Old Hunting Grounds and Other Stories by Yuri Kazakov

The two volumes comprise 38 short stories and travel sketches describing Russians and parts of the Soviet Union which up to Kazakov's time (he died in 1982) had been almost untouched by that country's 20th century upheavals. The majority of his settings are the coast and forests adjoining the White Sea, peopled by hunters, fishermen, buoy-keepers, ancient peasants, children in the most halcyon moment of their youth, and among his memorable actors are not excluded even an occasional soulful dog or bear. Through the eyes of this new array of 'Russian originals' we return to forgotten ways of perceiving the world around us, of appreciating the essential miracle of our surroundings, the universe extending from the immediate and almost microscopic grain of sand or flower, out to the infinitudes of which we are a part. The sense of the two books is topical and universal: the degree of man's involvement in the harmony and natural processes of the world is an essential measure of his moral dignity. (That such natural processes included hunting, for instance, is a challenging thought in our environmentally-ideological and conservation-focused times.) In the classic style of the Russian short story Kazakov's narratives move at a leisurely pace and often end apparently inconclusively, but they never fail to induce a deeply reflective mood. A few of his tales do have an urban setting, but even those are suffused with a pastoral quality, contributed to by the inescapable presence of the seasonal and climactic envelopment of man's works; and too by nature's mind-borne continuities: for example, a suburban boy repeatedly imagining and remembering episodes in some once-glimpsed corner of Russia's backwoods. Such recollections, and more immediate contemplations of nature in his other stories, return and return like wistful sighs among the meanders of Kazakov's uncomplicated plots.