But Gorky, and that excellent though minor writer, Kuprin,
are the only belated representatives of the fine nineteenth century
tradition. For even Bunin is a poet and a stylist rather than a story
teller: his most characteristic "stories" are works of pure
atmosphere, as diffuse and as skeletonless as a picture by Claude
Monet.
The Symbolists of the early twentieth century (all the great poets of
the generation were Symbolists) tried also to create a prose of their
own. They tried many directions but they did not succeed in creating
a style or founding a tradition. The masterpiece of this Symbolist
prose is Theodore Sologub's great novel _The Little Demon_[Footnote:
English translation.] (by the way a very inadequate rendering of the
Russian title). It is a great novel, probably the most perfect
Russian _novel_ since the death of Dostoyevsky. It breaks away very
decidedly from Realism and all the traditions of the nineteenth
century. It is symbolic, synthetic, and poetical. But it is so
intensely personal and its achievements are so intimately conditioned
by the author's idiosyncrasies that it was quite plainly impossible
to imitate it, or even to learn from it. This is still more the case
with the later works of Sologub, like the charming but baffling and
disconcerting romance of _Queen Ortruda_.
The other Symbolists produced nothing of the same calibre, and they
failed to attract the public.
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