SOURCE: “Varangian Times,” in New Leader, Vol. 60, No. 11, May 5, 1977, pp. 9–11.

In the following essay, Hyman provides a positive review of Pilnyak's short fiction, asserting that “at his best, Boris Pilnyak was a matchless captor of the historical moment in all its rich life, a master of the full range of comic rhetoric, and a unique poetic voice in fiction.”

“Boris Pilnyak,” the pen name of Boris Andreyevich Vogau, born in 1894, was part of the teeming growth of fictional talents that mushroomed after the Russian Revolution and Civil War, including Isaac Babel, Evgeni Zamyatin, Yuri Oleska, and many others. Like a number of them, he modeled his writing on Andrey Bely's St. Petersburg, which pioneered a new sort of poetic and symbolic novel. At least five volumes of Pilnyak's work were published in this country in the 1920s and early 1930s, without gaining him any substantial number of American...