Teapots and Samovars
WHEN the Russian fever was at its height in the 1920s and 1930s almost any translation from the Russian was liable to be seized upon as a revelation of a startlingly new and significant way of looking at life. As Virginia Woolf pointed out, however—after first paying handsome tribute to the Russian influence—in the long IUD it is the tea-pot, not the samovar that must rule in English fiction." There has in fact been a gradual reaction against the methods of the Russians : atmosphere, suggestion, the" straggle of dots, " have to a large extent given way to plot, characterisation, social satire and irony—the traditional ingredients of the English novel. And in this mood of reaction we may sometimes find our- selves wondering whether, at any rate as far as the minor writers were concerned, much that appeared wonderful and profound, was not after all naïve, banal, woolly—or simply the result of bad translation.
The last of these misgivings does not apply to this edition of The Impenitent Midge by Vladimir Krymov, but it will have to contend with our scepticism in other respects. The book consists simply of disconnected "jottings." " And so on, and so forth," Krymov says in one of them. "That is how one's thoughts run on, disconnectedly, pointlessly, and if one were to jot it all down it would amount to a volume a day."
The Impenitent Midge however is not entirely trivial and incon- sequential. • In the first place Krymov is disarmingly unpretentious in his aims. In his foreword he describes how one day when a midge settled on the book he was reading it occurred to him that just as the insect must have been puzzled by the black marks on the page, so " traversing the pages "of his own life, he has failed" to grasp any divine purpose "in his universe, and" I have come to the conclusion that I myself am very little removed from that midge." He is himself, in fact, " the impenitent midge," and this impeni- tence, combined with a good-humoured and humane modesty, does give to the book as a whole a certain unity of tone, and a kind of whimsical perkiness—as for example in the section entitled " How Tolstoy Showed Me the Door " which describes how as a young man of eighteen Krymov forced himself into Tolstoy's presence brandishing the manuscript of a short story and assuring Tolstoy that he " simply must " share his" thoughts and conclusions " with him.
The reminiscences of writers, particularly of Gorky, Kuprin, H. G. Wells, and Alexey Tolstoy, are particularly interesting, as are the jottings on natural history and notably the stories about the entomologist N. I. Kardakov. Krymov has also travelled widely— several of his earlier books consisted of travel notes—and he has many surprising and entertaining things to say on a wide variety of subjects from the Indian rope trick to fishing with cormorants in Japan, and the most fascinating paragraph in the book is headed 6` Sperm Whales and Perfumery."
Moreover it still remains to be said that there is something charac- teristically Russian about The Impenitent Midge ; a kind of innocence and openness to experience, a capacity that Krymov shares with the greater Russian writers to throw unexpected light on little-known facets of human behaviour. These are qualities that Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Katherine Mansfield and D. H. Lawrence (in spite of his hatred of" the Russian soul ") respected, and which con- temporary English writers in their return to an older English tradition may be in danger of forgetting.
GILBERT .PRELPS
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