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p If not ton, then almost ton years have passed  [88•*  since the works of Karoniii began to appear in our best jouniaJs. His murie is well known to the reading public. But little is said of him both among the public, and in literature. He is read, but seldom reread. This is a bad sign.

p It shows thai Mr. Karonin has for some reason or other been unable to touch his readers to the quick.

p But it must be noted that among the relatively small public that does not forget his stories immediately after reading (hem there exist the most varying views of his talent. Some regard him as gifted, even exceptionally gifted. Others maintain I hat lie has only a feeble semblance of talent, the further development of which, in their opinion, is hindered by what they calJ the author’s false, artificial manner. This is a good sign. It suggests that Mr. Karonin possesses at least a certain originality. People who lack originality tend to please everyone without distinction or to be condemned by everyone indiscriminately. Lei us now see whether this sign is not deceiving us and whelher Mr. Karoniii can in fact be called an original writer.

p Mr. Karonin belongs to the Naroduik camp in our literature. His sketches and stories are devoted primarily to peasant life. He regards this life from the Naroduik viewpoint and when an opportunity offers is ready to admire the “harmony” of the peasant world outlook. He does in fact admire it in certain of his works. But these works stand apart.

p In the vast majority of cases Mr. Karonin describes something that is the complete opposite of the “harmony” of I he aforementioned world outlook, namely, the muddle, the chaos, which are being brought into it by the new conditions of village life. "The air, the sky and the earth in the village had remained the same as they were hundreds of years ago.” he says in his story Village Nerves. "In just the same way grass grew in I he street, wormwood in the kitchen gardens, and in the fields the crops which the village produced by the sweat of its brow. Time had. changed 89 nothing in the landscape that had surrounded the village since time immemorial. Everything was just as it used lo be. Only the people appeared to be different: their attitudes to one another and to their surroundings—the air. the sun, the earth—had changed. Not a month went by, but the inhabitants were upset by some change or some event which completely contradicted e\erylliing that the old men in the village remembered."

p “That’s never happened before”, "the old "uus don’t remember the likes of thai!”, they said almost every month about some, such happening. And how could they remember "something thai really had never happened before"? This appearance in the village of "something lhat had never happened before" is reflected perfectly in Mr. Karonin’s sketches and stories. They are a true chronicle of the historical process of the transformation of the Russian peasantry. The tremendous significance of this process is self-evident. On it depends the future course of our social development, because under its influence all the foundations of our social edifice, the whole structure of our social organism are changing.

p Mr. Karonin’s originality lies in the fact that, in spile of all his Narodnik sympathies and prejudices, he has taken upon himself the portrayal of precisely those aspects of our people’s life from the collision with which all the Narodniks’ “ideals” will be and already are being shattered. He must have possessed a strongly developed artistic instinct, must have heeded very carefully the requirements of artistic truth, in order lo refute as a fiction writer, without being worried by his own inconsistency, everything that he would probably have defended passionately as a publicist. Had Mr. Karonin cared less about artistic truth, he would have long since been able to win very cheap, of course, but also very numerous laurels, by devoting himself to a bitter-sweet portrayal of the age-old virtues of commune peasants. The merit of his works would have lost a great deal from this, but for a while his literary reputation would have benefited considerably.

_p Narodnik readers would have turned a well-disposed eye upon him. People would have started to lalk about him. to analyse him in the press, to quote him__ As we know, the Narodnik reader does not like "art for art’s sake”. He looks upon literature, as he does upon life, from the viewpoint of the famous “foundations”. which he regards as indestructible and invincible. In taking up a book, he demands above all that il should show him the ceremonial march of the “foundations”. If he does not find what he is seeking in it, he puts it aside. Newspaper reports, statistical data, economists’ arguments and historians" explanations are accepted by him only in so far as they confirm his beloved doctrine. Nowhere, with the exception of Germany, is Marx read more than in Russia. Yet it is in Russia thai he is understood least of all.

p Why is this so?

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p Because we appreciate Marx too only from the viewpoint of the ”•foundations”, and since appreciating him from this viewpoint •means seeing nothing in him at all, the result is obvious. The Narodnik reader’s attitude to fiction, at least fiction that portrays the people’s life, is exactly the same. He is firmly convinced that such fiction should provide him with yet another opportunity of thanking history for the blessed uniqueness of the Russian people.

p Works which do not justify such confidence are ignored by him, however. This explains to a considerable extent our Narodniks’ indifference to Mr. Karonin’s works. True, the writings of other Narodnik fiction writers do not always come up to the aforementioned standard either.

p They too contain a fairly vivid picture of the collapse of the “foundations”. But it is entirely a question of degree. There can be no doubt that no one has gone further in this respect, no one •has returned to this subject so persistently and so often as Mr. Karonin. And this counts for a great deal in the eyes of the democratic “intelligentsia” which constitutes the main contingent of readers of Narodnik fiction.

p We remember how angry the Narodniks were with Gl. Uspensky in the second half of the seventies, when his sketches of village life seemed to be going too much against the general Narodnik mood. By that time Gl. I. Uspensky’s literary reputation was fully established, and it was quite impossible to ignore his great talent. But we are nevertheless certain that if the famous "power •of the land"-^^9^^ had not put matters right, Gl. I. Uspensky’s works would not be read now witli anything like the interest with which they are read. Moreover, Uspensky, like most of his fellow writers and thinkers, is as much a publicist as a writer of fiction. He not ’only portrays, he also discourses on what he portrays, and by his publicistic discourses he softens the impression produced by his fictional portrayals.

_p Karonin does not possess this habit. He leaves the discoursing to the readers themselves. In his works the publicist does not hasten to the aid of the fiction writer and add an instructive caption to arouse the spectators’ interest in a picture the content of which leaves them indifferent.

p Karon in could be saved only by great talent.

p Great talent compels people to heed it even in cases when it •goes against all the public’s established habits and most cherished views. But Mr. Karonin does not possess such talent. The extent of his talent is small. Ft would probably not be sufficient for a large, complete work. Mr. Karonin will not go further than the short novel, and he cannot always manage even that, particularly when ho gives vent in it to his Narodnik sympathies, as in the short novel Mif World. His field is short sketches and stories, moreover 91 those that deal with the life of the people. Works that do not deal with this life, such as. for example, Bebe, Gryazev and Babochkin, are not bad. and some of them are even positively good, but that is all. They contain nothing original. Whereas most of his stories that deal with the life of the people are marked, as we have already said, by originality. In general Mr. Karonin possesses everything in this field that is necessary to occupy a most distinguished place in modern Russian belles lettres. The serious critic will always render Mr. Karonin his due: he is intelligent and observant, with a healthy, weighty sense of humour, a sincere warmth for the world he portrays, and a remarkable ability for portraying its most salient aspects. True, we have sometimes heard Mr. Karonin accused of making portrayals that are quite untrue to reality. He was attacked a great deal in particular for his short novel From the Bottom Upwards.

p Many readers are to this day most seriously convinced that such workers as Fomich and Mikhailo Lunin (characters in the short novel mentioned above) are nothing but the product of the author’s unbridled and tendentious imagination. The existence of such workers in our present-day real life seems completely impossible to such readers. Listening to their attacks, anyone unfamiliar with the life of our factory workers in large urban centres might perhaps think that in the person of Mr. Karonin Narodnik fiction is entering a new, so to say Romantic, period of its development and that the author in question turns Russian workers into Parisian ouvriers with the same lack of ceremony with which Marlinsky once turned our officers into characters from melodrama. But if you were to ask on what these accusations are based, you would not receive anything like a satisfactory reply. It would probably transpire then that the accusers know nothing whatever about the milieu which is discussed in the short novel From the Bottom Upwards, and for this reason alone cannot be competent critics of it. "That’s never happened before!”, "the old ’uns don’t remember the likes of that"—this is basically what all the arguments of the accusers amount to. These good people do not even suspect that the "old ’uns" whom they regard as so authoritative "don’t remember" a great deal more besides, because the bandage of preconceived notions covering their eyes prevented them from seeing the reality around them.

p Kindly note that we have no intention whatsoever of presenting Mr. Karonin’s sketches and stories as model literary works. They are far from that. as. incidentally, are the works of all our Narodnik fiction writers. In all the works of this trend aesthetic criticism can point to numerous shortcomings.

_p They are all somewhat awkward, somewhat untidy, somewhat dishevelled and unkempt. These general shortcomings are by no means absent in Mr. Karonin’s stories too.

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p Take the language, for example.

p In the words of our author, one of the ’characters (Komich) sometimes used such "foul language" in conversation that lie was even ashamed of himself afterwards. We occasionally find the same "foul language" in Mr. Karonin, arid whereas he himself is hut little put out by such occasions, they are nevertheless capable of embarrassing the nice lady reader. It must be admitted that Mr. Karonin’s language is very much that of a raznochinets And yet just see how expressive it is in places, this somewhat coarse raznochinetsian language, in which imagery is combined with a perfectly unconstrained laconic brevity. At times a single expression, a single verb, for example, "life crawled on" or ”he beat himself against it very successfully”, takes the place of a whole description. Is this not a merit? And in view of this merit should one not forget about the "foul language"?

Finally, let us repeat that the main merit of Mr. Karonin’s sketches and stories lies in the fact that they re flee I the most important of our modern social processes: the collapse of the old village system, the disappearance of peasant ingenuousness, the emergence of the people from the childhood of its development, the appearance in it of new feelings, new views on things and new intellectual requirements. A common purveyor of articles of liction would never have chanced upon such a profound and noble theme.