Essays on Russian Novelists

On leaving the University, he meant to take up a permanent residence in the country; but this enthusiasm waned at the close of the summer, as it does with nearly everybody, and...

Raskolnikov's character cannot be described nor appraised; one must follow him all the way through the long novel. He is once more the Rudin type--utterly irresolute, with a min...

"Dostoevski is still very much read in Russia; and when, some twenty years ago, his novels were first translated into French, German, and English, they were received as a revela...

"Pashkov, a colonel of the Guards, who died in Paris at the beginning of 1902, started in the 'eighties' a movement in St. Petersburg, which was essentially evangelical, with a...

He was far more helpful to Russia, living in Paris, than he could have been at home. Just as Ibsen found that he could best describe social conditions in Norway from the distanc...

But if "Mother" is a dull book, "The Spy" is impossible. It is full of meaningless and unutterably dreary jargon; its characters are sodden with alcohol and bestial lusts. One a...

"Last night, at Count Malatesta's reception, I heard by chance these two words, 'l'improductivite slave.' I experienced the same relief as does a nervous patient when the physic...

"The style of education in that age differed widely from the manner of life. These scholastic, grammatical, rhetorical, and logical subtleties were decidedly out of consonance w...

Throughout this book, as in all Tolstoi's work, is the eternal question WHY? For what purpose is life, and to what end am I living? What is the real meaning of human ambition an...

The fear of death, which to an intensely intellectual people like the Russians, is an obsession of terror, and shadows all their literature, --it appears all through Tolstoi's d...

Gogol spent the last fifteen years of his life writing this book, and he left it unfinished. Pushkin gave him the subject, as he had for "Revizor." One day, when the two men wer...

He proves that he is a man of action in a humorous incident. At a picnic, the ladies are insulted by a colossal German, even as Gemma is insulted by a German in "Torrents of Spr...

Leonid Andreev is at this moment regarded by many Russians as the foremost literary artist among the younger school of writers. He was born at Orel, the birthplace of Turgenev,...

The Japanese war pricked one of the biggest bubbles in history, and left Russia in a profoundly humiliating situation. Her navy was practically destroyed, her armies soundly bea...

It is seldom that Turgenev reminds us of Dickens; but Sipyagin and his wife might belong to the great Dickens gallery, though drawn with a restraint unknown to the Englishman. S...

Nature herself could hardly be colder or more passive than the woman with whom it was Bazarov's bad luck to fall in love. The gradual change wrought in his temperament by Madame...

If Kuprin's story be true, one does not need to look far for the utter failure of the Russian troops in the Japanese war; the soldiers are here represented as densely ignorant,...