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The most interesting portion of Pilniak's works are no doubt his longer stories of "Soviet life" written since 1921. Unfortunately they are practically untranslatable. His proceedings, imitated from Bely and Remizov, would seem incongruous to the English reader, and the translation would be laid aside in despair or in disgust, in spite of all its burning interest of actuality.
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.
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.
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.
The cold spirit of system of the Revolutionary Terrorists is presented as the natural and legitimate outcome of bureaucratic formalism. A cunningly produced atmosphere of weird irreality pervades the whole book. It is in many ways a descendant of Dostoyevsky and has in its turn again produced a numerous family of imitations, including Pilniak's most characteristic tales of the Revolution.
Since 1922 editions and reprints of Pilniak's stories have been numerous, and as he follows the rather regrettable usage of making up every new book of his unpublished stories with reprints of earlier work the bibliography of his works is rather complicated and entangled, besides being entirely uninteresting to the English reader.
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.
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