water enough to make his writings palatable to the average reader. So
he early became the most popular of the _literary_ novelists of the
years before the Revolution.

A far more significant writer is Michael Prishvin. He belongs to an
older generation and attracted some attention by good work in the
line of descriptive journalism before he came in touch with Remizov.
A man of the soil, he was capable of following Remizov's lead in
making his Russian more colloquial and less bookish, without
slavishly imitating him. He was unfortunately too much absorbed by
his journalistic work to give much time to literature. But he wrote
at least one story which deserves a high rank in even the smallest
selection of Russian stories--_The Beast of Krutoyarsk_ (1913). It is
the story of a dog, and is far the best "animal" story in the whole
of Russian literature. The animal stories of Rudyard Kipling and Jack
London were very popular in Russia at that time, but Prishvin is
curiously free from every foreign, in fact from every bookish,
influence; his story smells of the damp and acid soil of his native
Smolensk province, and even Remizov was to him only a guide towards
the right use of words and the right way of concentrating on his
subject.

Prishvin stands alone. But in the years 1913-1916 the Russian
literary press was flooded with short stories modelled on the
_Unhushable Tambourine_. The most promising of these provincialists
was E. Zamyatin, whose stories [Footnote: _Uyezdnoe_, which may be
rendered as "something provincial."] are as intense and packed with
suggestive ugliness as anything in Remizov, but lack the master's
unerring linguistic flair and his profound and inclusive humanness.
Zamyatin's stories are most emphatically _made_, manufactured, there