Yama: The Pit: Яма

Aleksandr Ivanovich Kuprin, (1870—1938), Russian novelist and short-story writer, is one of the last exponents of the great tradition of Russian critical realism. His best known novel, Yama (1909–15; Yama: The Pit), deals with the red-light district of a southern port city. It dwells with enthusiasm of the everyday life of the prostitutes, their housekeeping, economics, and social stratification. As Kuprin’s spokesman in the novel puts it, “all the horror is just this—that there is no horror! Bourgeois work days—and that is all. . . .” We offer you this bilingual English-Russian edition, believing that reading parallel texts and inferring the vocabulary and grammar is a far superior method of language learning than traditional memorization. It is also much less painful. Read more