Remizov's disciples, as might be expected, have been more successful
in imitating the grotesqueness of his caricatures and the vivid and
intense concentration of his character painting than in adopting his
sympathetic and human attitude or in speaking his pure Russian.
The first of the new realists to win general recognition was A. N.
Tolstoy, who speedily caught and vulgarised Remizov's knack of
creating grotesque "provincial" characters. He has an easy way of
writing, which is miles apart from Remizov's perfect craftsmanship, a
love for mere filth, characteristic of his time and audience, and
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).
Pages:
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25