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A BIOGRAPHY
273
undergone, whieh prevented her from resuming her
scientific studies. She now began again to revise her
"Yæ Victis," and write the preface. The book had
been translated from the Russian MS., and published
in the literary calendar Norm ånn for that year. In
it there is a short passage depicting the struggle of
nature, the awakening from the long winter sleep in
spring. But it is not, as usual in such compositions,
written in praise of Spring. On the contrary, it is the
calm restful Winter which is here idealized. Spring
is depicted as a brutal, sensual being, whieh awakens
great hopes only to disappoint them.
Sonya intended this novel to be part of her own
inner history. Few women have become more
celebrated, or been so surrounded by outer success. Yet
in this novel she depicts the story of defeat, because
she felt herself defeated, in spite of her triumphs, in
her struggle for happiness; and her sympathies were
rather with those who succumb than with those who
conquer.
This deep feeling for suffering was very
characteristic of her. It was not the ordinary " charity " of the
Christian. It was that she made the sufferings of others
her own, not with the superiority which strives to
console, but with the sympathy that is the outcome of
despair—despair at the cruelty of life. Sönya always
said that what she most loved in the Greek religion, in
which she had been educated, and for which she never
quite lost her veneration, was its sympathy for
suffering, which is much more emphasized in this than in any
other form of religion. In literature she was always
most touched by this note in any writer, and it is in
Russian literature that the feeling has found its most
beautiful expression.
Sönya now began to put the finishing touches to the
18
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