The Short Fiction of Vsevolod Garshin

Vsevolod Garshin wrote very little, but each of his stories carries the weight of a man who felt the world’s suffering too keenly to look away. This collection gathers his short fiction, including ‘Four Days,’ in which a wounded soldier lies helpless beside a rotting corpse on a battlefield, and ‘The Red Flower,’ where an asylum patient becomes convinced that a single poppy holds all the evil on earth. Garshin served in the Russo-Turkish War and drew on that experience to write some of Russian literature’s most unflinching antiwar prose. His recurring subjects are conscience, madness, and pity for the vulnerable, told plainly and without sentimentality. Free to download as a PDF or EPUB.