SOURCE: “Boris Pilnyak: The Untimely Symbolist,” in Soviet Russian Literature: Writers and Problems, 1917–1977, Oxford University Press, 1977, pp. 59–66.

In the following essay, Slonim discusses Pilnyak's political beliefs and how they were expressed in his fiction.

Chronologically, the first significant panorama of the Great Upheaval was presented in The Naked Year (1922), a novel consisting of a series of flashbacks and close-ups of an aristocratic family, an anarchist's bohemian colony, peasants, uprisings, fratricidal strife, and various episodes of cruelty, lust, famine, physical frenzy, and mental exaltation. The author of this strange yet attractive novel, which blended crude naturalistic descriptions with complex philosophical flights and extravagant stylistic devices, was 28-year-old Boris Pilnyak (1894–1938?), one of the most discussed Soviet writers of the NEP period. In his autobiography he says: “My true name is Vogau. My father—a country veterinarian—comes from German settlers of the Volga region; and my mother from an ancient...