SOURCE: “Rerouting the Train of Time: Boris Pil'nyak's ‘Krasnoye Derevo’,” in Modern Language Review, Vol. 75, No. 1, 1980, pp. 138–47.

In the following essay, Falchikov explores the roles of time and memory in Pilnyak's Mahogany.

At the end of the fourth chapter of his five-chapter novella Krasnoye derevo Pil'nyak comes out with a cliché which nevertheless seems to provide an important clue to an interpretation of the work. Describing a futile attempt by one of the characters to catch a train by making a cross-country journey by horse and cart, Pil'nyak finishes the chapter with the words: ‘Akim, the Trotskyite, missed the train, just as he missed the train of time.’¹

In taking this otherwise unremarkable phrase as the title of my enquiry, I want to suggest that Pil'nyak's central interest in Krasnoye derevo is the problem of time and memory and that in his setting of this work on the...