Page:Leskov - The Sentry and other Stories.djvu/12

 xii to the spirit of the partizan. This is not to say that Lyeskov was not also "prejudiced" by his experiences. No doubt he generalized over freely about the Nihilists from the specimens he himself had encountered. Again it is declared that in both "At Daggers Drawn" and "The Cathedral Folk," Lyeskov unfairly exaggerated the traits of his unscrupulous characters, but who shall say if this were so, in the light of recent Russian history? An artist may divine elements in the life before his eyes, which only fully declare themselves at a later stage. Thus in "The Possessed" Dostoevsky divined the existence of monstrous personalities which more than a generation later emerged in full light in the hideous figure of Azev. And since Azev!

Anyway, in the stories here translated one does not encounter the spirit of the partizan. "The Sentry" is an excellent objective study of military manners under Tzar Nicholas I., and it reflects in a luminous glass the cast iron rigidity of the code dispensed by the martinets under the Autocrat's frown. Another and a blacker illustration of the abuse of despotic power to which the Russian seems specially prone, is seen in "The Toupee Artist," with its picture, admirable for its atmospheric veracity and dramatic strength, of the "paternal rule" of the Counts Kamensky in Orel. In "The