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 worse in morals. No one ever seems to love his compatriots when he observes them in foreign lands; if Americans complain that Henry James has satirised them in his international novels, they ought to read Smoke, and see how Turgenev has treated his travelling countrymen. They talk bad German, hum airs out of tune, insist on speaking French instead of their own tongue, attract everybody's attention at restaurants and railway-stations, — in short, behave exactly as each American insists other Americans behave in Europe.

The book is filled with little portraits, made "peradventure with a pen corroded." First comes the typical Russian gasbag, who talks and then talks some more.

"He was no longer young, he had a flabby nose and soft cheeks, that looked as if they had been boiled, dishevelled greasy locks, and a fat squat person. Everlastingly short of cash, and everlastingly in raptures over something, Rostislav Bambaev wandered, aimless but exclamatory, over the face of our long-suffering mother-earth."

Dostoevski was so angry when he read this book that he said it ought to be burnt by the common hangman. But he must have approved of the picture of the Petersburg group, who under a thin veneer of polished manners are utterly inane and cynically vicious. One of them had "an