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                 CONSTABLE’S RUSSIAN LIBRARY UNDER THE
                     EDITORSHIP OF STEPHEN GRAHAM




                            THE REPUBLIC OF
                          THE SOUTHERN CROSS




                      CONSTABLE’S RUSSIAN LIBRARY

                      _Edited with Introductions_

                           By STEPHEN GRAHAM


                        THE SWEET SCENTED NAME

                          By Fedor Sologub

                        WAR AND CHRISTIANITY
                         THREE CONVERSATIONS

                          By Vladimir Solovyof

                        THE WAY OF THE CROSS

                           By V. Doroshevitch

                        A SLAV SOUL AND OTHER STORIES

                          By Alexander Kuprin

                        THE EMIGRANT

                          By L. F. Dostoieffshaya

                        THE JUSTIFICATION OF THE GOOD

                          By Vladimir Solovyof

                        THE REPUBLIC OF THE SOUTHERN CROSS
                         AND OTHER STORIES

                          By Valery Brussof




                            THE REPUBLIC OF
                          THE SOUTHERN CROSS

                           AND OTHER STORIES

                                  BY
                            VALERY BRUSSOF

                     WITH AN INTRODUCTORY ESSAY BY
                            STEPHEN GRAHAM

                                LONDON
                      CONSTABLE AND COMPANY LTD.
                                 1918




INTRODUCTION

VALERY BRUSSOF


Valery Brussof is a celebrated Russian writer of the present time. He is
in the front rank of contemporary literature, and is undoubtedly very
gifted, being considered by some to be the greatest of living Russian
poets, and being in addition a critic of penetration and judgment, a
writer of short tales, and the author of one long historical novel from
the life of Germany in the sixteenth century.

He is a Russian of strong European tastes and temperament, a sort of
Mediterraneanised Russian, with greater affinities in France and Italy
than in his native land; an artificial production in the midst of the
Russian literary world. A hard, polished, and even merciless
personality, he has little in common with the compassionate spirits of
Russia. If Kuprin or Gorky may be taken as characteristic of modern
Russia, Brussof is their opposite. He sheds no tears with the reader, he
makes no passionate and “unmanly” defiance of the world, but is
restrained and concentrated and wrapped up in himself and his ideas. The
average length of a sentence of Dostoieffsky is probably about
twenty-five words, of Kuprin thirty, but of Brussof only twenty, and if
you take the staccato “Republic of the Southern Cross,” only twelve. His
fine virile style is admired by Russians for its brevity and directness.
He has been called a maker of sentences in bronze.

It is curious, however, that the theme of his writing has little in
common with the virility of his style. As far as our Western point of
view is concerned it is considered rather feminine than masculine to
doubt the reality of our waking life and to give credence to dreams. Yet
such is undoubtedly the preoccupation of Brussof in these stories.

He says in his preface to the second edition of that collection which
bears the title _The Axis of the Earth_, “the stories are written to
show, in various ways, that there is no fixed boundary line between the
world of reality and that of the imagination, between the dreaming and
the waking world, life and fantasy; that what we commonly call
‘imaginary’ may be the greatest reality of the world, and that which all
call reality the most dreadful delirium.”

This volume, to which we have given the title of _The Republic of the
Southern Cross_ contains the best of Brussof’s tales, and they all
exemplify this particular attitude towards life. Six tales are taken
from _The Axis of the Earth_, but “For Herself or Another” is taken
from the volume entitled _Nights and Days_, and “Rhea Silvia” and
“Eluli, son of Eluli,” from the book bearing the title of _Rhea Silvia_,
in the Russian Universal Library.

In Russia, as I have previously pointed out, the short story is
considered of much more literary importance than it is here. It is the
fashion to write short stories, and readers remember those they have
read and refer to them, as we do to the distinctive and memorable poems
on our intimate bookshelves. But, then, as a rule in Russia a short
story must possess as its foundation some particular literary idea and
conception. The story written for the sake of the story is almost
unknown, and as a general rule the sort of love story and “love
interest” so indispensable with us is not asked there. It often happens,
therefore, that a volume of short tales makes a real and vital
contribution to literature. I think possibly that these specimen volumes
of Russian stories which I have edited from Sologub Kuprin and Brussof
may be helpful in our own literary world as affording new conceptions,
new models, and showing new possibilities of literary form. Brussof’s
volume is an emotional study of reality and unreality cast in the form
of brilliant tales.

       *       *       *       *       *

“Rhea Silvia,” the longest and perhaps the best, tells of the dream
which becomes reality in the Golden House of Nero which had been lost;
the subterranean Rome where a Goth can meet a crazed girl who imagines
she is the vestal Rhea Silvia, the mother of Romulus and Remus who
founded Rome itself, and that the Goth, one of the barbarian destroyers
of Rome, is the god Mars; the whole before and after intermingled.

       *       *       *       *       *

In “The Republic of the Southern Cross” Brussof projects himself several
centuries into the future and imagines an industrial community of
millions of workers, so divorced from reality that they are living at
the South Pole where no life is possible, in a huge town called Star
City where no star is visible, because they have built an immense opaque
roof to the town--