A Slav Soul and Other Stories

by Aleksandr Kuprin

The tales selected here are taken from various volumes, and two of them, "The Elephant" and "The White Poodle," from a volume specially designed by Kuprin for reading aloud to children. The others are: A Slav Soul; The Song and The Dance; Easter Day; The Idiot; The Picture; Hamlet; Mechanical Justice; The Last Word; Dogs' Happiness; A Clump of Lilacs; Anathema; Tempting Providence; Cain. Aleksandr Ivanovich Kuprin (1870-1938) was Russian novelist and short-story writer. He was an army officer for several years before he resigned to pursue a writing career, and was a friend of Maxim Gorky. He won fame with The Duel (1905), a novel of protest against the Russian military system. In 1909, Yama: The Pit, his novel dealing with prostitution in Odessa, created a sensation. Kuprin left Russia after the revolution but returned in 1937. Some of his best short stories of action and adventure appear in The Garnet Bracelet, originally published in 1917.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Russia

248 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1916

About the author

Aleksandr Kuprin (Russian: Александр Иванович Куприн; 7 September 1870 in the village of Narovchat in the Penza Oblast - August 25, 1938 in Leningrad) was a Russian writer, pilot, explorer and adventurer who is perhaps best known for his story The Duel (1905). Other well-known works include Moloch (1896), Olesya (1898), Junior Captain Rybnikov (1906), Emerald (1907), and The Garnet Bracelet (1911) (which was made into a 1965 movie). Vladimir Nabokov styled him the Russian Kipling for his stories about pathetic adventure-seekers, who are often "neurotic and vulnerable."

Kuprin was a son of Ivan Ivanovich Kuprin, a minor government official who died of cholera during 1871 at the age of thirty-seven years. His mother, Liubov' Alekseevna Kuprina, Tatar princess (of the Kulunchakovs), like many other nobles in Russia, had lost most of her wealth during the 19th century. Kuprin attended the Razumovsky boarding school during 1876, and during 1880 finished his education in the Second Moscow Military High School (Cadet Corps) and Alexander Military School, spending a total of ten years in these elite military institutions. His first short story, The Last Debut, was published during 1889 in a satirical periodical. "In February 1902, Kuprin and Maria Karlovna Davydova were married, their daughter Lidia born in 1903." Kuprin's mother died during 1910.

Kuprin ended military service during 1894, after which he tried many types of job, including provincial journalism, dental care, land surveying, acting, circus performer, church singer, doctor, hunter, fisher, etc. Reportedly, "all of these were subsequently reflected in his fiction." His first essays were published in Kiev in two collections. Reportedly, "although he lived in an age when writers were carried away by literary experiments, Kuprin did not seek innovation and wrote only about the things he himself had experienced and his heroes are the next generation after Chekhov's pessimists."

Although the 1896 short story Moloch first made his name known as a writer, it was his novel The Duel (1905) which made him famous. "Kuprin was highly praised by fellow writers including Anton Chekhov, Maxim Gorky, Leonid Andreyev, Nobel Prize-winning Ivan Bunin" and Leo Tolstoy who acclaimed him a true successor to Chekhov. After publication of The Duel he paid less and less interest to fancy literature and began to spend time in pubs and brothels. His sensationalist novel about the lurid life of prostitutes, The Pit (1915), was accused by Russian critics of excessive Naturalism.

Although not a conservative, he did not agree with Bolshevism. While working for a brief time with Maxim Gorky at the World Literature publishing company, he criticized the Soviet regime. During spring 1919, from Gatchina near Petrograd, Kuprin left the country for France. He lived in Paris for most of the next 17 years, succumbing to alcoholism. He wrote about this in much of his work. He eventually returned to Moscow on May 31, 1937, just a year before his death, at the height of the Great Purge. His return earned publication of his works within the Soviet Union.

Kuprin died during the spring of 1938 in Leningrad and is interred near his fellow writers at the Literaturskiye Mostki in the Volkovo Cemetery (Volkovskoye Memorial Cemetery) in Leningrad. A minor planet 3618 Kuprin, discovered by Soviet astronomer Nikolai Stepanovich Chernykh in 1979 is named after him.

Reportedly, "even today, Alexander Kuprin remains one of the widest read classics in Russian literature", with many films based on his works, "which are also read over the radio", partly due to "his vivid stories of the lives of ordinary people and unhappy love, his descriptions of the military and brothels, making him a writer for all times and places."

Reviews

[Rex · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is another wonderful compendium of short stories by Aleksandr Ivanovich Kuprin, which I enjoyed very much. Yet, I would rank his The River of Life, and Other Stories ahead of this. If one likes Chekhov, their flair for Kuprin should be a sequitur, if I may add that. :-)

There are 15 short-stories in this collection:

1. A Slav Soul
2. The Song and the Dance
3. Easter Day
4. The Idiot
5. The Picture
6. Hamlet
7. Mechanical Justice
8. The Last Word
9. The White Poodle
10. The Elephant
11. Dog's Happiness
12. A Clump of Lilacs
13. Anathema
14. Tempting Providence
15. Cain

It is truly a daunting task to select the top 3 from this collection but, here is mine:

14. Tempting Providence, which has shades of existential thought of the absurd, with its own philosophic thoughts and dlalectical discourse with self.

15. Cain, which pretty much reminded me of Kuprin’s contemporary Nemirovich-Danchenko’s short-story Mahmoud’s Family from his Peasant Tales of Russia

6. Hamlet.

But, how can one ignore the childlike wonder behind these short-stories, which will be a wonderful set of stories to narrate or read out to the children?

9. The White Poodle
10. The Elephant
11. Dog's happiness

True to his wont and shtick, Kuprin has his distinct slant of coarse satire with sentimentalism, smeared across several of the stories in this short-story collection. He takes on the satirical whiplash against the well-to-do bourgeouis in The White Poodle, for example. He takes on a conscientious objection to the Orthodox Church in anathematizing the anathema against Leo Tolstoy in the short-story Anathema.

His childlike sense of humor, is as usual, traded against individuals, classes, groups, institutions and even the Church. In the Mechical Justice, he satirizes the meritocratic Professor of the academe.

As I may have stated in my earlier review of Kuprin’s,what this sensitive soul of a writer does, is to see through the eyes of his very characters. Naturally, his flair and storge for animals – especially dogs – comes out fully in The White Poodle and Dog’s Happiness.

To pay a tribute to Kuprin on this short-story collection, will be to paraphrase his own, in a slightly different way: We can look at the characters and scenes of his stories in this short-story collection, with a microscope, while they in turn can look at us with a telescope, especially when we are approaching this short-story collection after a century since it was originally written.

[Godly Gadfly · Rating 2 out of 5]

A Chekhov contemporary and peer (2.5 stars)

When it comes to Russian short story writers, few are more well known than the great Anton Chekhov (1860-1904). His contemporary Aleksandr I. Kuprin (1870-1938) is best known for his novels "The Duel" (1905) and "Yama The Pit" (1915), but he also wrote many short stories that have been compared favourably with Chekhov's work.

Chekhov's short stories are notable for their focus on character and mood rather than plot, and he had a great ability to explore human nature and portray ordinary people, especially those experiencing harsh social conditions. Many of Kuprin's best short stories have similar features, with a focus on vivid characterization, detailed descriptions, and realism. Like Chekhov, he was not afraid to criticize the corruption evident in the Russian regime and society of his day. But Kuprin's stories tend to have more narrative and feature a more traditional storytelling approach, and at times his storylines are even filled with passion and adventure. Some are light-hearted, but there's generally a tragic feel about them.

I read about a dozen or so of Kuprin's stories, trying to focus on the ones that are regarded as his best works, but had mixed feelings about them. Of the ones I read (in an eBook entitled "Short Fiction" by Aleksandr Kuprin), these were the standouts for me:

"The Outrage" (1897). A guild of thieves comes to complain to a group of lawyers about how they have been insulted for being named among those who participated in pogroms against the Jews.

"Gambrinus" (1907). Also commonly found under the title "Sasha", this touching story features a beloved Jewish violinist named Sasha who plays regularly in a tavern, accompanied by his dog, until he is conscripted to go to war, and the even worse horror of hatred to Jews from Russians themselves.

"The Elephant" (1907). Suitable for children, this story features a sick six-year-old girl who has lost all interest in life, until her father arranges for a real elephant to be brought to her.

"Cain" (1916). A Russian captain commands his soldiers to murder, but his conscience is troubled after he is visited at night by an old man he has innocently sentenced to be executed the next day.

I can appreciate what Kuprin has accomplished in terms of characterization and setting in some of the other stories I read. But none of them really grabbed me, and for the most part his stories weren't my cup of tea. These included: A Slav Soul, The Last Word, Allez!, Anathema, Black Fog, A Clump of Lilacs, Mechanical Justice, An Evening Guest, Hamlet, The Park of Kings, Tempting Providence, The Inquiry, and Captain Rybnikov (a novella).

Besides Captain Rybnikov (1906), which is about a Japanese spy posing as a Russian officer, I've not read any of Kuprin's novellas, all of which are quite highly regarded, such as Moloch (1896), Olesya (1898), The River of Life (1906), Emerald (1907), and The Garnet Bracelet (1911).

[Ann · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an audiobook from LibriVox.

https://librivox.org/a-slav-soul-and-...