But their "Revolutionism" is purely aesthetical and
is conspicuously empty of ideas. Most of their stories appear on the
pages of official Soviet publications, but they are regarded with
rather natural mistrust by the official Bolshevik critics, who draw
attention to the essentially uncivic character of their art.
The exaggerated elaborateness and research of their works makes all
these writers practically untranslatable; not that many of them are
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.
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