Full resolution (JPEG) - On this page / på denna sida - Impressions of Russian Literature - IV
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to happen, pokes fun at the reader’s consternation at the
immorality of the narrator, telling him that it is even
far greater than it appears to be. But in truth this is
not at all a story, but is in all respects a treatise on
social morals. Much which wearies a modern reader,
the description of Viera’s sewing establishment, where
every sewing-girl shares in the receipts, and much more
of the same kind, is for Tchernuishevski only the means
of proclaiming that socialism which he regards as right
and promising for the future. He cannot proclaim his
ideals directly. A careful reading will show that all the
Russian ideas of progress and all the Russian Utopias
are contained in this book.
On a hasty reading one understands nothing at all of
this. The book was not written for the superficial
reader. By an artistic circumlocution the poor prisoner
must inform the reader of his ideas of how the world of
the future will come to look. When he cannot do it
any other way, he lets his heroine fall asleep and tells us
her dreams in regular dream pictures, with symbolical
meaning in great poetical visions, the description of
which sometimes fills over thirty pages in succession.
Thus everything is combined in this book which is
most thoroughly characteristic of Russia: the broadly
constituted nature, the proud frankness, and the radical
disposition to go to the end of the rope; strong
influences from foreign lands, and independent originality,
lively sense of reality down to the dry prose and
penetrating fanatical mysticism.
When the foreigner in Russia, after repeatedly asking
if this or that person is prominent, gifted, remarkably
interesting, or the like, and after continually receiving
a negative answer, at last demands impatiently, “Who,
then, in the whole world is gifted?” then it will happen
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