Alexander Grin
THE MAKING OF ASPER
I
In the gloomy valley of Engra, near the quarries,
Judge Gakker confessed the most extraordinary
things
to
me.
"My friend," began Gakker, "man's higher purpose is crea–
tive work. The kind of work to which I have dedicated my life
demands ironclad secrecy during the creator's lifetime. The art–
ist's name must remain unknown; more than that, people should
1.
Alexander Grin (Grinevsky) was born in Viatka of Polish parents in
1880. As a child, living in this suffocating Russian province, he dreamed
of exotic and romantic worlds where men were strong and free. He
nourished himself largely on American literature: Poe, Mayn Reid, and
Cooper. As a youth he longed to escape the dreary realities of life in
Czarist Russia and run away to sea. Unlike Conrad he was not able to
get further than Odessa, which nonetheless provided him with much of
the romantic material for his works.
A protege of Gorky, Grin became a prolific writer of fantastic tales
(much in the style of Gorky's early
"bosyak"
["bum"] stories ), whose
action usually takes place in the imaginary country of "Grinland."
Because of his exotic plots, his use of Anglo-Saxon-sounding names, and
his peculiar "translated" style, he was often thought by his readers
to be a foreign author in translation. It is interesting to note that he
sometimes appears to anticipate the existentialist trend in Western
literature, as in the story translated here.
This totally anomalous Soviet writer died of tuberculosis in 1932.
Selections of his work were often reprinted until 1950, when he was
posthumously denounced as an "arch-cosmopolitan"; it was said that
the Soviet intelligentsia had been infected by him with a disease quaintly
defined as "Grinomania." Since Stalin's death he has again been re–
printed, and his influence, thanks partly to the efforts of friends such
as Paustovsky and other Grinomaniacs, is as strong as ever among Soviet
intellectuals of all ages for whom he provides an antidote to
lOCialist
realism.
