Alexandre I. Kuprin was born in 1870; 1909 marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of his literary activity. He attained his fame only upon the publication of his amazing, epical novel, The Duel—which, just like Yama, is an arraignment; an arraignment of militaristic corruption. Russian criticism has styled him the poet of life. If Chekhov was the wunderkind of Russian letters, Kuprin is its enfant terrible. His range of subjects is enormous; his power of observation and his versatility extraordinary. “Gambrinus” alone would justify his place among the literary giants of Europe. Some of his picaresques, “The Insult,” “Horse-Thieves,” and “Off the Street”—the last in the form of a monologue—are sheer tours de force. Olessiya is possessed of a weird, unearthly beauty; The Shulamite is a prose-poem of antiquity. He deals with the life of the muzhik in “Backwoods” and “The Swamp”; of the Jews, in “The Jewess” and “The Coward”; of the soldiers, in “The Cadets,” “The Interrogation,” “The Night Watch,” “Delirium”; of the actors, in “How I Was an Actor” and “In Retirement.” We have circus life in “ ‘Allez!’,” “In the Circus,” “Lolly,” “The Clown”—the last a one-act playlet; factory life, in Moloch; provincial life, in “Small Fry”; bohemian life, in “Captain Ribnicov” and “The River of Life”—which no one but Kuprin could have written. There are animal stories and flower stories; stories for children—and for neuropaths; one story is dedicated to a jockey; another to a circus clown; a third, if I remember rightly, to a racehorse … Yama created an enormous sensation upon the publication of the first part in volume three of the Sbornik Zemliya—The Earth Anthology—in 1909; the second part appeared in volume fifteen, in 1914; the third, in volume sixteen, in 1915. Both the original parts and the last revised edition have been followed in this translation.
The greater part of the stories listed above are available in translations, under various titles; the list, of course, is merely a handful from the vast bulk of the fecund Kuprin’s writings, nor is any group of titles exhaustive of its kind. Several collections of his latest stories have been published recently, but all outside Russia.
It must not be thought, despite its locale, that Kuprin’s Yama is a picture of Russian prostitution solely; it is intrinsically universal. All that is necessary is to change the kopecks into cents, pennies, sous or pfennings; compute the versts into miles or metres; Jennka may be Eugenie or Jeannette; and for Yama, simply read Whitechapel, Montmartre, or the Barbary Coast. That is why Yama is a “tremendous, staggering, and truthful book—a terrific book.” It has been called notorious, lurid—even oleographic. So are, perhaps, the picaresques of Murillo, the pictorial satires of Hogarth, the bizarreries of Goya …
The best introduction to Yama, however, can be given in Kuprin’s own words, as uttered by the reporter Platonov. “They do write,” he says, “… but it is all either a lie, or theatrical effects for children of tender years, or else a cunning symbolism, comprehensible only to the sages of the future. But the life itself no one as yet has touched …
“Yet the material here is in reality tremendous, downright crushing, terrible … And not at all terrible are the loud phrases about the traffic in women’s flesh, about the white slaves, about prostitution being a corroding fester of large cities, and so on, and so on … an old hurdy-gurdy of which all have tired! No, horrible are the everyday, accustomed trifles; these businesslike, daily, commercial reckonings; this thousand-year-old science of amatory practice; this prosaic usage, determined by the ages. In these unnoticeable nothings are completely dissolved such feelings as resentment, humiliation, shame. There remains a dry profession, a contract, an agreement, a well-nigh honest petty trade, no better, no worse than, say, the trade in groceries. Do you understand, gentlemen, that all the horror is in just this—that there is no horror! Bourgeois work days—and that is all …
“More awful than all awful words, a hundredfold more awful—is some such little prosaic stroke or other as will suddenly knock you all in a heap, like a blow on the forehead …”
It is in such little prosaic strokes; everyday, accustomed, characteristic trifles; minute particles of life, that Kuprin excels. The detailism which crowds his pages is like the stippling of Whistler; or the enumerations of the Bible; or the chiselling of Rodin, that endows the back of the Thinker with meaning.
“We all pass by these characteristic trifles indifferently, like the blind, as though not seeing them scattered about under our feet. But an artist will come, and he will look over them carefully, and he will pick them up. And suddenly he will so skillfully turn in the sun a minute particle of life, that we shall all cry out: ‘Oh, my God! But I myself—myself!—have seen this with my own eyes. Only it simply did not enter my head to turn my close attention upon it.’ But our Russian artists of the word—the most conscientious and sincere artists in the whole world—for some reason have up to this time passed over prostitution and the brothel. Why? Really, it is difficult for me to answer that. Perhaps because of squeamishness, perhaps out of pusillanimity, out of fear of being signalized as a pornographic writer; finally from the apprehension that our gossiping criticism will identify the artistic work of the writer with his personal life and will start rummaging in his dirty linen. Or perhaps they can find neither the time, nor the self-denial, nor the self-possession to plunge in head first into this life and to watch it right up close, without prejudice, without sonorous phrases, without a sheepish pity, in all its monstrous simplicity and everyday activity … That material … is truly unencompassable in its significance and weightiness … The words of
