Stories East and West [antikvár]

Preface Stories East and West brings together twenty short stories from the political East and West, They are organized according to similarity of theme, but readers will quickly perceive many points of contrast between them. I think that certain emphases, which are especially apparent to me at the ends of the stories, reveal deep differences between Eastern and Western cultural attitudes. In order to make fellow Westerners aware of these attitudes, I have tried to read the stories as a hypothetical Eastern- er; the result is evident in the "Notes and Comments" following the stories. My only defense for this admittedly artificial approach is that it has led me to inspect my life attitudes and literary tastes and to imagine alternatives that otherwise might not have occurred to me. Although the stories support at least the plausibility of "Notes and Comments/' I expect no one to be completely satisfied. I hope that every reader will pit his interpretations against mine and discover that realistic short stories have meanings that are not universal, but social and historical. The reader who will try on an Eastern outlook and use the "Background Readings" to inform and prepare himself for that role may discover that literary works do bear on our lives and can ready us for actual experience. How can I claim that these twenty stories reveal social ideas that are possible in the East or in the West? It would be easy to draw some abstract and extreme contrasts between the cultures of the East and West, but impossibly difficult to verify by eyewitness account and historical and social research just what is or was, for example, the case in Russia or China in situations analogous to those represented by Babel and Lu Hsun. But the pairing of stories and the commentaries in this book do not rest on godlike impressions: rather, there is, in "Notes and Comments," copious quotation, to ground in the texts of the stories nearly every observation about characters and their communities. "Notes and Comments" also relies on and refers to a number of