United States or Uruguay ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


As for the correspondents themselves, they are townsmen who know the country only from Glyeb Uspensky. Their position is an utterly false one, they must fly into a district, sniff about, write, and dash on further. The Russian correspondent has neither material resources, nor freedom, nor authority.

The result is a deep penetration of the popular mind, in conjunction with an acute, and sometimes sickly, nervousness, which is shown in the works of the great Uspensky, and, more recently still, in Tchekoff, Andreyev, and many others.

We do not find in his work either the nervousness, often sickly, which pervades the works of Uspensky, or the optimism of Zlatovratsky, which often excessively idealizes the life of the Russian peasant, who is the principal hero of all his works.

I was also able to buy a book of his which I have long wanted, his "Foreigners' Accounts of the Muscovite State," which had also fallen out of print. In the same way the Government has reprinted, and sells at fixed low prices that may not be raised by retailers, the works of Koltzov, Nikitin, Krylov, Saltykov-Shtchedrin, Chekhov, Goncharov, Uspensky, Tchernyshevsky, Pomyalovsky and others.

In Zharoshenko's famous picture, "The Student," Uspensky notes something new in this type of femininity. He calls it "the masculine trait"; it is the mark of thought. He sees there the harmonious fusion of a young girl and an adolescent boy, with an expression neither feminine nor masculine, but exceptionally human.

Here Chekhov gained an insight into military society which he afterwards turned to account in his play "The Three Sisters." One day a young doctor called Uspensky came in from Zvenigorod, a small town fourteen miles away. "Look here," he said to Chekhov, "I am going away for a holiday and can't find anyone to take my place.... You take the job on.

It is in this sense then, that Korolenko may be said to continue the literature of 1870, and to be the successor of Zlatovratsky and Uspensky. But he has reincarnated this past in new forms, which naturally result from the activity of his far-sighted, powerful intelligence.

The "barefoot brigade" is not a novelty in Russian literature. We find it in the works of Reshetnikov, Uspensky, Mamine, Zhassinsky, and others. It is true that, up to this time, the vagabonds had been represented as the dregs of the people, as hopeless drunkards, thieves, and murderers.