really worth translating. Their deliberate aestheticism--using as
they do revolutionary subjects only as material for artistic effect--
prevents their writings from being acceptable as reliable pictures of
Russian post-Revolutionary life. And it is quite obvious that they
have very few of the qualities that make good fiction in the eyes of
the ordinary novel-reader.

There are marked inequalities of talent between them, as well as
considerable differences of style. Pilniak is the most ambitious, he
aims highest--and at his worst falls lowest. Vyacheslav Shishkov, a
Siberian, is notable for his good Russian, a worthy pupil of Remizov
and Prishvin. Vsevolod Ivanov, another Siberian, is perhaps the most
interesting for the subjects he chooses (the Civil War in the
backwoods of Siberia), but his style is, though vigorous, diffuse and
hazy, and his narrative is lost in a nebula of poetically-produced
"atmosphere."

Nicholas Nikitin, who is considered by some to be the most promising
of all, is certainly the most typical of the school of Zamyatin; his
style, overloaded with detail which swamps the outline of the story,
is disfigured by the deliberate research of unfamiliar provincial
idioms. Michael Zoshchenko is the only one who has, in a small way,
reached perfection in his rendering of the common slang of a private
soldier. But his art savours too much of a pastiche; he is really a
born parodist and may some day give us a Russian _Christmas Garland_.

The most striking feature of all these story-tellers is their almost
complete inability to tell a story. And this in spite of their great
reverence for Leskov, the greatest of Russian story-tellers. But of
Leskov they have only imitated the style, not his art of narrative.