Vsevolod Ivanov was praised in the 1920s as one of the most original and promising young writers to emerge from the Russian revolution. Although his contribution to postrevolutionary Russian literature is considerable, Ivanov"s work has not been widely available in translation. Fertility and Other Stories makes available for the first time in English some of the best stories of one of the most talented twentieth-century Russian writers.Ivanov"s personal experiences in Siberia and Central Asia during the revolution and the civil war, set against a childhood and youth spent wandering through that vast expanse and nourishing his imagination on such Romantic writers as Edgar Allen Poe and Jules Verne, infuse his writing. Combining traditional elements with the fantastic and the surreal, Ivanov"s stories address not only the themes of the revolution -- the dehumanizing effects of famine; the ferment, energy, and uncertainty of the tempestuous times -- but also the quotidian: the quiet world of man and nature, and the elemental bond that tied peasants to their native land.Fertility and Other Stories contains the stories "Empty Arapia", "The Child", "The Return of the Buddha", "The Field", "The Life of Smokotinin", "Night", "Fertility", "The Dinner Service", "The Mansion", "Tannery Owner M. D. Lobanov", "The Drummers and the Magician Mattsukami", and "Yegor Yegorovich"s Dream", an excerpt from Ivanov"s satirical novel Y. This collection is an introduction to an absorbing and multifaceted writer.