Page:Ossendowski - The Shadow of the Gloomy East.djvu/132

 CHAPTER XVI

URGENIEV, Nekrasoy, Pushkin, Gucharov, and Pezmantov enriched literature with wonderful types of Russian womanhood. But in the west of Europe people did not pay any attention to the fact that the women thus presented were of ancient noble families, of houses living the civilised life of the West, where French culture was supreme and even exclusive.

But now, other giants of Russian literature, Feodor Dostoyevski, and the painter of the petty bourgeosie, Antony Chehov, or the apologist of peasant morality, Leo Tolstoy, draw an entirely different picture.

The woman of the Russian middle class was a "typeless" individual. She had no place left in Russian humanity. From the point of view of civilised man she was dispossessed of wider human rights, while her spiritual needs were symbolised in the "drab fence" of Chehov's tale as a colourless, soulless life: a drunken, or mentally demented husband, a petty provincial official, proud of his rank and uniform, her narrow-minded and old-fashioned folks, little-town gossip, lazy, bourgeois flirtations, which ended in nothing but shame and disgust, without the shadow of a drama.