The Dragon: Fifteen Stories (English and Russian Edition) by Yevgeny Zamyatin, Mirra Ginsburg (Translator).

 Waaaaay overdue for a reprint! These stories are very stylish and quite eternal. I crave more, Zamyatin's plays and letters and other assorted things--most of which are only shady .pdf files or very cheap-looking public domain printoffs. Who even knows the translation quality... but my copy is Mirra Ginsburg, so, rock solid. 

I don't care what Pevear says, I love Ginsburg. Volkhonsky also, what she says, it doesn't turn me to stone. Mirra Ginsburg's Master and Margarita cannot be topped.

Here are the contents:
Translator Intro
Letter to Stalin
A Provincial Tale
The Dragon
The Protectress of Sinners
Two Tales for Grown-up Children: The Church of God and The Ivans
The North
The Cave
The Healing of the Novice Erasmus
In Old Russia
A Story about the Most Important Thing
The Miracle of Ash Wednesday
X
Comrade Churygin has the Floor
The Flood
The Lion

While some feel early in skill, none I found unfit for reading, all bear the mark of this writer's genius--uncanny sense of future, nature, and the human soul placed between the dissolution of the two. Except with Zamyatin, it isn't noisy or chaotic dissolution: It is orderly, mathematical, and quite zen in a way that unsettles. Like the coldhearted closing-in of a spider.

The short tales are just as good as WE in my opinion, and that's very good. That's the book that inspired 1984, you know, only it has a more soul-questioning Russian bent, rather than the English lust for power play and the dark side of human organization.

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