The Short Fiction of Aleksandr Kuprin

Alexander Kuprin knew the Russia he wrote about from the inside, having served as an army officer and drifted through a dozen trades before he made his name in letters. This collection gathers his shorter work, from the shabby lodging house of The River of Life to studies of soldiers, circus performers, ordinary clerks, and lovers caught in situations larger than they can manage. Kuprin wrote in the great realist tradition of Chekhov and Tolstoy, with a warm eye for the overlooked and a refusal to sentimentalize suffering. The stories move easily between tenderness and hard clarity. Assembled from several translators, this volume offers a broad sample of one of pre-revolutionary Russia’s most beloved storytellers. It is free to read as a PDF and EPUB.