Page:Phelps - Essays on Russian Novelists.djvu/298

Rh Apart from the terrible indictment of army life and military organisation that Kuprin has given, the novel In Honour's Name is an interesting story with living characters. There is not a single good woman in the book: the officers' wives are licentious, unprincipled, and eaten up with social ambition. The chief female character is a subtle, clever, heartless, diabolical person, who plays on her lover's devotion in the most sinister manner, and eventually brings him to the grave by a device that startles the reader by its cold-blooded, calculating cruelty. Surely no novelists outside of Russia have drawn such evil women. The hero, Romashov, is once more the typical Russian whom we have met in every Russian novelist, a talker, a dreamer, with high ideals, harmlessly sympathetic, and without one grain of resolution or will-power. He spends all his time in aspirations, sighs, and tears—and never by any chance accomplishes anything. The author's mouthpiece in the story is the drunkard Nasanski, who prophesies of the good time of the brotherhood of man far in the future. This is to be brought about, not by the teachings of Tolstoi, which he ridicules, but by self-assertion. This self-assertion points the way to Artsybashev's Sanin, although in Kuprin it does not take on the form of absolute selfishness. One of Nasanski's alcoholic speeches seems to contain the doctrine of