Short Fiction

de V. M. Garshin

<p><a href="https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/vsevolod-garshin">Vsevolod Garshin’s</a> literary career followed a stint as a infantry soldier and later an officer, and he received both public and critical acclaim in the 1880s. Before his sadly early death at the age of thirty-three after a lifelong battle with mental illness he wrote and published nineteen short stories. He drew on his military career and life in <abbr>St.</abbr> Petersburg as initial source material, and his varied cast of characters includes soldiers, painters, architects, madmen, bears, frogs and even flowers and trees. All are written with a depth of feeling and sympathy that marks Garshin out from his contemporaries.</p> <p>Collected here are the seventeen translations into English by Rowland Smith of Garshin’s short stories and novellas, in chronological order of the original Russian publication.</p>