Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/42

16 so organised as to render self-sacrifice superfluous, for as long as men exist who are ready and willing to make sacrifices, so long will egoists take advantage of these sacrifices. And seldom indeed have men any right to demand sacrifices from their fellows!

In America, Lopuhov overcomes his love for Věra. How does he effect this? Apart from the consideration that by the year 1863 a flight to America was already a somewhat trite expedient, we feel impelled to ask how Lopuhov could succeed in extirpating his first passion so radically as to be able, not merely to love a second time, but to live tranquilly in close association with his former wife. The author tells us how Věra finds Kirsanov and why she loves him; we understand that an inexperienced girl may delude herself concerning the depth and genuineness of her affection. But Lopuhov, a thinker, a man of wide experience and quite exceptional intelligence, was he also self-deluded when he married Věra? This can hardly have been the case, or he would not have had to journey to America in search of a cure. But the main point is this, that a man or a woman may resolve to love once and once only during a lifetime. What is to be done then? "I will love but once in all my life," is the entry we find in Černyševskii's own diary. What would Černyševskii have said had Lopuhov elected to follow this rede? Would he tell us that it was a needless sacrifice? All honour to utilitarianism, but there are times when it seems narrow and petty.

Černyševskii continued to ponder the problem in Siberia. In a comedy (this writer loved to convey his serious thoughts in paradoxes, jests, and shafts of irony) he shows us a woman who loves two men with an equally strong affection, and the way out of the difficulty is discovered in a marriage à trois. The development of the plot is as follows. First of all the heroine decides between the two men by lot. When the die is cast, she marries one, and the other disappears. The wife falls ill, and, acting on medical advice, goes upon a sea voyage, accompanied by her husband. A storm ends in a shipwreck, and the two are saved by being cast up on a lonely islet and rescued from drowning by the vanished friend and third member of the trio. Recapitulation of the earlier troubles follows, in an aggravated form. Jealousy, despair, thoughts of murder. It seems as if the affair must end in the destruction