasm; for all seem to feel that to admit that everything, including themselves, is as bad as possible is the easiest way out for everyone. To hope would be to struggle, even to wish would be to cry out against things as they are; but cries require effort.

“Remizov,” says Mr. Cournos, “differs from the author of Crime and Punishment chiefly in that he is more conscious of his style”—a statement which would seem to imply that he is a greater Dostoevski. In reality he lacks almost completely the thing which makes the writer with whom he is so casually compared great; namely, his passion. However bad Dostoevski may have thought the world to be, he never ceased to resent with all his fierce soul the fact that it was not different. His despair was rung from him by the bitter results of his heroic efforts, but Remizov takes as a matter of course all that Dostoevski protests against, and he wrings no emotion from his tale because he is so far beyond struggle. At the beginning of his story his misshapen hero asked himself: “In general what was the use of life?” and the question is reiterated again and again. Innumerable other Russian authors have asked the same question, and it may very properly be the end of a great work. But it is not a good beginning, because if life is really without value then the only possible interest which it can offer is the discovery of this fact. To start with it as an assumption is to destroy art along with life. Nearly all the stories of both the authors under discussion are emotionally static because the conflict is over before they commence, and the tragedy is not described because it is taken for granted. They are interesting as evidence of the state of mind to which the authors have descended, but they are strangely unmoving because nothing ever hangs in the balance. The characters have already lost all there is to lose, and the authors have descended to the lowest pit to which it is possible to descend.

The intense preoccupation with untranslatable niceties of language which is spoken of in the case of both as the distinguishing mark of their effort is probably here, as so often, a sign of their barrenness of thought or feeling. They obviously find themselves at the close of a period, and having heard all they have to say already said they can do nothing except occupy themselves with ways of saying it. A writer must go up hill or down; he must be moving toward faith or toward disillusion, he must have an enthusiasm for either creation or destruction; and these writers have neither. Russian literature has rushed through its mad course from despair to despair, and it has reached the bottom. Tolstoi and Dostoevski discovered through passion and suffering that the social system under which they lived was hopeless; Andreev and Artsybashev discovered through passion and suffering that all existence was hopeless; no further descent is possible and one must rise or stagnate. Before Russia lies, perhaps, a new hope and after that a new despair, but it must begin again to believe, however mistakenly, in something—whether it be Bolshevism or religion or romantic love or what not—before it can disillusion itself again. In the history of literature the optimist gathers illusions which the pessimist then spends, and both processes are interesting. At present Russia is, if one may judge by these two writers, bankrupt. She has spent all she has to spend.