Some Books of the Week
IF a censor of books should ever be inflicted upon us, one of his first duties should surely be to limit the output of antholo- gies. No book seems easier to make than a readable an- thology : indeed no book is easier to make, or more certain of its public—with the result that we have been suffering from a spate of these omnibus volumes and what not, and still they come. But we demand more of the anthology publisher than that he should merely heap together stories, poems, or essays and charge 8s. 6d. for the manufactured article. We want a complete work of art, that is to say, unity, and how rarely do we get it ! Having come to look on all this trade of book-manufacture with suspicion it is with real relief therefore that we can recommend Mr. Stephen Graham's Great Russian Short Stories (Benn, 8s. 6d.) a volume of particular value not only as giving well-selected examples of admittedly great Russian stories from the late eighteenth century to the present day, but as providing very largely a new field of reading in English, many of the stories being translated here for the first time. A lazy anthologist would have given lis more of Tolstoy, Tchekov, or Dostoievsky. Mr. Graham has rightly chosen to exclude some of the best known stories of these giants in favour of some rather doubtfully great efforts by living authors. The story," Things," by Valen- tine Kataev, seems to us hardly worthy of inclusion, even so. But it would have been a pity to have missed either Michael Zoschenko's delicious fragment, " The Old Rat," or Pantelimon Romanov's clever, but dreary, study of post-Revolution Russian youth, "Without Cherry Blossom." And the only point upon which we can heartily disagree with Mr. Graham is in his estimate of Alexander Kuprin, whom he compares favourably with Tchekov. Judging by Kuprin's stories reproduced here we should say that Tchekov has been
insulted. *
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