SOURCE: “Politic Views,” in Spectator, Vol. 222, June 14, 1969, pp. 788, 790.

In the following excerpt, Capitanchik offers a mixed assessment of Mother Earth and Other Stories.

‘Human kind,’ wrote Eliot, ‘cannot bear very much reality’. One of the more baleful aspects of contemporary Russian society is its treatment of writers who do not accept that great flight from reality, the view of the revolution as the beginning of universal justice. Boris Pilnyak, some of whose stories are now published in translation for the first time, was an experimental writer, interspersing incantatory imagery with reports from documents, who welcomed the revolution as an expression of Russian history, not as a communist achievement. Vilified, in 1926, for his Tale of the Unextinguished Moon—in which he describes the killing of a famous general by means of a surgical operation, the parallel of what may have been an early example of Stalinist paranoia—he expunged...