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Novels and Novelists

Alexander Kuprin

Alexander Kuprin

The Garnet Bracelet — By Alexander Kuprin

In his introduction to this volume of short stories Mr. Lyon Phelps, Professor of English Literature at Yale University, has seized the opportunity to inform, caution, and put ‘right’ American opinion upon the whole subject of Russian Literature. His manner in so doing is unfamiliar to English readers. It makes us feel that while we read we are, like Alice, dwindling away in height; by the end of the first page we are much too young even to attend a University; by the end of the second, and especially when that tiny little joke is popped into our baby mouths, we are of a size to spell out maxims at a learned knee:

A novel is not great simply because it is written in the Russian language, nor because its author has a name difficult to pronounce.

Or:

A slavish—no pun intended—adoration of Russian novels is not itself an indication of critical intelligence.

page 131

Or:

A pessimist is not necessarily a profound thinker, nor is uncleanness in itself a sign of virility.

But surely Mr. Phelps exaggerates the extreme innocence of American literary opinion; he must surely be mistaken in not realizing that it has long cut down these modest flowers of thought with its little hatchet. Nevertheless even Kuprin is described in terms that remind us of those infantile dogmatics about the cat and the mat, and ‘run, fox, run’: ‘He soars and he sinks…. He is holy and he is coarse; he is sublime and he is flat.’

Between this introduction and the preface contributed by the translator, Mr. Pasvolsky, who is at naive pains to inform us when Kuprin is at his best, and why he is at his best, the author makes a difficult bow. But happily the first story, which gives the title to the book, is wonderfully successful, and so the bow is a triumphant one. ‘The Garnet Bracelet’ is a story of hopeless love. It tells how a poor official fell in love with the beautiful Princess Vera Nicolaeyna. For seven years he wrote to her, and then on her birthday he sent her the bracelet. At this her husband and brother interfered. They sought the man out, and he, after giving them to understand that he fully realized the impossibility of the situation, promised them to disappear. Next day the Princess read of his suicide. She received from him a letter written just before he had shot himself, expressing his happiness in having loved her, and begging her to ask someone to play for her, in his memory, the Largo Appassionata from Sonata 2, Op. 2, of Beethoven. From this old-fashioned plot, old-fashioned like the poor bracelet with its ill-polished stones, its green stone in the middle with the five deep red ones surrounding, there come rays of deep quivering light, and all that they reveal is linked together just for one moment, becomes part of the tragic life-story of the strangely simple man for whom ‘to love was enough.’ ‘May nothing transient or vain trouble your page 132 beautiful soul!’ he writes. But the life of the Princess is composed of what is transient and vain; the society in which she lives is transient and vain; real love could have no part in it. But being a woman her secret dream is of a love that shall fill her whole life; it has come near her, and now it is gone for ever.

The other stories in the book do not approach the first. ‘Horse Thieves’ and ‘The Jewess’ are, we imagine, written under the influence of Tchehov. The first, which is an account of a little boy's association with beggars and thieves, and contains a hideous picture of mob violence, has many a touch which puts us in mind of the great writer, but only to marvel, before Kuprin's heaviness, at the delicacy and surety of the other. In ‘The Jewess,’ again, it is easy to see in what soil the idea has been nourished. But a sorry weed has grown, coarse, straggling, with no flower at all for all the author's urging, until at last he has propped it up with an old stick of allegory which never for an instant deceives us.

A word must be said about ‘An Evening Guest.’ In a letter giving a list of the works he considers his most successful the author places it first. This is very interesting, as showing the extraordinary difference between the Russian consciousness and ours. To us ‘The Evening Guest’ is quite impossible; it is very nearly absurd in its ingenuousness. One evening somebody knocks at the writer's door. It sets him wondering who is there, who might be there, and how unknown is the future. He compares life at great length to a game of cards, and then imagines that some madman should hit upon the idea of a lottery of life. On an appointed day there would stand an urn filled with cards, one of which we must draw. And then what is life except this drawing of lots out of an urn of fate? And so on until he falls to wondering whether he will be able to make certain sounds to which that other person on the other side of the door will respond. Until finally, when we are almost inclined to call it childish, he page 133 cries, ‘Every time that I think of the vastness, complexity, darkness, and elemental accidentally of this general intertwining of lives, my own life appears to me like a tiny speck of dust tossed in the fury of a tempest.’ What more is to be said?

(December 26, 1919.)