Boris Pil'niak preferred the genres of short story, novel, and travel sketch. Beginning with World War I, he wrote during a fateful period in Russian history that included the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution (also known as the October Revolution), War Communism and famine, the New Economic Policy (NEP), rapid industrialization, forced collectivization, the consolidation of Stalinism, and the beginning of the Great Terror. Learning principally from Andrei Belyi and Aleksei Mikhailovich Remizov, Pil'niak developed a style of writing called ornamental prose, which emphasizes deliberate artfulness, rhythmic prose, mixed narrative styles, fragmentary compositional structure, and the development of leitmotivs, within which is embedded, often, a key to the message of a work. In the 1920s major writers along a broad ideological spectrum agreed that this style seemed to correspond to their turbulent age. Pil'niak's thematic touchstones relate to instinct--particularly those connected with love, propagation, and death--within the biological cycle of life...