When the Revolution came and brought Russia that general impoverishment and reversion to savagery and primitive manners which is still the dominant feature of life in the U.S.S.R., literature was at first faced with a severe crisis. The book market was ruined. In the years 1918-1921 the publication of a book became a most difficult and hazardous undertaking. During these years the novel entirely disappeared from the market. For three years at least the Russian novel was dead. When it emerged again in 1922 it emerged very different from what it had been in 1917. As I have said, the surface "literature" of pre-Revolutionary date was swept away altogether. The new Realism of Remizov and Bely was triumphant all along the line. The works of both these writers were among the first books to be reprinted on the revival of the book-trade. And it soon became apparent that practically all the young generation belonged to their progeny. The first of these younger men to draw on himself the attention of critics and readers was Pilniak, the author of the present volume, on whom I shall dwell anon in greater detail.
In Petersburg there appeared a whole group of young novelists who formed a sort of professional and amicable confraternity and called themselves the "Serapion Brothers." They were all influenced by Remizov; they were taught (in the very precise sense of the word-- they had regular classes) by Zamyatin; and explained the general principles of Art by the gifted and light-minded young "formalist" critic, Victor Shklovsky. Other writers emerged in all ends of Russia, all of them more or less obssessed by the dazzling models of Bely and Remizov.
All the writers of this new school have many features in common. They are all of them more interested in Manner than in Matter. They work at their style assiduously and fastidiously. They use an indirect method of narrating by aid of symbolic detail and suggestive metaphor. This makes their stories obscure and not easy to grasp at first reading. Their language is elaborate; it is as full as possible of unusual provincial words, or permeated with slang. It is coarse and crude and many a page of their writings would not have been tolerated by the editor of a pre-Revolution Russian magazine, not to speak of an English publisher. They choose their subjects from the Revolution and the Civil War. They are all fascinated by the "elemental" greatness of the events, and are in a way the bards of the Revolution. 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.