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Maoriland Worker, Volume 2, Issue 35, 3 November 1911, Page 5

HOW THIS STORY CAME TO BE TRANSLATED. ' Some few years ago I had staying with mc in my house in Loudon a Russian' woman comrade, who had just been released from -prison, her offence having been organising industrially the textile workers of St. Petersburg. Together we did several translations of Gorki, Andreeif, and of Vsevolod Garshhvfcli© writer of the following story. At a time when Australian workingclass youths are being invited to prepare to fight for a country which they do not own, it has occurred to mc it might be useful to put before the more thoughtful among them a picture of war, by one of the great writers of Russian prose. Vsevolod Gar shin was born in 1855 at "Lovely Valley," .the estate of his grandmother, in the province of Yekaterinoslav. He came of a family who had served their country with - distinction., both in the Russian army and navy; but his own aspirations were toward literature. So precocious was 'his talent that, while attending a secondary school at St. Petersburg, he wrote feuilletons for the school magazine, and composed, under the influence of his studies in the Iliad a poem in hexameters of some hundred, verses. In 1877, when Russia declared war against Turkey', he was working in St. Petersburg at the Mining Institute for.Higher Studies; and, though utterly opposed in the abstract to war, and devoid of sympathy for the cause for which Russia was'fighting, he, in a burst of .youthful, quixotic enthusiasm, volunteered for the front. -His mental and emotional state at this period are well described in "The Experiences of Private Ivanoff," translated into English by Voynich. The ultimate result of this generous impulse of self-sacri-fice on. the part of Garshin was the publication'of several stories based on his. military experiences. Both of us translators "of the story now published were anti-militarists, and we agred, when working together on its rendering into English that it was the most subtle anti-war pamphlet that had ever been written. Garshin's imaginative genius has stripped war of its last fragment of "glory" and "honour," and has shown it, even at 'its best, as blind MURDER, and the tearing up by the roots of the most primal conceptions of morality. The official report of the affair, in which Gairshin received the wounds that were the cause of his four days' suffering on the field of Asliar says: "Private Volunteer Vsevolod Garshin encouraged his comrades by an example of personal bravery to rush forward in attack, in the course of which he was wounded in the leg." The story was not published at the time with our other translations ; and I offer it now to the voting conscripts of Australia.—D.B.M. '