SOURCE: A review of Chinese Story and Other Tales, in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 26, No. 4, Fall, 1989, p. 564.

In the following essay, Day offers a favorable review of Chinese Story and Other Tales.

In Mother Earth, Pilnyak's loving testimonial short story of Russia's “fields, forests, swamps, coppices, hills, distances, years, nights, days, blizzards, storms, calms,” Arina Arsenyeva the tanner has fallen from bourgeois comfort in the post-revolution years. Her comfortable childhood home now houses workers, and she herself works hard hours in the tannery:

The house was as it had always been, but her days were different—very spacious; there were neither clerks nor bookkeepers nor father nor mother. Work had to be done at all costs. Everything had to be cut to a new pattern. The house was the same, but the pies had vanished, and where the dining room (a place to eat those pies) had...