Page:Phelps - Essays on Russian Novelists.djvu/36

Rh first completely realised it in Rudin; he afterwards made it equally clear in Torrents of Spring, Smoke, and other novels. Raskolnikov, in Dostoevski's Crime and Punishment, is another illustration; he wishes to be a Napoleon, and succeeds only in murdering two old women. Artsybashev, in his terrible novel, Sanin, has given an admirable analysis of this great Russian type in the character of Jurii, who finally commits suicide simply because he cannot find a working theory of life. Writers so different as Tolstoi and Gorki have given plenty of good examples. Indeed, Gorki, in Varenka Olessova, has put into the mouth of a sensible girl an excellent sketch of the national representative.

"The Russian hero is always silly and stupid, he is always sick of something; always thinking of something that cannot be understood, and is himself so miserable, so m--i--serable! He will think, think, then talk, then he will go and make a declaration of love, and after that he thinks, and thinks again, till he marries.... And when he is married, he talks all sorts of nonsense to his wife, and then abandons her."

Turgenev's Bazarov and Artsybashev's Sanin indicate the ardent revolt against the national