Pilniak is without a doubt a writer of considerable ability, but he is essentially unoriginal and derivative. Even in his famous novels of "Soviet life," it is only the subject matter he has found out for himself--the methods of treating it are other peoples'. But this imitativeness makes Pilniak a writer of peculiar interest: he is a sort of epitome of modern Russian fiction, a living literary history, and this representative quality of his is perhaps the chief claim on our attention that can be advanced on behalf of the stories included in this book. Almost every one of them can be traced back to some Russian or foreign writer. Each of them belongs to and is eminently typical of some accepted literary genre in vogue between 1910 and 1920. The _Snow_ and _The Forest Manor_ belong to the ordinary psychological problem-story acted among "intellectuals"; they have for their ancestors Chekhov, Zenaide Hippius, and the Polish novelists. _Always on Detachment_, belongs to the progeny of A. N. Tolstoy, with the inevitable blackguardly seduction of a more or less pure girl or woman at the end. _The Snow Wind_ and _Over the Ravine_ are animal stories, for which, I believe, Jack London is mainly responsible. In _A Year of Their Lives_ the same "animal" method is transfered to the treatment of primitive human life, and the shadow of Knut Hamsun is plainly discernible in the background. _Death_, _The Heirs_, and _The Belokonsky Estate_ are first class exercises in the manner of Bunin, and only _A Thousand Years_ and _The Crossways_ herald in, to a certain extent, Pilniak's own manner of invention. From the point of view of "ideas" _The Crossways_ is the most interesting in the book, for it gives expression to that which is certainly the root of all Pilniak's conception of the Revolution. It is--to use two terms which have been applied to Russia by two very different schools of thought but equally opposed to Europe--a "Scythian" or an "Eurasian" conception. To Pilniak the Revolution is essentially the "Revolt" of peasant and rural Russia against the alien network of European civilisation, the Revolt of the "crossways" against the highroad and the railroad, of the village against the town. A conception, you will perceive, which is opposed to that of Lenin and the orthodox Communists, and which explains why official Bolshevism is not over-enthusiastic about Pilniak. The _Crossways_ is a good piece of work (it can hardly be called a story) and it just gives a glimpse of that ambitious vastness of scale on which Pilniak was soon to plan his bigger Soviet stories.