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The Kiss and Other Stories, translated by Mr. R.E.C. Long and published by Duckworth (6s.). A similar volume,
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The Black Monk (same translator and publisher), was issued some years ago. Tchehkoff lived and made a tremendous name in Russia, and died, and England recked not. He has been translated into French, and I believe that there exists a complete edition of his works in German; but these two volumes are all that we have in English. The thanks of the lettered are due to Mr. Long and to his publisher. Tchehkoff's stories are really remarkable. If any one of authority stated that they rank him with the fixed stars of Russian fiction--Dostoievsky, Tourgeniev, Gogol, and Tolstoy--I should not be ready to contradict. To read them, after even the finest stories of de Maupassant or Murray Gilchrist, is like having a bath after a ball. Their effect is extraordinarily one of ingenuousness. Of course they are not in the least ingenuous, as a fact, but self-conscious and elaborate to the highest degree. The progress of every art is an apparent progress from conventionality to realism. The basis of convention remains, but as the art develops it finds more and more subtle methods fitting life to the convention or the convention to life--whichever you please. Tchehkoff's tales mark a definite new conquest in this long struggle. As you read him you fancy that he must always have been saying to himself:
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Life is good enough for me. I won't alter it. I will set it down as it is.
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The Kiss and
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The Black Monk. They will delight every person of fine taste, but to the artist they are a profound lesson. We have no writer, and we have never had one, nor has France, who could mould the material of life, without distorting it, into such complex forms to such an end of beauty. Read these books, and you will genuinely know something about Russia; you will be drenched in the vast melancholy, savage and wistful, of Russian life; and you will have seen beauty. No tale in
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The Kiss is quite as marvellous as either the first or the last tale in
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The Black Monk,