"
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.
Miss Harrison, in her notable essay on the Aspects of the Russian
Verb, [Footnote: _Aspects and Aorists_, by Jane Harrison, Cambridge
University Press, 1919.] makes an interesting distinction between the
"perfective" and "imperfective" style in fiction. The perfective is
the ordinary style of an honest narrative. The "imperfective" is
where nothing definitely happens but only goes on indefinitely
"becoming." Russian Literature (as the Russian language, according to
Miss Harrison) has a tendency towards the "imperfective.
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