Page:Phelps - Essays on Russian Novelists.djvu/92

 th century. In doing this, he added an immortal character to the world's literature. "Such and such a man is a Rudin," has been a common expression for over fifty years, as we speak of the Tartuffes and the Pecksniffs. The character was sharply individualised, but he stands as the representative of an exceedingly familiar Slavonic type, and no other novelist has succeeded so well, because no other novelist has understood Rudin so clearly as his creator. It is an entire mistake to speak of him, as so many do nowadays, as an obsolete or rather a "transitional" type. The word "transitional" has been altogether overworked in dealing with Turgenev. Rudins are as common in Russia to-day as they were in 1850; for although Turgenev diagnosed the disease in a masterly fashion, he was unable to suggest a remedy. So late as 1894 Stepniak remarked, "it may be truly said that every educated Russian of our time has a bit of Dmitri Rudin in him." If Rudin is a transitional type, why does the same kind of character appear in Tolstoi, in Dostoevski, in Gorki, in Artsybashev? Why has Sienkiewicz described the racial temperament in two words, improductivite slave? It is generally agreed that no man has succeeded better than Chekhov in portraying the typical Russian of the last twenty years of the nineteenth century. In 1894 some one sent to him in writing this question, "What should a