Vsevolod Garshin by Edmund Yarwood (review)

74ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW Such objections aside, however, Quest for Eros is a provocative and impressive study that no student of Browning can afford to overlook. MARY ROSE SULLIVAN University of Colorado at Denver Edmund Yarwood. Vsevolod Garshin. Boston: Twayne, G. K. Hall, 1981. 147p. Twayne World Author Series 627. American teachers and scholars of foreign literatures have long been grateful for the wonderfully concise resource provided by the Twayne's World Authors Series. Where else can one find an author's biography, a critical survey of his or her works, and an annotated bibliography of other relevant criticism in so thin a volume? Each number in this series has quickly become a source of great practical value to us, and Yarwood's treatment of Vsevolod Garshin is no exception. Garshin was an extremely sensitive and sometimes morbid short-story writer who, before his suicide at the age of 33 in 1888, enjoyed great popularity for his works on war, art, and insanity, subjects with which he had an intimate personal acquaintance . Yarwood traces Garshin's persistent melancholia to an early period of abandonment by his roving mother and astutely demonstrates how Garshin's primary impact on the short-story genre lay not in plot structure, although this aspect is treated very thoroughly in chapter 7 (from Yarwood's dissertation), but in the "greater concern with mood and tension" which this personal affliction gave his work. Yarwood points out, but does not as thoroughly examine, the personal origins of Garshin's "ambivalence toward war." A pacifist moved to service by his conscience , Garshin's urge to battle could well have been motivated by his father's "endless recountings, now exaggerated, now embellished, of military experiences." Yet Yarwood omits the obvious father-mother opposition of influence as a source of Garshin's psychological conflict concerning war. The discussion of Garshin's critical writings on art and of Garshin 's poetry is distinctly secondary in nature, and is brought in only to reinforce some point of interpretation of theshort stories. This is completely justified and very aptly done, as in chapter 3 where Yarwood refers to Garshin's poem, "The Prisoner," to refute Soviet critics' claims that the famous allegorical short story, "Attalea Princeps," should be viewed as a mere criticism of the nineteenth-century Russian autocracy. In general, it is clear that Yarwood's intrinsic approach to Garshin's short stories, as opposed to the sociopolitical, is a fruitful one. And his discussion of Garshin's literary antecedence to the work of Chekhov carries real import. This is a very competent and welcome addition to a key series in our profession. LEE B. CROFT, Arizona State University ...