A Scottish-Canadian Blethering On About Books

Edited and translated by Thomas Seltzer. Author list (cribbed from Goodreads): Alexander Pushkin; Fyodor Sologub; Ignaty Potapenko; Sergey Semyonov; Maxim Gorky; Leonid Andreyev; Mikhail Artsybashev; Aleksandr Kuprin; Nikolai Gogol; Ivan Turgenev; Fyodor Dostoyevsky; Leo Tolstoy; M.E. Saltykov-Shchedrin; Vladimir G Korlenko; Vsevolod Garshin; Anton Chekhov.  This corresponds with the e-version I read; later editions may have additional stories. 

This is a compilation of translations of Russian short stories, ending in the early part of the twentieth century (it was first published in 1917, an interesting cut-off date). There is an introductory essay by the compiler/translator, Thomas Seltzer, that rewards re-reading after the stories, bearing in mind, of course, Seltzer's own ideological predilections (he refers to the Russian Revolution as the start of true democracy in Russia and "the beginning, perhaps, of a radical transformation the world over."

Although of course there are individual exceptions, the stories in this volume left a general impression of earnestness, particularly political, class-based earnestness, observational rather than imaginative writing, and in response to censorship, a tendency towards (in Seltzer's words) "an editorial or essay done into fiction." I don't intend to slander Chekov, Pushkin or Tolstoy with that characterization, but there are certainly examples of it present in this collection.

The whole exercise of reading it, too, left me with an emotional impression of deep sadness. The stereotype, it appears, is based in fact.