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The horror-stricken consternation of his friends fills Sanin with such scorn that he leaves the town, and we last see him in an open field in the country, giving a glad shout of recognition to the dawn. The motto that Artsybashev has placed at the beginning of the novel is taken from Ecclesiastes vii. 29: "God hath made man upright: but they have sought out many inventions."
Not the greatest, but the most sensational, novel published in Russia during the last five years is "Sanin," by Artsybashev. It is not sensational in the incidents, though two men commit suicide, and two girls are ruined; it is sensational in its ideas. To make a sensation in contemporary Russian literature is an achievement, where pathology is now rampant.
Like Gogol and Artsybashev, Chekhov was a man of the South, being born at Taganrog, a seaport on a gulf of the Black Sea, near the mouth of the river Don. The date of his birth is the 17 January 1860. His father was a clever serf, who, by good business foresight, bought his freedom early in life.
Second and third- rate writers, like Merezhkovsky, Andreyev, and Artsybashev, have found their way into England and are still supposed to be the best Russian twentieth century fiction can offer. The names of really significant writers, like Remizov and Andrey Bely, have not even been heard of.
It has acquired a somewhat unaccountable popularity among the budding English intelligentsia. From the literary point of view its value is nil. Artsybashev and Andreyev were very second-rate writers; they had no knowledge of their art and their taste was deplorably bad and crude, but at least they were in a way, sincere, and gave expression to the genuine vacuum and desolation of their hearts.
Gorki has violently protested against the irresolute Slav, and Artsybashev has given us in Jurii the Russian as he is and in Sanin the Russian as he ought to be. But a disease obstinately remains a disease until it is cured, and it cannot be cured by hope or by protest. *Published at Yale University by the "Yale Courant."
He treats his mother's shocked amazement with brutal scorn; he ridicules Lyda's shame at being enceinte; he seduces Karsavina, at the very time when she is in love with Jurii, and reasons with cold patience against her subsequent remorse. It is clear that Artsybashev believes that for some time to come women will not accept the gospel of uncompromising egoism.
Even before the Revolution Gorki had expressed the spirit of revolt; but his position, extreme as it appears to an Anglo-Saxon, has been left far behind by Artsybashev, who, with the genuine Russian love of the reductio ad absurdum, has reached the farthest limits of moral anarchy in the creation of his hero Sanin.
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