The Ten Most Forgotten Short Stories in English Translation (1853–1929)
Ten stories that arrived in English before 1960, were read and praised, and vanished when their translations did.
Written & prepared by Longhand Almanac Research · 8 September 2026
The Brief
Ten short stories that reached English before 1960 with named translators, named publishers, and named reviews, and then fell out of circulation when their translations were superseded or their champions died. Each entry documents the reception, names the mechanism of the forgetting, and links to where the story can be read today. All ten are online; six as open scans, four through the Internet Archive’s free lending program.
A literature survives in translation the way a wave survives a sea: intermittently, at the expense of what came before. Every language that reaches English reaches it twice. First through a first-wave translator, paid poorly and working from whatever edition they had on the table, and again, decades later, through someone better credentialed, better paid, and better positioned to displace the first attempt. The displacement rarely preserves the first translator’s selections. Stories that carried an author into English in 1906 or 1929 or 1952 lose their presence along with their wording. The newer translator chooses differently, and the author’s presence in English narrows to whatever the newer translator wanted to translate.
This list is a companion to our survey of English-language stories eclipsed by canon drift. Here the mechanism is more specific. These ten stories all arrived in English before 1960, were read by named critics in named periodicals, and then vanished with their translations, while the writing stayed as good as it had ever been. In every case there is a readable text at a working URL. In every case there is documentable period reception. In every case the story is absent from the major English-language world-literature anthologies of the past thirty years and has slid out of standard undergraduate world-literature syllabi. Longhand Almanac exists to point readers at writing that is still readable and no longer circulated; the aim here is ten routes back into a library that is still, physically, on the shelf.
Methodology
Each case satisfies four criteria. First, contemporary attention: a documented original publication date in a named original-language venue, a first English translation with translator and publisher identified, and at least one named English-language review, anthology appearance, or peer endorsement at the time of translation. Second, current absence: the story is not in the Norton Anthology of World Literature (4th and 5th editions), the Penguin Book of the International Short Story (Alameddine and Freeman, 2026), Robert Chandler’s Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida (Penguin Classics, 2005), Theodore Goossen’s Oxford Book of Japanese Short Stories, or the Oxford Book of Latin American Short Stories in current editions, and is not in routine circulation on undergraduate survey syllabi. Third, a documentable mechanism of forgetting specific to translated literature rather than generic canon drift: superseded translation, translator obscurity, political repudiation, original-language revival bypassing the English corpus, Nobel-inflected canon narrowing, or first-wave translation corpus loss. Fourth, accessibility: a working URL to a readable English text, preferably the first-translation edition, at the Internet Archive, HathiTrust, Project Gutenberg, Wikisource, or a digitised periodical archive.
Anthology absence was spot-checked against published tables of contents rather than exhaustively verified against every edition. Period reception was verified in digitized periodical archives where available and otherwise taken from secondary scholarship with the trail cited. The record is necessarily partial. Every URL below was re-checked in September 2026; four of the first editions are readable through the Internet Archive’s free lending program rather than as open scans, and each of those is marked. Cases arrange chronologically by original publication date.
Stifter’s Alpine Christmas novella first appeared in 1845 as Der heilige Abend in the almanac Die Gegenwart and was rewritten and retitled Bergkristall for the 1853 collection Bunte Steine (Pest and Leipzig: Gustav Heckenast). Two children climb the wrong pass on Christmas Eve and are held in a glacier’s mouth by a night of aurora and silence. Nothing happens; everything is at stake.
At publication. The English translation that mattered appeared nearly a century later: Elizabeth Mayer and Marianne Moore, Rock Crystal: A Christmas Tale, with an introduction by W. H. Auden and illustrations by Josef Scharl (New York: Pantheon, 1945). Auden’s introduction called it a parable “about the relation of people to places, of man to nature.” The New York Times (1945) praised “a beautiful new translation by Elizabeth Mayer and Marianne Moore” whose “account of the courage and faith of little children and its reverent feeling for the beauty of nature and for the sacred symbolism of Christmas have a value that has little to do with literature.” Hannah Arendt subsequently placed Stifter among the “very few great novelists in German literature.” Auden’s preface plus the Moore-Mayer imprimatur was the strongest possible entry ticket mid-century America could offer a nineteenth-century Austrian pastoralist.
The forgetting. Three mechanisms compound. Mayer, the Austrian-exile translator central to Auden’s New York circle, never attained the independent visibility of her collaborators, so the translation travelled under Moore’s and Auden’s names and carried no estate of its own into the academy. The Biedermeier tradition (Stifter, Mörike, Keller) slipped out of syllabus fashion after the 1960s pivot toward modernism and the postcolonial. Thomas Bernhard’s well-known contempt for Stifter (in Alte Meister and Korrektur) supplied later generations a reason to trust the dismissal. The NYRB Classics reissue of 2008 returned the Moore-Mayer text to trade shelves but did not return it to anthologies; Isabel Fargo Cole’s 2021 Motley Stones is a fresh translation that has not yet changed the syllabus picture.
Why it still matters. Stifter wrote a disaster story with no disaster. Readers who have absorbed Jenny Erpenbeck’s glacial patience or Jon Fosse’s liturgical slowness already read in Stifter’s register without knowing it, and would find in “Rock Crystal” the first mature version of the slowness they prize.
Sources. Pantheon 1945 first edition verified against the Internet Archive record. New York Times review quotation per NYRB jacket copy; Arendt citation per standard Stifter reception scholarship; original publication history per the 1945 Pantheon title-page note and standard Stifter bibliography.
2. “The Lighthouse Keeper of Aspinwall” by Henryk Sienkiewicz (1881)
Mechanism: superseded translation · one-story tax
Sienkiewicz published “Latarnik” in the Warsaw Niwa in 1881: an old Polish exile, after decades of wandering in the Americas, takes a lighthouse post on the Isthmus of Panama and is destroyed by the accidental arrival of a book in his own language. The story is eleven pages long and turns on a single sentence of Mickiewicz.
At publication. Curtin’s 1893 collection, which also contained “Yanko the Musician” and “Bartek the Victor,” arrived on the cusp of the Sienkiewicz boom that Quo Vadis (1895, Curtin 1896) would detonate. Contemporary American reviewers paired Curtin’s Sienkiewicz with the Tolstoy translations then pouring into Little, Brown’s lists; the 1905 Nobel ratified the reception. Else Benecke’s retranslations of Sienkiewicz short fiction in Tales by Polish Authors (Oxford: B. H. Blackwell, 1915) drew from The Contemporary Review the judgment, still quoted on the volume’s dust jacket: “This is a book to be bought and read; it cannot fail to be remembered… The whole book is full of passionate genius… It is delightfully translated.” The most striking long-term evidence of reception is internal to Anglophone literature: Malcolm Lowry directly borrows and cites the Curtin “Lighthouse-Keeper” in “Through the Panama,” a fact tracked in the Filipczak scholarship.
The forgetting. Curtin’s English is Victorian-rotund and has aged poorly; no major retranslation of Sienkiewicz’s short fiction has followed to replace him, because the energy of modern Sienkiewicz translation has gone entirely to Quo Vadis and the Trilogy. The short stories were therefore neither preserved in Curtin’s registers nor reborn in new ones: a clean case of first-wave translation corpus loss. Curtin himself was an ethnographer and folklorist without a literary estate or disciples to advocate for his short-story selections.
Why it still matters. The story is the compressed ancestor of every exile story in English since: Nabokov’s “Spring in Fialta,” Sebald’s lantern-lit arrivals, Aleksandar Hemon’s return-vertigo pieces. It is also the clearest available period dramatization of what a book in a lost language physically does to a reader. Its absence from the Norton World Literature table of contents, while a sentimental Joseph Conrad remains, is hard to defend.
Sources. Original 1881 Niwa publication per standard Sienkiewicz bibliography. Curtin 1893 Yanko the Musician Internet Archive record. Benecke 1915 Tales by Polish Authors at https://archive.org/details/talesbypolishaut00beneiala. Contemporary Review blurb verified against the 1915 Blackwell jacket quoted in Project Gutenberg transcription #35457. Lowry reception per Dorota Filipczak, “Intertextual Illuminations,” Text Matters (University of Łódź).
3. “Bontshe the Silent” by I. L. Peretz (1894)
Mechanism: translator dependency
Peretz published “Bontshe Shvayg” in his Warsaw Yontef Bletlekh in 1894: a man who has been silent his entire punished life is tried in heaven, acquitted, asked what reward he would like, and answers, with the story’s final and lacerating line, that he would like a warm roll with fresh butter every morning.
Where to read it. Helena Frank’s translation appears as chapter XI of Stories and Pictures by Isaac Loeb Perez (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1906), at https://archive.org/details/stories-and-pictures.
At publication. Frank’s volume was commissioned by Henrietta Szold for the Jewish Publication Society after Szold discovered Frank’s pseudonymous (“Golde”) Peretz translations in the New York Jewish Daily News; Frank’s Peretz work also appeared across five issues of the Jewish Quarterly Review (1902–1907). Leo Wiener had offered a partial earlier rendering in The History of Yiddish Literature in the Nineteenth Century (1899). The decisive mid-century endorsement came with Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg’s A Treasury of Yiddish Stories (New York: Viking, 1954), which carried Hilde Abel’s new translation, “Bontsha the Silent,” and which was promptly reviewed and discussed in Commentary and across the postwar Jewish periodical press. The Peretz-in-English file is therefore double-authenticated: a JPS commissioning in 1906 and a Viking canonization in 1954, with Abel’s version the one that entered general circulation.
The forgetting. Peretz remains central within Yiddish studies (YIVO, the Yiddish Book Center, Ruth Wisse’s I. L. Peretz Reader) and absent from the general world-literature anthologies. Helena Frank is the textbook case of translator obscurity: “Almost no English-language scholarship exists on Helena Frank,” the University of Pennsylvania’s Katz Center blog notes flatly; In Geveb titles its recovery piece “Figures in Need of Rehabilitation.” Frank’s 1906 selections were superseded by Abel 1954 and then again by Hillel Halkin’s 1990 translations for Wisse; at each step the earlier corpus slipped. The broader post-1960 world-literature anthology tradition absorbed Isaac Bashevis Singer as the Yiddish representative and left Peretz to Jewish-studies readers.
Why it still matters. “Bontshe” is the modern short story’s sharpest single sentence on the production of the silent by systems. The comparables are structural rather than ethnic: J. M. Coetzee’s Michael K, Herta Müller’s narrators, László Krasznahorkai’s patient sufferers. None of them will make more sense than after reading Peretz.
Sources. Original 1894 Yontef Bletlekh publication per YIVO Encyclopedia and Yiddish Book Center bibliographies. Frank 1906 JPS edition verified in the Internet Archive record (the story stands as item XI). Wiener 1899 partial version; Abel 1954 in the Howe/Greenberg Treasury; Halkin 1990 in the Wisse Peretz Reader, all standard Peretz-in-English bibliography. Frank biographical record per the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies and In Geveb.
4. “The Hungry Stones” by Rabindranath Tagore (1895)
Mechanism: one-story tax · superseded translation
“Kshudhita Pashan” was published in Bengali in the journal Sadhana in 1895: a tax collector on assignment sleeps in a Mughal palace on the banks of the Susta and is besieged at night by the palace’s remembered women. It is Tagore’s strongest ghost story and one of his few stories English-speaking readers can think of by name.
At publication. The 1916 Macmillan volume arrived three years after the 1913 Nobel and in the wake of Tagore’s lecture tours in London and the United States. The publisher’s Note identifies the translators: “The version of The Victory is the author’s own work. The seven stories which follow it [including ‘The Hungry Stones’] were translated by Mr. C. F. Andrews, with the author’s help. Assistance has also been given by the Rev. E. J. Thompson, Panna Lal Basu, Prabhat Kumar Mukerji, and the Sister Nivedita.” Macmillan reprinted the collection through multiple impressions in 1916–17. The Athenaeum (November 1916) carried a Tagore review in that window; the general reception can be reconstructed from the volume’s reprint history and the standard Tagore Nobel scholarship, though specific named reviews in The Nation, The Dial, and the New York Times Book Review have proven elusive at the level of directly quotable text, and the record is partial on this point. What is secure is that Hungry Stones and Other Stories was one of the three or four most-circulated Tagore volumes in English between 1916 and 1930.
The forgetting. This is a canonical case of superseded translation. The 1916 renderings are heavily mediated, by Tagore’s own simplified English and by Andrews’s Edwardian religiose, and critical consensus since the 1990s, following William Radice’s Selected Short Stories (Penguin, 1991, expanded 2005) and Kalpana Bardhan’s direct-from-Bengali translations, treats them as devotional paraphrases rather than faithful renderings. Tagore’s home-tradition revival in Bengali accelerated after the centennial events of 2011 and bypassed the 1916 English corpus entirely. The Norton Anthology now represents Tagore, when at all, through Radice- or Bardhan-translated selections; “The Hungry Stones” itself has slipped into specialty weird-fiction anthologies (Jeff and Ann VanderMeer’s The Weird, 2011) rather than general world-literature ones.
Why it still matters. The story is the nineteenth century’s most direct Asian answer to Henry James’s “The Jolly Corner” and the closest ancestor of contemporary haunted-architecture fictions like Mariana Enríquez’s “The House of Adela” or Han Kang’s “The Fruit of My Woman.” The 1916 text is the text in which millions of interwar English-language readers first encountered Tagore’s prose; that deserves preservation even as the translation itself is surpassed.
Sources. Bengali 1895 Sadhana publication per standard Tagore bibliography. Hungry Stones and Other Stories (Macmillan 1916) verified at the Internet Archive and Library of Congress. Athenaeum Nov 1916 citation per the Victorian Fiction Research Guides periodical index; direct-quotable period review remains to be confirmed in JSTOR and the American Periodical Series. Radice 1991/2005 Penguin edition; Bardhan translations from the 1990s, both standard Tagore-in-English reference points.
5. “The Attendant’s Confession” by Machado de Assis (1896)
Mechanism: translator dependency
“O Enfermeiro” was published in Rio de Janeiro in 1884 in the Gazeta de Notícias as “Cousas Íntimas” and collected in Várias Histórias (Rio: H. Garnier, 1896). A male nurse confesses, at the end of a long and prosperous life, to having killed his cruel patient, and then watches his life benefit, for decades, from the act. It is Machado at his most cool-blooded.
Where to read it. Isaac Goldberg’s translation is in Brazilian Tales (Boston: The Four Seas Company, 1921), at Project Gutenberg (#21040): https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/21040, and at Wikisource.
At publication. Goldberg (1887–1938), a Harvard-trained polyglot critic, assembled the 1921 volume as, in his own phrase, “a modest sample-case” of Brazilian short fiction. Three of Machado’s stories led it: “The Attendant’s Confession,” “The Fortune-Teller,” and “Life.” The book was dedicated to J. D. M. Ford, Smith Professor of French and Spanish at Harvard. Three of the stories had previously appeared in The Stratford Journal (Boston) in 1917–1919. Goldberg followed up with Brazilian Literature (Knopf, 1922). The most concrete trace of period American reception is a New York Evening Post review cited in a dealer catalogue of a period copy with the clipping pasted in, comparing the stories to “the more macabre short stories of de Maupassant and Balzac.” The record is partial: the clipping has not been independently re-verified in the Evening Post microfilm record, and reviews in The Nation and The Dial have not yet surfaced in the available periodical indexes. The Goldberg translations themselves were reprinted by the International Pocket Library in 1965, a clear sign that the 1921 text had survived into the paperback era, before being overwritten by later direct-from-Portuguese work.
The forgetting. A classic case of original-language revival bypass. Machado’s 1990s–2000s Anglophone reboom has been carried almost entirely by new translations: William L. Grossman’s The Psychiatrist and Other Stories (UC Press, 1963), then Gregory Rabassa for the novels, and decisively Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson’s Collected Stories of Machado de Assis (Liveright/Norton, 2018). The Norton Anthology of World Literature represents Machado through “The Rod of Justice”; the Oxford Book of Latin American Short Stories uses “Midnight Mass.” The Goldberg 1921 Machado selections, including “The Attendant’s Confession,” have not been re-curated into either, and the Costa/Patterson 2018 Collected Stories renders Goldberg philologically superfluous. Adding to the orphaning: scholarly work (Freitas and Costa, Cadernos de Tradução, 2015) has shown that Goldberg appears to have worked in part from Adrien Delpech’s 1910 French intermediary Quelques Contes rather than the Portuguese, which offers modern editors a reason not to reprint his text. The Goldberg Machado is therefore triple-orphaned: displaced, suspected, and superseded in one motion.
Why it still matters. “The Attendant’s Confession” sets Ricardo Piglia’s, Roberto Bolaño’s, and Samanta Schweblin’s Latin American narrator-as-reluctant-murderer a century before they write it. It also records something rarer: the Goldberg 1921 volume is the first English-language effort to constitute Brazilian short fiction as a category for Anglophone readers. Its disappearance is the disappearance of a whole 1920s American project.
Sources. Portuguese original 1884/1896 per Várias Histórias. Goldberg 1921 Four Seas edition read at Project Gutenberg #21040 (the Internet Archive scan of this volume has gone dead and was removed from this entry in September 2026); Freitas and Costa, Cadernos de Tradução (2015), on the French intermediary and Stratford Journal pre-prints. New York Evening Post citation via bookseller catalogue, flagged above as unverified at the periodical source. Costa/Patterson 2018 Collected Stories (Liveright/Norton) and Grossman 1963 The Psychiatrist and Other Stories (UC Press) per standard Machado-in-English bibliography.
6. “The Seven Who Were Hanged” by Leonid Andreyev (1908)
Mechanism: political repudiation · translator dependency
Published in the fifth volume of the Shipovnik almanac in 1908 and dedicated to Leo Tolstoy, Rasskaz o semi poveshennykh tracks seven condemned prisoners, five revolutionaries and two ordinary criminals, through their last night before execution. Andreyev meant it, explicitly, as an argument against capital punishment.
At publication. Bernstein’s edition carried a dedicatory letter from Andreyev himself and went through multiple American printings through the 1910s and 1920s, including Modern Library and Boni and Liveright reissues; Thomas Seltzer’s 1925 translation followed. Seltzer’s 1917 Best Russian Short Stories (Boni and Liveright), the foundational American Russian-lit anthology of the century, included Andreyev’s “Lazarus.” Alexander Kaun’s Leonid Andreyev: A Critical Study (New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1924) devoted two long chapters to the story, the fullest English-language critical treatment any Andreyev work has received. In the 1908–1925 Anglophone imagination, Andreyev was a figure of the first order; the collapse that followed is one of the largest reputational falls in twentieth-century translated literature.
The forgetting. Andreyev’s 1919 anti-Bolshevik manifesto S.O.S. ensured blacklist status during the Soviet period (his works, Britannica summarizes, were “hardly known during the Soviet period”), and his name accordingly vanished from the Soviet export canon that Western programs of Russian literature drew on after 1945. Bernstein’s 1909 translation remained the standard American text for 107 years, until Anthony Briggs’s Seven Hanged (Penguin Classics, UK, 2016); no intervening retranslation arrived to reset him for a new generation. Britannica’s own reception summary is blunt: “Andreyev’s fame as a novelist declined rapidly as his works became increasingly sensational.” He is absent from the Norton Anthology of World Literature and from Robert Chandler’s 2005 Penguin Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida.
Why it still matters. The direct ancestor is Dostoevsky’s Idiot scaffold passage; the direct descendants include Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, Albert Camus’s “Reflections on the Guillotine,” and every novel of carceral last hours from Victor Serge to Anna Seghers. The story is also, contextually, said to have been read by the circle around Gavrilo Princip before the 1914 Sarajevo assassination, a reception detail widely repeated in the Andreyev literature and worth treating as suggestive rather than settled. It is the modern short-fiction landmark missing from English-language world-literature courses.
Sources. Shipovnik almanac 1908 publication per standard Andreyev bibliography. Bernstein 1909 J. S. Ogilvie first edition at the Internet Archive, OCLC 669927833. Seltzer 1917 Best Russian Short Stories (Boni and Liveright) at Project Gutenberg #13437. Kaun 1924 Leonid Andreyev: A Critical Study (Huebsch) per WorldCat. Briggs 2016 Seven Hanged (Penguin Classics UK). Princip-reception claim per widely repeated secondary sources and flagged accordingly.
7. “Yam Gruel” by Akutagawa Ryūnosuke (1916)
Mechanism: one-story tax
Akutagawa published “Imogayu” in Osaka’s Shinshōsetsu in 1916: a retelling, refracted through Nikolai Gogol’s “The Overcoat,” of an entry in the twelfth-century Konjaku Monogatari. A shabby minor samurai is consumed by his desire to eat yam gruel to the point of satiety, is given exactly that, and is destroyed by the fulfillment.
Where to read it. Takashi Kojima’s translation is in Rashomon and Other Stories (New York: Liveright, 1952), at https://archive.org/details/rashomonothersto00akut (the Archive’s copy is the 1970 Liveright printing, readable with a free account through the lending program).
At publication. Kojima’s 1952 Liveright volume, six stories with an introduction by Howard Hibbett, arrived in the slipstream of Kurosawa’s film Rashomon and was reviewed by Robert Halsband in the Saturday Review of March 7, 1953 (“Fresh Tales from Japan”). Halsband wrote: “The recent success in this country of the Japanese film Rashomon probably explains why there has now been published Rashomon and Other Stories, by Ryunosuke Akutagawa. The six stories which it contains need no recommendation except their own merits, which are fresh and striking.” The volume was reissued in the Charles E. Tuttle Company’s Tokyo editions and carried into American paperback circulation through the 1960s. An earlier parallel corpus, Glenn W. Shaw’s Tales Grotesque and Curious (Tokyo: Hokuseido, 1930; second edition 1938), had introduced Akutagawa’s “The Nose” and a wider selection to English readers; the 1930 U.S. review trail is thin, but the volume’s commercial persistence into a second edition is evidence of reception in its own right.
The forgetting. Akutagawa’s English canon consolidated around two stories, “Rashōmon” and “In a Grove,” and Theodore Goossen’s Oxford Book of Japanese Short Stories represents him with “In a Grove” in a later translation. Jay Rubin’s Penguin Classics Rashōmon and Seventeen Other Stories (2006), with an introduction by Haruki Murakami, has since become the standard classroom Akutagawa, and its selections eclipse Kojima’s. “Yam Gruel,” “Kesa and Morito,” and “The Martyr,” all in the 1952 Kojima, are therefore outside the Norton and Penguin apparatus despite a documented and named period review; the Kojima renderings are the paradigm of a superseded first-English-wave translation whose specific story-selection did not migrate with the author to a new anthology home.
Why it still matters. “Yam Gruel” is the twentieth century’s most compact treatment of the psychology of achieved desire, the destruction that follows getting what one wants. It anticipates Yoko Tawada’s and Hiroko Oyamada’s compressed absurdist fables and is the shortest path to understanding why Akutagawa is a fiction writer and not, as classroom habit sometimes suggests, a Rashōmon plot device.
Sources. Japanese 1916 Shinshōsetsu publication per standard Akutagawa bibliography. Kojima 1952 Liveright first edition (Hibbett introduction) per book-trade records; the Internet Archive lending copy is the 1970 printing. Halsband review, Saturday Review March 7, 1953, quoted per the research file (not re-verified against the archived issue this pass; see Researcher’s Note). Shaw 1930 Tales Grotesque and Curious (Hokuseido) per Project Gutenberg #78105 and the Internet Archive. Goossen, Oxford Book of Japanese Short Stories; Rubin, Penguin 2006.
8. “The Lady Aristocrat” by Mikhail Zoshchenko (1923)
Mechanism: political repudiation
“Aristokratka” appeared in Russian in 1923, one of the hundreds of short first-person skaz monologues Zoshchenko wrote in the 1920s: a minor Soviet functionary takes a lady he believes to be an aristocrat to the opera and is humiliated when she orders, one by one, too many cream cakes.
Where to read it.Russia Laughs, trans. Helena Clayton (Boston: Lothrop, Lee and Shepard, 1935), gave Zoshchenko his first book-length American appearance; The Woman Who Could Not Read and Other Tales, trans. Elisaveta Fen (London: Methuen, 1940), carried him to British readers, as did The Wonderful Dog and Other Tales (Methuen, 1942). The Spectator printed Fen’s translation of “The Woman Who Could Not Read” in its June 23, 1939 issue, at https://archive.spectator.co.uk/article/23rd-june-1939/13/the-woman-who-could-not-read. The modern Jeremy Hicks translation containing “The Aristocrat” is at https://archive.org/details/galoshotherstori0000zosh (lending access).
At publication. WorldCat records five editions of Russia Laughs 1935–1966 in 129 holding libraries, a substantial distribution for an interwar translation. The Spectator’s 1939 appearance was followed in the same magazine by an unsigned November 29, 1946 review of Janko Lavrin’s Russian Humorous Stories (Sylvan Press), titled “Russia Laughs,” which praised Zoshchenko’s “descriptions of a hospital and of the dog that was set to find one law-breaker” and noted that “Zoschenko has now been stigmatised by the Soviet Government” (the archive’s spelling). Rebecca A. Domar’s “The Tragedy of a Soviet Satirist, or, the Case of Zoshchenko,” in Ernest J. Simmons, ed., Through the Glass of Soviet Literature (Columbia University Press, 1953), was the major American academic essay on him.
The forgetting. The 1946 Zhdanov decree denouncing Zoshchenko (and Akhmatova) in Pravda, triggered by the story “Adventures of a Monkey,” expelled him from the Union of Soviet Writers and effectively ended his career. Cold War American critics, reflexively suspicious of any Soviet-published author of the 1920s and 30s, did not re-canonize him. Zoshchenko was therefore suspect to both sides: denounced by the Soviets and shelved by anti-Soviet Western critics. Robert Chandler’s 2005 Penguin Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida includes six Zoshchenko stories (“Electrification,” “Pelageya,” “The Bathhouse,” “The Crisis,” “The Galosh,” “The Hat”) and not “The Aristocrat,” which remains the most performable, funniest, and most socially precise of his 1920s pieces, and was dropped.
Why it still matters. Zoshchenko is the point at which Gogol’s civic satire turns into twentieth-century deadpan urban monologue, the line from Aleichem through Flann O’Brien, Donald Barthelme, and Lorrie Moore. “The Lady Aristocrat” is the story in which he invents the Soviet speaker whose language is funnier than he is, a device now almost a default of contemporary short fiction.
Sources. Russian 1923 first publication per standard Zoshchenko bibliography. Clayton 1935 Russia Laughs (Lothrop, Lee and Shepard), WorldCat records. Fen 1940 The Woman Who Could Not Read and Other Tales (Methuen) and 1942 Wonderful Dog, per WorldCat and book-trade records. Spectator 1939 text and 1946 review read in the Spectator online archive, September 2026; the 1946 review is at https://archive.spectator.co.uk/article/29th-november-1946/24/russia-laughs. Domar 1953 in Simmons, ed. (Columbia UP). Zhdanov decree per standard Soviet literary-history sources. Chandler 2005 Penguin TOC, confirmed September 2026.
9. “Gedali” by Isaac Babel (1924)
Mechanism: archive-state capture · political repudiation
“Gedali” was first published in Russian in 1924 and collected in Konarmiya (Red Cavalry) in 1926. The narrator Lyutov, a Jewish commissar riding with Budyonny’s Cossack cavalry, stops on a Friday evening in Zhitomir and argues, across a marketplace stall of dust-grey objects, with the old shopkeeper Gedali, who wants “an International of good people.”
Where to read it. The landmark pre-1960 American edition is Isaac Babel: The Collected Stories, trans. Walter Morison, introduction by Lionel Trilling (New York: Criterion Books, 1955). Princeton’s full catalog entry with contents list is at https://catalog.princeton.edu/catalog/9922915383506421. The 1929 Knopf first-English Red Cavalry (translator traditionally credited as Nadia Helstein) preceded it.
At publication. Trilling’s introduction to the 1955 Morison volume is simultaneously the most important American critical notice any Russian short-story writer received at mid-century. Trilling published it as a stand-alone essay, “Isaac Babel: Torn Between Violence and Peace” (Commentary, June 1955), and later reprinted it as “Isaac Babel” in Beyond Culture (1965). It opens: “A good many years ago, in 1929, I chanced to read a book which disturbed me in a way I can still remember. The book was called Red Cavalry … it was obviously the most remarkable work of fiction that had yet come out of revolutionary Russia, the only work, indeed, that I knew of as having upon it the mark of exceptional talent, even of genius.” Trilling called Red Cavalry “the masterpiece of Soviet literature.” Morison’s selections, which ran from “Crossing into Poland” and “The Church at Novograd” through “Gedali,” “My First Goose,” “The Rabbi,” and on to “Argamak,” organized the American understanding of Babel for roughly half a century.
The forgetting. Babel was arrested on May 15, 1939, executed on January 27, 1940, and officially rehabilitated in 1954. Later retranslations have rebalanced his English presence toward three stories: “My First Goose,” “The Death of Dolgushov,” and “Crossing into Poland.” Peter Constantine’s Complete Works of Isaac Babel (Norton, 2002), with an introduction by Cynthia Ozick, and Boris Dralyuk’s Red Cavalry (Pushkin Press, 2014) both consolidated this leaner canon. The inward, Judaic-philosophical stories that mattered most to Trilling, above all “Gedali” and its companion “The Rabbi,” have fallen out of the working anthology corpus. Chandler’s 2005 Penguin Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida includes exactly three Babel stories (“My First Goose,” “The Death of Dolgushov,” “Salt”) and not “Gedali.” Norton World Literature uses “My First Goose” alone.
Why it still matters. “Gedali” is the story in which modern Jewish political imagination and revolutionary modernity confront each other in a single afternoon, across a stall selling brass chandeliers, dismantled trumpets, and half a broken menorah. It is the direct ancestor of the confrontational-dialogue short story in the hands of Philip Roth, Aleksandar Hemon, and contemporary writers such as Keith Gessen. To teach Babel without “Gedali” is to teach him without his conscience.
Sources. Russian 1924 first publication and 1926 Konarmiya book publication per standard Babel bibliography. Knopf 1929 Red Cavalry (Helstein attribution per Babel bibliographies; the 1929 title page is sometimes uncredited). Morison/Trilling 1955 Criterion edition per the Princeton catalog and standard Babel-in-English reference works. Trilling, “Isaac Babel: Torn Between Violence and Peace,” Commentary (June 1955), confirmed September 2026; reprinted in Beyond Culture (1965). Constantine 2002 Norton Complete Works; Dralyuk 2014 Pushkin Red Cavalry. Chandler 2005 Penguin TOC, confirmed September 2026.
“Buchmendel” was serialized in three installments in the Viennese daily Neue Freie Presse (Nos. 22396–22398, 1–3 November 1929) and collected in Kleine Chronik: Vier Erzählungen (Leipzig: Insel, 1930). A narrator returns to a Viennese café and slowly reconstructs the fate of Jakob Mendel, a Galician-Jewish book-dealer of perfect bibliographic memory who was interned during the Great War for corresponding with Russian booksellers and never recovered.
Where to read it. Eden and Cedar Paul’s translation is in Kaleidoscope: Thirteen Stories and Novelettes (New York: Viking; London: Cassell, 1934), at https://archive.org/details/kaleidoscopethir00zwei (lending access).
At publication. The Viking Kaleidoscope was reviewed by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency wire on May 6, 1934, in a signed notice titled “Stefan Zweig’s Baker’s Dozen of Short Tales and Novelettes”: “There are few things, of equal length published these days, more satisfying than a story, or a novelette, by Stefan Zweig. The Viking Press has just published thirteen of them, in translation, under the title of ‘Kaleidoscope.’ I strongly recommend this book… ‘Buchmendel,’ ‘The Runaway’ and ‘The Governess’ are nothing to be sneezed at, despite the tenable objection to ‘Buchmendel’ as a memoir rather than as a story.” Viking held a Zweig press conference for the American press on January 31, 1935, also covered by JTA; Zweig was one of the most-reviewed European writers in 1930s America. A second American translation appeared as Theodore W. Koch’s “The Old-Book Peddler: A Viennese Tale for Bibliophiles” (Evanston: Northwestern University / Charles Deering Library, 1937).
The forgetting. Two mechanisms compound. Within Zweig’s own English-language canon, his postwar Anglophone reputation consolidated around two titles, Schachnovelle / Chess Story (1942) and Beware of Pity (1939), and every other story, including “Buchmendel,” slid into the shadow they cast. The Eden and Cedar Paul translations were then comprehensively superseded, beginning around 2000, by Anthea Bell’s Pushkin Press translations, which re-launched Zweig for a broad trade readership but fed classics tables rather than university world-literature anthologies. Zweig’s mid-century critical disfavor in the Anglophone academy (traced in the introduction to Vanwesenbeeck and Gelber’s Stefan Zweig and World Literature, Camden House, 2014) kept every short story except Chess out of the canon in the crucial window of canon-formation; the post-2000 trade revival did not retrofit that absence.
Why it still matters. “Buchmendel” is the short story of the twentieth-century bibliophilic unconscious: the direct ancestor of everything from Alberto Manguel’s essays to Javier Marías’s narrators to contemporary writers such as Maria Stepanova and Olga Tokarczuk, for whom the remembered library is the site of moral testing. It also remains the single most precise short fiction on what the Great War did to the multilingual reading public that existed, in a real sense, only in Vienna.
Sources.Neue Freie Presse 1–3 November 1929 first publication, corrected from some secondary sources that cite Die Neue Rundschau. Kleine Chronik (Insel 1930). Paul translation in the Viking 1934 Kaleidoscope at the Internet Archive (contents confirmed September 2026). JTA May 6, 1934 review at https://www.jta.org/1934/05/06/archive/stefan-zweigs-bakers-dozen-of-short-tales-and-novelettes (confirmed September 2026). Koch 1937 Northwestern/Deering edition per WorldCat. Bell translations in The Collected Stories of Stefan Zweig (Pushkin, 2013). Vanwesenbeeck and Gelber, Stefan Zweig and World Literature (Camden House, 2014).
Patterns of Forgetting
Throughout our research, the Longhand Almanac team discovered six recurring patterns when it came to forgetting stories in translation, and every case above instantiates at least two.
Superseded translation with orphaned selections (superseded_translation). The dominant pattern. A later translator of higher literary standing supersedes a first-wave translator and chooses different stories to translate. The first translator’s selections, the specific stories that carried the author into English, drop out with the translation itself. Tagore’s 1916 Macmillan texts are supplanted by Radice and Bardhan; Zweig’s Eden and Cedar Paul by Anthea Bell; Akutagawa’s Kojima by Jay Rubin; Babel’s Morison by Constantine and Dralyuk; Machado’s Goldberg by Costa and Patterson; Peretz’s Helena Frank by Hilde Abel and then Hillel Halkin. In none of these cases does the first translator’s full story-selection travel to the later corpus. The newer translator, rightly, chooses differently, and the author’s English presence narrows.
Translator obscurity and the missing estate (translator_dependency). Translators without independent literary-critical reputations cannot protect their work after death. Jeremiah Curtin was an ethnographer; Helena Frank worked pseudonymously for the Jewish Daily News; Isaac Goldberg was a freelance Boston critic without university tenure; Eden and Cedar Paul were workhorse English translators of German; Elizabeth Mayer was an Austrian-exile editor inside Auden’s circle; Glenn W. Shaw taught at a Japanese university press. None of them left estates or students capable of advocating their story-selections back into anthology curation. Translator obscurity is the institutional form of the mechanism above.
Political repudiation and the Zhdanov-era inheritance (political_repudiation). Zoshchenko was denounced by the Soviets in 1946 and shelved by Cold War Western critics who distrusted Soviet-published authors of the 1920s; Andreyev’s 1919 anti-Bolshevik manifesto blacklisted him in the Soviet export canon and never earned him parallel protection in the West; Babel was executed in 1940 and rehabilitated in 1954, leaving a brief Trilling-shaped window of canonization before the 2000s rebalancing. In each case political repudiation operated as reputational impairment that made subsequent anthologists reluctant to commit a story slot.
Original-language revival bypassing the English corpus (an extension specific to translation). Machado’s 1990s–2000s reboom in Brazil carried over to English via entirely new translations; Peretz’s Yiddish-studies revival post-1980 operated through Halkin and Wisse rather than Frank. In both cases the home tradition recovered the author in the original, and English readers were served by newer translations of different works, leaving the first-English corpus orphaned even as the author returned.
Nobel-inflected canon narrowing (an extension). The Nobel concentrates an author’s English-language presence around a single work. Tagore’s Nobel fixed Anglophone attention on Gitanjali; Sienkiewicz’s on Quo Vadis; Selma Lagerlöf’s on Gösta Berling and Nils Holgersson. The stories that surrounded the Nobel-anointed work in English-language reception at the time of translation are then pruned away by anthology editors who use the Nobel work as the default selection.
First-wave translation corpus loss (an extension). Between roughly 1920 and 1945, a substantial English-language apparatus of translated short fiction was built by translators who were never re-curated: Goldberg on Brazil, Cournos on Russian Symbolism, Helena Frank on Yiddish, Selver on Czech and Polish, Shaw on Japan, Clayton and Fen on Soviet satire. The corpus they built was read, reviewed, and anthologized in its period. Then the anthology-editing generation that inherited world literature after 1960, operating with tighter page budgets and new translators, rebuilt the corpus from scratch rather than preserving what was there. The 1920s–40s first-wave English corpus of translated short fiction is, in effect, a lost century: a library still physically intact at the Internet Archive and HathiTrust, entirely outside the curatorial memory of the present anthology system.
The Mechanism Vocabulary
Each entry above carries its tags from the almanac’s working vocabulary of thirteen mechanisms of forgetting. The seven at work in this list:
superseded translation superseded_translation
A newer translation displaces an older one, and the stories the first translator chose drop out of the corpus.
translator dependency translator_dependency
A tradition’s English-language survival rests on one or two translators; when they die without successors, their story selections die with them.
political repudiation political_repudiation
Blacklist, denunciation, or a disqualifying association; editors drop the name, and the next generation never reads it.
one-story tax one_story_tax
The canon grants an author one representative work and discards the rest of the shelf.
anthology bottleneck anthology_bottleneck
One selection comes to stand in for an author, and later editors copy it; the rest of the corpus stops being reprinted.
anthology petrifaction anthology_petrifaction
Anthology slots assigned decades ago freeze in place across reissues, and the table of contents outlives the judgment behind it.
archive-state capture archive_state_capture
The state suppresses the work and holds the archive; the writing returns decades later to a canon already committed elsewhere.
Three further patterns named above, original-language revival bypass, Nobel-inflected canon narrowing, and first-wave translation corpus loss, are translation-specific extensions of the vocabulary rather than entry tags.
The Case for Active Recovery
Translated short fiction is the single largest reservoir of readable, reviewed, once-canonized prose currently outside the standard anthology apparatus. The stories did not fail their moment, and they did not fade; the institutional machinery of English-language anthology-making moves at the pace of new translations rather than at the pace of surviving texts. Longhand Almanac exists to widen the surface where readers meet writing. Every story above was read, praised, and anthologized in its moment. Every story above is online at a working URL, most of them free, and that is the only literacy test that finally matters.
Bibliography
Stifter, “Rock Crystal.” Adalbert Stifter, “Der heilige Abend,” in Die Gegenwart (Pest, 1845); rewritten as “Bergkristall” in Bunte Steine: Ein Festgeschenk (Pest/Leipzig: Gustav Heckenast, 1853). First English: Elizabeth Mayer and Marianne Moore, trans., Rock Crystal: A Christmas Tale, introduction by W. H. Auden, illustrations by Josef Scharl (New York: Pantheon, 1945). Reissues: NYRB Classics 2008 (Mayer/Moore text, Auden intro); Isabel Fargo Cole, Motley Stones (NYRB 2021). Reception: The New York Times (1945); subsequent Hannah Arendt commentary.
Sienkiewicz, “The Lighthouse Keeper of Aspinwall.” Henryk Sienkiewicz, “Latarnik,” Niwa (Warsaw, 1881). First English: Jeremiah Curtin, trans., Yanko the Musician and Other Stories (Boston: Little, Brown, 1893). Related volume: Else C. M. Benecke, trans., Tales by Polish Authors (Oxford: B. H. Blackwell, 1915), blurbed by Contemporary Review. Reception trail: Filipczak, “Intertextual Illuminations,” Text Matters (University of Łódź), on Malcolm Lowry’s use of the Curtin text in “Through the Panama.”
Peretz, “Bontshe the Silent.” Isaac Leib Peretz, “Bontshe Shvayg,” Yontef Bletlekh (Warsaw, 1894). First English book: Helena Frank, trans., Stories and Pictures by Isaac Loeb Perez (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1906). Partial earlier English: Leo Wiener, The History of Yiddish Literature in the Nineteenth Century (1899). Mid-century: Hilde Abel, trans., “Bontsha the Silent,” in Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg, eds., A Treasury of Yiddish Stories (New York: Viking, 1954). Later canonization: Hillel Halkin, trans., in Ruth Wisse, ed., The I. L. Peretz Reader (Schocken, 1990; Yale 2002). Biographical: Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, University of Pennsylvania; In Geveb, “Figures in Need of Rehabilitation: Helena Frank.”
Tagore, “The Hungry Stones.” Rabindranath Tagore, “Kshudhita Pashan,” Sadhana (Bengali, 1895). First English book: Hungry Stones and Other Stories (London and New York: Macmillan, 1916); translators per the publisher’s Note include C. F. Andrews, Tagore himself, E. J. Thompson, Panna Lal Basu, Prabhat Kumar Mukerji, Sister Nivedita. Later translations: William Radice, Selected Short Stories (Penguin, 1991; expanded 2005); Kalpana Bardhan translations.
Machado de Assis, “The Attendant’s Confession.” Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, “O Enfermeiro” (as “Cousas Íntimas”), Gazeta de Notícias (Rio de Janeiro, 13 July 1884); collected in Várias Histórias (Rio: H. Garnier, 1896). First English: Isaac Goldberg, trans., in Brazilian Tales (Boston: Four Seas, 1921); preceded by appearance in The Stratford Journal (Boston, 1917). Reprint: International Pocket Library, 1965. Goldberg companion: Brazilian Literature (New York: Knopf, 1922). Superseding translations: William L. Grossman, The Psychiatrist and Other Stories (University of California Press, 1963); Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson, The Collected Stories of Machado de Assis (Liveright/Norton, 2018). Scholarship on the French intermediary: Freitas and Costa, Cadernos de Tradução (2015).
Andreyev, “The Seven Who Were Hanged.” Leonid Andreyev, Rasskaz o semi poveshennykh, Shipovnik almanac vol. 5 (St. Petersburg, 1908). First English: Herman Bernstein, trans., The Seven Who Were Hanged: A Story (New York: J. S. Ogilvie, 1909). Second pre-1960 translation: Thomas Seltzer, The Seven That Were Hanged (1925). Anchor anthology: Thomas Seltzer, Best Russian Short Stories (Boni and Liveright, 1917). Critical monograph: Alexander Kaun, Leonid Andreyev: A Critical Study (New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1924). Late-wave translation: Anthony Briggs, Seven Hanged (Penguin Classics UK, 2016).
Akutagawa, “Yam Gruel.” Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “Imogayu,” Shinshōsetsu (1916). First English: Takashi Kojima, trans., in Rashomon and Other Stories, introduction by Howard Hibbett (New York: Liveright, 1952). Adjacent corpus: Glenn W. Shaw, trans., Tales Grotesque and Curious (Tokyo: Hokuseido, 1930; second edition 1938). Period review: Robert Halsband, “Fresh Tales from Japan,” The Saturday Review XXXVI: 10 (March 7, 1953), pp. 59–60. Superseding translation: Jay Rubin, Rashōmon and Seventeen Other Stories, introduction by Haruki Murakami (Penguin Classics, 2006).
Zoshchenko, “The Lady Aristocrat.” Mikhail Zoshchenko, “Aristokratka” (Russian, 1923). First English book: Helena Clayton, trans., Russia Laughs (Boston: Lothrop, Lee and Shepard, 1935). Subsequent: Elisaveta Fen, trans., The Woman Who Could Not Read and Other Tales (London: Methuen, 1940); The Wonderful Dog and Other Tales (Methuen, 1942). Periodical reception: The Spectator, 23 June 1939; The Spectator, 29 November 1946. Academic: Rebecca A. Domar, “The Tragedy of a Soviet Satirist, or, the Case of Zoshchenko,” in Ernest J. Simmons, ed., Through the Glass of Soviet Literature (Columbia University Press, 1953). Modern translation: Jeremy Hicks, The Galosh and Other Stories.
Babel, “Gedali.” Isaac Babel, “Gedali,” first Russian publication 1924; collected in Konarmiya (Moscow: Gosizdat, 1926). First English book: Red Cavalry (New York: Knopf, 1929; Helstein attribution per Babel bibliographies). Landmark American edition: Walter Morison, trans., Isaac Babel: The Collected Stories, introduction by Lionel Trilling (New York: Criterion Books, 1955). Trilling’s introduction republished as “Isaac Babel: Torn Between Violence and Peace,” Commentary (June 1955); reprinted in Beyond Culture (1965). Later canonizing translations: Peter Constantine, The Complete Works of Isaac Babel, introduction by Cynthia Ozick (Norton, 2002); Boris Dralyuk, Red Cavalry (Pushkin Press, 2014).
Zweig, “Buchmendel.” Stefan Zweig, “Buchmendel,” Neue Freie Presse (Vienna), 1–3 November 1929, Nos. 22396–22398; collected in Kleine Chronik: Vier Erzählungen (Leipzig: Insel, 1930). First English: Eden and Cedar Paul, trans., in Kaleidoscope: Thirteen Stories and Novelettes (New York: Viking; London: Cassell, 1934). Second American translation: Theodore W. Koch, “The Old-Book Peddler: A Viennese Tale for Bibliophiles” (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University / Charles Deering Library, 1937). Reception: Jewish Telegraphic Agency, “Stefan Zweig’s Baker’s Dozen of Short Tales and Novelettes,” 6 May 1934. Later canonizing corpus: Anthea Bell, trans., The Collected Stories of Stefan Zweig (Pushkin, 2013). Scholarship: Birger Vanwesenbeeck and Mark H. Gelber, eds., Stefan Zweig and World Literature (Camden House, 2014).
Researcher’s Note
This list inherits its companion’s methodological commitments and its acknowledgment of limits. Several specific caveats bear on the cases above.
Named period-review verification was uneven across cases. Directly quotable period reviews were re-confirmed in September 2026 for Zweig (the JTA notice of 6 May 1934, quoted verbatim above) and Babel (Trilling’s Commentary essay of June 1955). The Halsband Saturday Review quotation for Akutagawa is carried from the research file, which reports quoting the archived text directly; it was not re-verified against the archived issue. The Spectator pages for Zoshchenko were opened and read in the magazine’s online archive before publication: the 23 June 1939 printing of “The Woman Who Could Not Read” (page 13) and the unsigned 29 November 1946 “Russia Laughs” review (page 24), whose quotations above follow the archive text. For Sienkiewicz, the Contemporary Review blurb on Benecke 1915 is the cleanest directly quotable notice; for Peretz, JPS commissioning and the Jewish Quarterly Review appearances constitute institutional endorsement in lieu of a specific magazine review; for Tagore, The Athenaeum of November 1916 still requires confirmation at the source; for Machado, the New York Evening Post review survives only as a clipping described in a dealer catalogue. Treat the Machado and Tagore reception claims as secondarily attested pending archival work.
Anthology-absence verification was spot-checked rather than exhaustive. Robert Chandler’s Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida was confirmed against its full table of contents in September 2026: three Babel stories, six Zoshchenko stories, no “Gedali,” no “Aristocrat,” no Andreyev. The Penguin Book of the International Short Story (Alameddine and Freeman) was confirmed as published in April 2026. The Norton World Literature, Goossen, and Oxford Latin American checks rest on listed tables of contents and standard scholarship. Some of the stories above appear in specialty anthologies (Peretz in Jewish-studies readers, Tagore’s “Hungry Stones” in the VanderMeers’ The Weird), and absence from the general world-literature apparatus is the operative claim.
First-wave translations were handled through digital facsimile rather than physical copies, and four of them are readable through the Internet Archive’s free lending program rather than as open scans: the 1945 Rock Crystal, the Liveright Rashomon (the Archive’s copy is the 1970 printing), the Hicks Galosh, and the 1934 Kaleidoscope. The Internet Archive scan of Goldberg’s Brazilian Tales went dead sometime before September 2026; the Project Gutenberg edition replaces it in this document. The Princeton catalog record for the 1955 Criterion edition sits behind an automated-traffic check; the edition and its contents are corroborated in book-trade records. Collation against physical copies may yet produce small bibliographic corrections, particularly on translator attribution (the 1929 Knopf Red Cavalry has variable Helstein-attribution practice) and on serialization dates. The Neue Freie Presse 1929 datum corrects the widely circulated secondary claim that “Buchmendel” first appeared in Die Neue Rundschau.
Candidates investigated and dropped. Strong candidates that reached late-stage verification but did not make the final ten include Selma Lagerlöf’s “The Outlaws” (tr. Pauline Bancroft Flach, 1899), dropped for thinner direct-quotable period reception; Aleksandr Kuprin’s “The River of Life” (tr. Koteliansky and J. Middleton Murry, 1916), dropped because Kuprin’s “Garnet Bracelet” has been partially re-circulated, weakening the forgetting claim at the author level; Fyodor Sologub’s “Hide and Seek” (tr. John Cournos, 1915), dropped as a third Russian case where two already represent the tradition; and Karel Čapek’s “The Last Judgment” (tr. Paul Selver, 1932), dropped because Čapek remains on the margin of the English-language science-fiction canon through R.U.R. and War with the Newts. All four remain worth a further treatment. Andreyev’s “Lazarus” was investigated and excluded because it currently appears in the Dover Thrift Great Russian Short Stories, which disqualifies it under criterion four in strict form. Bruno Schulz, Robert Walser, Mahfouz, and Andrić were investigated and excluded because their major English reception is post-1960.
The list is complete at ten. The library it points to is online tonight.