“…You have to believe in bays and chestnuts. And I won’t say a bad word against black horses, either. Only they’re unnecessarily hotheaded and quickly work up a lather. This is partly true, too, of dark bays and liver-chestnuts….” How wonderful when a great writer has a passion for something. He writes superbly of everything, but there are some things on earth he writes especially well about. Sight and smell, always highly attuned in a writer, then reach a state of extreme feeling, and the usual level of keenness of observation at once soars, since here constant creative sharp-sightedness is ennobled by expert experience. Kuprin1 himself notes that, when a Russian talks of his habitual and favorite pursuit, we’re astounded by the precision and purity of his language, by the compact freedom of his speech and the easy obedience of the necessary words. But when not just an ordinary Russian, but a Russian writer, who has received a generous gift from God, speaks about what he knows and loves, about a passion endlessly tender and strange, then you can imagine the precision and purity of his expression, how his words move us. This is how Kuprin writes of a horse’s charm, of its hot, strong breath and of its marvelous smell, and, reading the first short story in this collection, you feel the whole time the warm, silky skin of the horse beneath its lips, the tender hollow above the nostril, not to be compared to anything else. What, for example, isn’t this worth: “The failure of a race can depend on many more reasons: the horse was unwell, but this wasn’t seen to in time; it woke up in a bad mood, perhaps it had had a bad dream.” And our imagination is immediately ignited at the mention of the dream the horse might have had, and you can’t help feeling that Kuprin knows even this—a horse’s dream—and that this knowledge for him is as easy and natural as the knowledge of the colors of horses’ coats. But this longing for an outlet…What can the writer do with—and how can he explain to himself—this agitation, this passion….For in this case the man has been created as if solely to write books, and write them beautifully, but “all his life he has been dreaming of training thoroughbred racehorses.” Rousseau fancied himself a botanist (he was a dreadful botanist, by the way, but he wrote about plants with great exaltation); it’s very possible that, had Kuprin given up writing books, he would have made a wonderful horse trainer, but the loss to Russian literature would have been huge.
In this small collection there are stories not only about horses, but also about dogs, the circus, a magic violin, a flying carpet. And they are all, of course, very Kuprinesque. The author’s talent bursts forth from every, even a careless, sentence; yet for some reason some pages seem only quick jottings, simply material—rich and vivid material—for more harmonious and stricter works.
But reproach would be a sin; after all, this is very good, very good.
* V. Sirin, “Kuprin. ‘Elan’ (rasskazy). ‘Russkaya Biblioteka.’ Belgrade,” Rul’, Oct. 23, 1929, 5.