Page:Ossendowski - The Shadow of the Gloomy East.djvu/31

Rh with souls and brains corroded with a hereditary wild desire for disorder, who curse everything and everybody, see darkness in the rays of the sun and the abyss opening under their feet, as they stand upon the paved courtyard of their wretched, lonely, dull cottages. Such degraded souls differ from the whimpering souls of Chehov's heroes inasmuch as their masters are "barefooted."

What then is there terrible in these specific types of the Russian proletariat? Nothing at all; they are rather tragi-comic, pitiful, or at the utmost deserving of the attention of the policeman, of the social welfare worker or the doctor.

And, nevertheless &hellip; a, perusal of the thoughts and imagination of the barefeeters fills the heart of a cultured reader with terror. There is an absolute self-erasement from the ranks of socially conscious human beings! There is a complete amorality, an utter lack of organs for the reception of intuitions and ideas, even of that primitive morality which arrived probably at the moment when two cavemen, resolving upon their troth, took their females with them, founded a family dwelling and began to live as neighbours, whilst searching step by step somewhere in the folds of their undeveloped brains manifold, yet simple, principles of ethics, which have outlived ages, centuries, and civilisations, and endured unto our own days.

There is a hatred and disdain of morality, law, and the principles consecrated by Christianity or the history