Page:Phelps - Essays on Russian Novelists.djvu/265

Rh has reached the farthest limits of moral anarchy in the creation of his hero Sanin.

In an admirable article in the Westminster Gazette, for 14 May 1910, by the accomplished scholar and critic, Mr. R. C. Long, called The Literature of Self-assertion, we obtain a strong smell of the hell-broth now boiling in Russian literature. "In the Spring of 1909, an exhibition was held in the Russian ministry of the Interior of specimen copies of all books and brochures issued in 1908, to the number of 70,841,000. How many different books were exhibited the writer does not know, but he lately came upon an essay by the critic Ismailoff, in which it was said that there were on exhibition a thousand different sensational novels, classed as 'Nat Pinkerton and Sherlock Holmes literature,' with such expressive titles as 'The Hanged,' 'The Chokers,' 'The Corpse Disinterred,' and 'The Expropriators.' Ismailoff comments on this as sign and portent. Russia always had her literature of adventure, and Russian novels of manners and of psychology became known to Westerners merely because they were the best, and by no means because they were the only books that appeared. The popular taste was formerly met with naïve and outrageous 'lubotchniya'-books. The new craze for 'Nat Pinkerton and Sherlock Holmes' stories is something quite different. It foreshadows a