Анатема

The most significant thing in Kuprin's creative work is connected with the life of the Russian army at the end of the last century. He saw and artistically revealed the insurmountable weight of the then military discipline, which crushed feelings and thoughts in order to make people's souls dry and flat like barracks squares. He showed thousands of readers the age-old power of the then military hierarchy, which gradually turned commanders into tyrants and subordinates into automated executors. He peered behind the gilded prints of the so-called officer virtues and saw how hypocrisy, careerism, envy were cunningly creeping in. This quiet, modest man, a Russian tsarist officer, was forged from the same noble metal, perhaps, only not as shiny as the Decembrists, "iron men suckled by a she-wolf," as Herzen put it about them. And Kuprin managed to lift onto his weak shoulders the whole weight of cadet and cadet education, of garrison life in the backwater province, of regulations and discipline, and to rebel. There was a difficult, turning point in the writer's life: in 1893, when he failed the entrance exam to the General Staff Academy in St. Petersburg, he decided to leave the army. The young man had neither a salary nor a profession. All his life he had been in orphanages and barracks, all his life he had been taught discipline and obedience. And suddenly the officer felt that he could not take it anymore, that the regulations had become as heavy as lead, that he did not have enough air in the spacious barracks. And despite the peaceful life, the assured future, the beautiful uniforms, the garrison balls, he had to abandon all this in order to find his true essence.