Aleksandr Kuprin

Aleksandr Kuprin: The Officer Who Indicted the Army

In May 1905 a former sub-lieutenant of the 46th Dnieper Infantry Regiment finished a novel he had described to his wife in the language of combat: "The army cripples the soul, destroys all a man's finest impulses, and debases human dignity... I shall challenge the tsarist army to a duel." The book sold 45,500 copies, a colossal figure for early-1900s Russia. One serving officer challenged Kuprin to a real duel through a newspaper. Twenty others wrote to thank him.

The Orphan Sent to the Cadet Corps

Aleksandr Ivanovich Kuprin was the son of a government official in Narovchat, Penza province, and of Liubov Alekseyevna Kulunchakova, from a Volga Tatar noble family whose fortune had dwindled through the nineteenth century. Cholera killed his father in 1871, before the boy turned one. In 1874 his mother moved them into the Widows' Home at Kudrino in Moscow, and from there Kuprin was passed from one closed institution to the next for the whole of his youth: the Razumovsky boarding school in 1876, where he first discovered he could hold a room with a story; the Second Moscow Military High School in 1880; the Cadet Corps in 1882.

Six years in the Corps produced some thirty poems and translations of Béranger and Heine, and — at seventeen — a political poem called "Dreams," written on the eve of the sentencing of the terrorists who had tried to kill Alexander III. The uniform had not settled his opinions. He entered the Alexander Military Academy in 1888, graduated as a sublieutenant in 1890, and spent four years in the garrison at Proskurov that became the raw material for everything he later wrote about the army.

He also began publishing from inside it. The poet Liodor Palmin placed his debut story in the Russian Satirical Leaflet in 1889. Then in 1894 came "The Inquiry," an army story written by a serving officer and signed with his full name. It drew critical attention and, with it, the prospect of unpleasant consequences. Kuprin resigned that summer with no plan whatsoever.

The Wanderer Who Did Everything

Five years of drifting through southwestern Russia followed, and an accumulation of jobs that reads like an inventory of a whole society: dentistry, land surveying, acting, circus work, psalm singing, medicine, hunting, fishing. Almost all of it resurfaced in the fiction. By September 1894 he was writing for the Kiev papers, and had worked out his theory of the trade: good journalism required "mad courage, audacity, breadth of view, and amazing memory."

In 1896 Russkoye Bogatstvo published *Moloch*, an attack on the new Russian capitalism written out of industrial unrest. In 1897 he went to the Polesye marshes of southern Belorussia, where he grew makhorka tobacco and later said he had absorbed "my most vigorous, noble, extensive, and fruitful impressions." Out of that came *Olesya* (1898), the love story that, with *Moloch*, made his name.

Petersburg, Chekhov, and the Sensation of 1905

Kuprin moved to the capital in December 1901 to join the monthly Zhurnal Dlya Vsekh and found himself at the center of Russian literary life. He became a friend and regular correspondent of Anton Chekhov, whose advice he sought until Chekhov's death in 1904, and formed a friendship with Ivan Bunin that lasted nearly forty years. Gorky's Znanye published a collection of eight tales in 1903; Tolstoy praised its "vivid language" and called him a true successor to Chekhov, while Gorky ranked him third among living Russian writers.

Success did not make him comfortable. He wrote less and told a Kiev friend: "Life is hard: scandal, gossip, envy, hatred." What he lost in volume he gained in precision: "At the Circus" (1902) drew praise from Chekhov and Tolstoy alike, and "The Jewess" (1904) was written with unusual sympathy at a time of regular pogroms. Then *The Duel*, conceived during his second year in the army and finished on 3 May 1905, made him a national controversy — welcomed by the left as another nail in the coffin of autocracy, condemned by conservatives as a perfidious assault on the ruling order. Nicholas Luker called it "the summit of Kuprin's career... assuring him immortality in the annals of Russian literature."

Balloons, Diving Bells, and Diminishing Returns

After 1905 Kuprin turned openly against the regime. He built links with Black Sea Fleet sailors at Sevastopol, tried to join the mutinied battleship *Potemkin*, watched the cruiser *Ochakov* destroyed at Balaklava and — as he admitted only in 1918 — helped rescue several of its sailors. Admiral Chukhnin gave him forty-eight hours to leave and opened proceedings that ended in a fine and ten days' house arrest. He became an elector to the first State Duma, went up in a balloon with the sportsman Sergey Utochkin, and went down into the Black Sea as a diver.

These years produced his best-loved work: "Emerald" (1907), "Sulamith" (1908), built on the Song of Songs, and *The Garnet Bracelet* (1911), a novella of hopeless love. In 1909 he and Bunin jointly received the Pushkin Prize. But *The Pit*, his study of prostitution published in three instalments between 1909 and 1915, exposed his limits. He could not decide whether the book was documentary or fiction; Part I, thick with observed brothel detail, is much the strongest, and the later parts met near-total indifference.

The Long Paris Winter

Gatchina fell to Yudenich's White Army in October 1919, and Kuprin spent a fortnight editing its headquarters newspaper. When the Whites retreated he went with them, and reached Paris in July 1920. The next seventeen years dismantled him. He was poor, lonely, increasingly alcoholic, and after 1932 his failing sight ruined his handwriting. "I am left naked... and destitute as a homeless old dog," he wrote, and in 1925: "The more talented a man is, the harder is for him life without Russia." He still produced *The Wheel of Time* (1929) and the autobiographical *The Junkers* (1932), but the work was retrospective, circling the country he had lost.

He applied for a Soviet visa in late 1936 and left the Gare du Nord on 29 May 1937, seen off only by his daughter. Nikolay Teleshov found him "confused, rambling, and pathetic": a man who had left Russia robust returned "an emaciated... feeble, weak-willed invalid. This was no longer Kuprin." Bunin was blunter: "He did not go to Russia — he was taken there." Cancer of the oesophagus killed him on 25 August 1938.

Why Aleksandr Is Called a Genius

The case for Kuprin rests on an unfashionable faculty: total recall of lived experience, converted into prose at speed and without ornament. He belonged to an age of literary experiment and refused all of it, writing only what he had personally done — which is why the dentist, the surveyor, the circus hand, the diver, the balloonist and the garrison officer are all in the books, and why the brothel chapters of *The Pit* still read as reportage. Luker's verdict is the most honest available: "What he conceded in restraint to Chekhov, conviction to Gorky, and subtlety to Bunin, Kuprin made up for in narrative pace, construction of plot, and richness of theme." That is praise with a ledger attached. Tolstoy called him Chekhov's true successor; Gorky ranked him third among Russians; Nabokov, more coolly, styled him "the Russian Kipling."

The counter-case is substantial, and Kuprin's own life supplies it. His great period is narrow — roughly 1896 to 1911 — and the decline that followed was long, public and partly self-inflicted, aggravated by drink, exile and poverty. *The Pit*, his most ambitious book, failed on a structural question he never resolved. He was no innovator of form; he inherited the short story from Chekhov and worked it hard rather than remaking it. What survives is not intellectual originality but an unusual craft: a reporter's memory joined to a novelist's ear, and the nerve to sign an attack on the imperial army with his own name.

Legacy

*The Duel* outlived the institution it attacked, and Kuprin remained through the twentieth century one of the most widely read classics in Russian literature, endlessly adapted for film — the ordinary lives, the unhappy loves, the barracks and the brothels travelling better than more sophisticated work of the same period.

Achievements

• Pushkin Prize — 1909
• Notable work: The Duel
• Genres: short novel, sketch story and feuilleton