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
is not an ounce of spontaneity in them, and, especially in the later
work where he is more or less free from reminiscences of Remizov,
they produce the impression of mosaic laboriously set together. They
are overloaded with pointedly suggestive metaphor and symbolically
expressive detail, and in their laborious and disproportionate
elaborateness they remind you of the deliberate ugliness of a
painting by some German "Expressionist.
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