Russian Literature from Pushkin to the Present Day. By Richard
Hare. (Methuen. 4s. 6d.) MAURICE BARING claimed that hardly any literature equals the Russian in reproducing the spirited struggles of men, thus making Russian literature the surest road to understanding the Russian people. Yet out of this vast territory perhaps only the work of a dozen writers can be described as familiar to English readers. Now, however,'Mr. Hare has set out, in a new volume of the Home Study Book series, to reveal what is also worth reading, and why, among the dozens of less familiar novelists, poets and playwrights of the last 150 years. All the familiar figures from Gogol to Gorky are here, while the less familiar are described by epithets ranging from " unique " and " unforgettable " to " sinister " and " spineless," which makes one regret that mos,t of them are still shrouded behind the Russian language. Some are more easily available, of course, and a short bibliography of these would have been valuable. Mr. Hare's method is straightforward, as matter-of-fact as an efficient guide- book should be, and the volume ends with a well-balanced survey of developments since the first All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934, and of the present state of Soviet imaginative literature, which, as Mr. Hare points out, is often misunderstood by outside critics who fail to see that it is the work of an almost self-sufficient society without contact with the rest of the world.
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