SOURCE: A review of Chinese Story and Other Tales, in World Literature Today, Vol. 63, No. 3, Summer, 1989, p. 500.

In the following essay, Lewis provides a favorable review of Chinese Story and Other Tales.

The style of Boris Pilnyak's fiction has been described as disorderly and emotional but appropriate for the troubled times and events it treats. The stories translated for the collection Chinese Story and Other Tales would confirm that judgment, especially “Chinese Story” itself. Written in what at first seems to be a form of internal monologue, it later becomes apparent that the text is a diary kept by a Russian visitor to China in the year 1926. As the narrator-diarist says on the opening page of the story, “There are a great many Chinese everywhere … you cannot understand where they are going, where they come from, and what is the purpose of their constant movement.” These lines might...