SOURCE: “New Russia or Old?,” in Nation, Vol. 120, February 11, 1925, pp. 163–64.

In the following unfavorable assessment of Tales of the Wilderness, Krutch maintains that Pilnyak's stories “are singularly barren of either intellectual or emotional content.”

Prince Mirsky begins his introduction to Tales of the Wilderness with the statement that the English reading public knows next to nothing of contemporary Russian literature and then, as he proceeds to discuss the prose writers since Chekhov, comes very near to saying that they are not worth knowing. Dismissing Merezhkovsky, Andreev, and Artsybashev as “second- and third-rate writers,” he proposes Remizov and Pilniak as representatives of the best which contemporary Russia has to offer; but of them and their school he says that they have little except a self-conscious and fastidious style to distinguish them. Both from this introduction and from the tales themselves we learn that they are devoted to meticulous, rather...