Page:Phelps - Essays on Russian Novelists.djvu/294



Tolstoi, Garshin, and Andreev have shown the horrors of war, so Kuprin has shown the utter degradation and sordid misery of garrison life. If Russian army posts in time of peace bear even a remote resemblance to the picture given in Kuprin's powerful novel In Honour's Name, one would think that the soldiers there entombed would heartily rejoice at the outbreak of war would indeed welcome any catastrophe, provided it released them from such an Inferno. It is interesting to compare stories of American garrisons, or such clever novels as Mrs. Diver's trilogy of British army posts in India, with the awful revelations made by Kuprin. Among these Russian officers and soldiers there is not one gleam of patriotism to glorify the drudgery; there is positively no ideal, even dim-descried. The officers are a collection of hideously selfish, brutal, drunken, licentious beasts; their mental horizon is almost inconceivably narrow,