Vanished Writer, Vanished Book

Vanished Writer, Vanished Book

…I cannot write otherwise than I do write. I am unable to, and I will not, even though I should want to violate myself; there is a literary law which makes it impossible to violate a literary talent—even with your own brain….

—Boris Pilnyak, September 28, 1923

Forty years ago Boris Pilnyak was recognized throughout Europe as “one
of the giants of the modern novel,” in the words of the dust jacket on his now-forgotten The Volga Falls to the Caspian Sea. At this point in time the phrase seems more a publisher’s blurb than a just appraisal. I quote it that we may measure the distance traveled by Pilnyak between 1931, when Farrar & Rinehart published this work in Charles Malamuth’s translation (“His books sell in the millions, the present literary generation considers him its master”) , and 1938, when he was apparently shot in Moscow’s Butyrskaya prison as “a Japanese spy.” And in 1970, he remains—unlike his posthumously rehabilitated contemporary, Isaac Babel—practically an unperson, an unwriter in the land where he was once a literary star….

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