25 Stories from the Soviet Republics

On page 71 there is a headnote eight lines long. It gives an Armenian writer's dates - 1899 to 1937 - and says he left "two novels that he had no chance to finish". It does not say why a man of thirty-eight had no chance to finish them. It prints the year and moves on to the story.

That story is Cyclamens, the best thing in the book, and it is dedicated to the memory of Arphenik Charents.

Twenty authors, twenty-five stories, eleven of the sixteen union republics. A Chukchi hunter's son runs naked into the cold to test the weather; a Tajik remembers a Bukharan madrasah in 1891; an Estonian realist who died in 1933 gets sixty-two pages. Nothing has been levelled to match. Sholokhov's The Fate of a Man opens the collection.

This is the only volume in the fiction strand whose apparatus is good: every author gets a headnote with nationality and dates, and every story credits its translator. That is exactly what makes its silences legible. Georgia is absent, though two slots go to Abkhazian writers inside it. There is no Jewish writer and nothing from the Yiddish, in a book assembled a few years after that literature was destroyed.

Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, in the Library of Soviet Literature, undated. Ten translators, S. Apresyan carrying a third of the book alone. Reproduced complete.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.