Excerpt from A Slav Soul: And Other Stories "Oh how incomprehensible for us, how mysterious, how strange are the very simplest happenings in life. And we, not understanding them, unable to penetrate their significance, heap one event upon another, plait them together, join them, make acquaintances and marriages, write books, say sermons, found ministries, carry on war or trade, make new inventions and then after all, create history! And yet every time I think of the immensity and complexity, the incomprehensible and elemental accidentoriness of the whole hurly-burly of life, then my own little life seems but a miserable speck of dust lost in the whirl of a hurricane." So in a paragraph in one of his sketches Alexander Kuprin gives his feelings about his life and his work, and in that expression perhaps we see his characteristic attitude towards the world of which he writes. One of the strongest tales in this collection, "Tempting Providence," is very representative of Kuprin in this vein. After Chekhof the most popular tale-writer in Russia is Kuprin, the author of fourteen volumes of effusive, touching and humorous stories. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.