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A SLAV SOUL

AND OTHER STORIES

BY

ALEXANDER KUPRIN

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY

STEPHEN GRAHAM

NEW YORK

G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS

1916




CONTENTS



INTRODUCTION: ALEXANDER KUPRIN

          I. A SLAV SOUL
         II. THE SONG AND THE DANCE
        III. EASTER DAY
         IV. THE IDIOT
          V. THE PICTURE
         VI. HAMLET
        VII. MECHANICAL JUSTICE
       VIII. THE LAST WORD
         IX. THE WHITE POODLE
          X. THE ELEPHANT
         XI. DOGS' HAPPINESS
        XII. A CLUMP OF LILACS
       XIII. ANATHEMA
        XIV. TEMPTING PROVIDENCE
         XV. CAIN




INTRODUCTION

ALEXANDER KUPRIN

"Oh how incomprehensible for us, how mysterious, how strange are the
very simplest happenings in life. And we, not understanding them,
unable to penetrate their significance, heap one event upon another,
plait them together, join them, make acquaintances and marriages,
write books, say sermons, found ministries, carry on war or trade,
make new inventions and then after all, create history! And yet every
time I think of the immensity and complexity, the incomprehensible and
elemental accidentoriness of the whole hurly-burly of life, then my own
little life seems but a miserable speck of dust lost in the whirl of a
hurricane."

So in a paragraph in one of his sketches Alexander Kuprin gives his
feelings about his life and his work, and in that expression perhaps we
see his characteristic attitude towards the world of which he writes.
One of the strongest tales in this collection, "Tempting Providence,"
is very representative of Kuprin in this vein.

After Chekhof the most popular tale-writer in Russia is Kuprin, the
author of fourteen volumes of effusive, touching and humorous stories.
He is read by the great mass of the Russian reading public, and his
works can be bought at any railway bookstall in the Empire. He is
devoured by the students, loved by the bourgeois, and admired even by
intellectual and fastidious Russians. It is impossible not to admire
this natural torrent of Russian thoughts and words and sentiments. His
lively pages are a reflection of Russia herself, and without having
been once in the country it would be possible to get a fair notion of
its surface life by reading these tales in translation. Perhaps the
greatest of living Russian novelists is Kuprin--exalted, hysterical,
sentimental, Rabelaisian Kuprin. He comes to you with a handful of
wild flowers in one red, hairy hand and a shovelful of rubbish in the
other--his shiny, lachrymose but unfathomable features pouring floods
of tears or rolling and bursting in guffaws of laughter. His is a rank
verbiage--he gives birth to words, ideas, examples in tens where other
writers go by units and threes.

He is occasionally coarse, occasionally sentimental, but he gives great
delight to his readers; his are rough-hewn lumps of conversation and
life. With him everything is taken from life. He seems to be a master
of detail, and the characteristic of his style is a tendency to give
the most diverting lists. Often paragraph after paragraph, if you
look into the style, would be found to be lists of delicious details
reported in a conversational manner. Thus, opening a volume at random,
you can easily find an example:--

"Imagine the village we had reached--all overblown with snow; the
inevitable village idiot, Serozha, walking almost naked in the snow;
the priest, who won't play cards the day before a festival but writes
denunciations to the village starosta instead--a stupid, artful man,
and an adept at getting alms, speaking an atrocious Petersburg Russian.
If you have grasped what society was like in the village you know to
what point of boredom and stupefaction we attained. We had already
got tired of bear-hunting, hare-hunting with hounds, pistol-shooting
at a target through three rooms, writing humorous verses. It must be
confessed we quarrelled."

He is also the inventor of amusing sentences which can almost be used
as proverbs:--

He knew which end of the asparagus to eat.

Or,

We looked at our neighbours through a microscope; they at us through a
telescope.

Every one of Kuprin's stories has the necessary Attic salt. He is like
our English Kipling, whom he greatly admires, and about whom he has
written in one of his books an appreciative essay. He is also something
like the American O. Henry, especially in the matter of his lists of
details and his apt metaphors, but he has not the artifice nor the
everlasting American smile. Kuprin, moreover, takes his matter from
life and writes with great ease and carelessness; O. Henry put together
from life and re-wrote twelve times.

Above all things Kuprin is a sentimental author, preferring an impulse
to a reason, and abandoning logic whenever his feelings are touched.
He likes to feel the reader with the tears in his eyes and then to
go forward with him in the unity of emotional friendship. There is,
however, under this excitement a rather self-centred cynic despising
the things he does not love, a satirical genius. His humour is nearly
always at the expense of some person, institution or class of society.
Thus "The Song and the Dance" is at the expense of the peasantry, "The
Last Word" at the expense of the lower _intelligentia,_ "The White
Poodle" at the expense of those rich bourgeois who have villas on the
Crimean shores, "Anathema" at the expense of the Church, "Mechanical
Justice" at the expense of the professor, and so on. And it is part of
Kuprin's sentiment to love dogs almost as much as men, and he tells no
tales at dogs' expense. "The White Poodle" and "Dogs' Happiness" are
two of his dog tales.

The tales selected are taken from various volumes,