Boris Pilniak (or in more correct transliteration, Pil'nyak) is the pseudonym of Boris Andreyevich Wogau. He is not of pure Russian blood, but a descendant of German colonists; a fact which incidently proves the force of assimilation inherent in the Russian milieu and the capacity to be assimilated, so typical of Germans. For it is difficult to deny Pilniak the appellation of a typical Russian.

Pilniak is about thirty-five years of age. His short stories began to appear in periodicals before the War, and his first book appeared in 1918. It contained four stories, two of which are included in the present volume (Death and Over the Ravine). A second volume appeared in 1920 (including the Crossways, The Bielokonsky Estate, The Snow Wind, A Year of Their Lives, and A Thousand Years). These volumes attracted comparatively little attention, though considering the great scarcity of fiction in those years they were certainly notable events. But Ivan-da-Marya and The Bare Year, published in 1922, produced a regular boom, and Pilniak jumped into the limelight of all-Russian celebrity. The cause of the success of these volumes, or rather the attention attracted by them, lay in their subject- matter: Pilniak was the first novelist to approach the subject of "Soviet Byt," to attempt to utilise the everyday life and routine of Soviet officialdom, and to paint the new forms Russian life had taken since the Revolution. Since 1922 editions and reprints of Pilniak's stories have been numerous, and as he follows the rather regrettable usage of making up every new book of his unpublished stories with reprints of earlier work the bibliography of his works is rather complicated and entangled, besides being entirely uninteresting to the English reader.

The most interesting portion of Pilniak's works are no doubt his longer stories of "Soviet life" written since 1921. Unfortunately they are practically untranslatable. His proceedings, imitated from Bely and Remizov, would seem incongruous to the English reader, and the translation would be laid aside in despair or in disgust, in spite of all its burning interest of actuality. None of the stories included in this volume belong to this last manner of Pilniak's, but in order to give a certain idea of what it is like I will attempt a specimen-translation of the beginning of his story The Third Metropolis (dated May-June 1922), reproducing all his typographical mannerisms, which are in their turn reproduced rather unintelligently, from his great masters, Remizov and Bely. The story, by the way, is dedicated "To A. M. Remizov, the Master in whose Workshop I was an apprentice."