) His
climaxes are never strained; nothing is ever idealized, sentimentalized,
etherealized; no part of the truth is left out, no part is exaggerated.
There is no cleverness, no startling feat of virtuosity. All appears
simple, candid, almost childlike. I could imagine the editor of a popular
magazine returning a story of Tchehkoff's with the friendly criticism that
it showed promise, and that when he had acquired more skill in hitting the
reader exactly between the eyes a deal might be possible. Tchehkoff never
hits you between the eyes. But he will, nevertheless, leave you on the
flat of your back. Beneath the outward simplicity of his work is concealed
the most wondrous artifice, the artifice that is embedded deep in nearly
all great art. All we English novelists ought to study "The Kiss" and "The
Black Monk." They will delight every person of fine taste, but to the
artist they are a profound lesson. We have no writer, and we have never
had one, nor has France, who could mould the material of life, without
distorting it, into such complex forms to such an end of beauty. Read
these books, and you will genuinely know something about Russia; you will
be drenched in the vast melancholy, savage and wistful, of Russian life;
and you will have seen beauty.
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