Aleksandr Kuprin
Aleksandr Ivanovich Kuprin, (b. Sept.
7 [Aug. 26, old style], 1870, Narovchat,
Russia—d. Aug. 25, 1938, Leningrad),
Russian novelist and short-story writer,
one of the last exponents of the great
tradition of Russian critical realism.
Educated in military schools, he
served as an officer in the army, a
career he soon abandoned for a more
lively and diversified life as a
journalist, hunter, fisherman, actor,
and circus worker. Literary fame came
with Poyedinok (1905; The Duel), a
realistically sordid picture of the
emptiness of life in a remote military
garrison. Its appearance during the
Russo-Japanese War coincided with and
confirmed a national wave of
antimilitary sentiment. Kuprin wrote
prolifically; his subjects might be best
described by the title of one of his
best known stories, Reka zhizni (1906;
“The River of Life”). He is a fascinated
and an undiscriminating observer of the
stream of life and especially of any
milieu that constitutes a world of its
own—a cheap hotel, a factory, a house of
prostitution, a tavern, a circus, or a
race track. His best known novel, Yama
(1909–15; Yama: The Pit), deals with the
red-light district of a southern port
city. It dwells with enthusiasm on the
minutiae of the everyday life of the
prostitutes, their housekeeping,
economics, and social stratification. As
Kuprin’s spokesman in the novel puts it,
“all the horror is just this—that there
is no horror! Bourgeois work days—and
that is all. . . .”
Kuprin’s style is extremely natural.
He picks up the slang and argot that is
peculiar to his subject and describes
everything with zest and colour and with
a goodness of heart that compensates for
any shortcomings he may have in
originality or intellectual depth. After
the Revolution, Kuprin became one of the
many Russian émigrés in Paris, where he
continued to write, although exile was
not fruitful for his essentially
extroverted, reportorial talent. In 1937
he was allowed to return to the Soviet
Union.
