ble! In this coming artist I believe with all my
heart."

Kuprin is too sincere, too big, to have written this with himself in
mind; yet no reader of the scathing, searing arraignment called "Yama,"
will question that the great, the gigantic Kuprin has shown "the
burdens and abominations" of prostitution, in "simple, fine, and
deathlessly-caustic images"; has shown that "all the horror is in just
this--that there is no horror..." For it is as a pitiless reflection of
a "singular," sinister reality that "Yama" stands unsurpassed.

B. G. GUERNEY.

New York City, January, 1922.

TRANSLATOR'S NOTE.

A word must be said of Kuprin's style. He is by no means a purist; his
pages bristle with neologisms and foreign--or, rather,
outlandish--words; nor has he any hesitancy in adapting and
Russianizing such words. He coins words; he is, at times, actually
Borrowesque, and not only does he resort to colloquialisms and slang,
but to dialect, cant, and even actual argot. Therein is his glory--and,
perhaps, his weakness. Therefore, an attempt has been made, wherever
corruptions, slang, and so forth, appear in the original, to render
them through the nearest English equivalents. While this has its
obvious dubieties and disadvantages, any other course would have
smacked of prettification--a fate which such a book as "Yama" surely
does not deserve.

PART ONE

CHAPTER I.

A long, long time ago, long before the railroads, the
stage-drivers--both government and private--used to live, from
generation to generation, at the very farthest confine of a large
southern city. And that is why the entire region was called the
Yamskaya Sloboda--the Stage-drivers' Borough; or simply Yamskaya, or
Yamkas--Little Ditches, or, shorter still, Yama--The Pit. In the course
of time, when hauling by steam killed off transportation by horses, the
mettlesome tribe of the stage-drivers little by little lost its
boisterous ways and its brave customs, went over into other
occupations, fell apart and scattered. But for many years--even up to
this time--a shady renown has remained to Yama, as of a place
exceedingly gay, tipsy, brawling, and in the night-time not without
danger.

Somehow it came about of itself, that on the ruins of those ancient,
long-warmed nests, where of yore the rosy-cheeked, sprightly wives of
the soldiery and the plump widows of Yama, with their black eyebrows,
had secretly traded in vodka and free love, th