SOURCE: A review of Chinese Story and Other Tales, in Village Voice Literary Supplement, Vol. 5, October, 1989, pp. 5–6.

In the following positive review of Chinese Story and Other Tales, Francia maintains that “underneath the seemingly rambling passages is a passionate, inquisitive intelligence, gifted and large enough to let a certain amount of disorder flourish.”

While Stalin was consolidating his hold over a still young Soviet Union, Boris Pilnyak—one of the finest Russian writers of a generation that included Mikhail Bulgakov, Yevgeny Zamyatin, and Yevgeny Katayev—was president of the All-Russian Writers' Union's Moscow branch. Pilnyak was never comfortable with the Communist Party, nor was it comfortable with him. Party overseers viciously attacked Pilnyak whenever iconoclastic themes appeared in his writing. The passionate novella Mother Earth, for example, showed signs of Freudianism, still a taboo subject today:

Mother Earth, like love and sex, is a mystery: for her own...