Nothing brings home the artificiality and the narrowness of this
American fiction so clearly as a comparison, for better and for
worse, with the Russian short story. I have in mind the works of
Anton Tchekoff, whose short stories have now been translated into
excellent English. Fresh from a reading of these books, one feels,
it is true, quite as inclined to criticize as to praise. Why are
the characters therein depicted so persistently disagreeable, even
in the lighter stories? Why are the women always freckled, the men
predominantly red and watery in the eye? Why is the country so
flat, so foggy, so desolate; and why are the peasants so lumpish
and miserable? Russia before the Revolution could not have been so
dreary as this; the prevailing grimness must be due to some mental
obfuscation of her writers. I do not refer to the gloomy, powerful
realism of the stories of hopeless misery. There, if one
criticizes, it must be only the advisability of the choice of such
subjects. One does not doubt the truth of the picture. I mean the
needless dinginess of much of Russian fiction, and of many of
these powerful short stories.
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