SOURCE: “Mahogany and Soviet Critical Opinion,” in Boris Pil'niak: A Soviet Writer in Conflict with the State, McGill-Queen's University Press, 1975, pp. 82–6.

In the essay below, Reck discusses Pilnyak's novelette Mahogany and the criticism it generated.

In a report on the literary “war” in Moscow, Walter Duranty informed the readers of the New York Times that Mahogany had been “saluted with howls of joy by the White Russian press abroad.”¹ His information must have come from Moscow newspapers or other Soviet sources: there is no evidence of such a reception in the émigré press. Mahogany, this “essentially insignificant satire written for the few” received little notice abroad until it became “a great sensation.”² The only major review of the novelette to appear before the literary “war” broke out was by Georgii Adamovich in Poslednie Novosti.³ Far from being a howl of joy, it was a coolly negative appraisal of...