Boris Pilniak

Tales of the Wilderness Boris Pilniak

Book Excerpt1916 the Russian literary press was flooded with short stories modelled on the Unhushable Tambourine. The most promising of these provincialists was E. Zamyatin, whose stories [Footnote: _Uyezdnoe_, which may be rendered as "something provincial."] are as intense and packed with suggestive ugliness as anything in Remizov, but lack the master's unerring linguistic flair and his profound and inclusive humanness. Zamyatin's stories are most emphatically _made_, manufactured, there is not an ounce of spontaneity in them, and, especially in the later work where he is more or less free from reminiscences of Remizov, they produce the impression of mosaic laboriously set together. They are overloaded with pointedly suggestive metaphor and symbolically expressive detail, and in their laborious and disproportionate elaborateness they remind you of the deliberate ugliness of a painting by some German "Expressionist." [Footnote: Zamyatin was during the war a shipbuilding Engineer in the Russian service at Newcas