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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.
Pilniak is without a doubt a writer of considerable ability, but he is essentially unoriginal and derivative.
But Ivan-da-Marya and The Bare Year, published in 1922, produced a regular boom, and Pilniak jumped into the limelight of all-Russian celebrity.
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. 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 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.
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.
He is not of pure Russian blood, but a descendant of German colonists; a fact which incidently proves the force of assimilation inherent in the Russian milieu and the capacity to be assimilated, so typical of Germans. For it is difficult to deny Pilniak the appellation of a typical Russian. Pilniak is about thirty-five years of age.
The works of both these writers were among the first books to be reprinted on the revival of the book-trade. And it soon became apparent that practically all the young generation belonged to their progeny. The first of these younger men to draw on himself the attention of critics and readers was Pilniak, the author of the present volume, on whom I shall dwell anon in greater detail.
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 cause of the success of these volumes, or rather the attention attracted by them, lay in their subject- matter: Pilniak was the first novelist to approach the subject of "Soviet Byt," to attempt to utilise the everyday life and routine of Soviet officialdom, and to paint the new forms Russian life had taken since the Revolution.
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