prostitution being a corroding fester of large cities, and so on,
and so on... an old hurdy-gurdy of which all have tired! No,
horrible are the everyday, accustomed trifles; these business-
like, daily, commercial reckonings; this thousand-year-old science
of amatory practice; this prosaic usage, determined by the ages.
In these unnoticeable nothings are completely dissolved such
feelings as resentment, humiliation, shame. There remains a dry
profession, a contract, an agreement, a well-nigh honest petty
trade, no better, no worse than, say, the trade in groceries. Do
you understand, gentlemen, that all the horror is in just this--
that there is no horror! Bourgeois work days--and that is all...

"More awful than all awful words, a hundredfold more awful--is
some such little prosaic stroke or other as will suddenly knock
you all in a heap, like a blow on the forehead..."

It is in such little prosaic strokes; everyday, accustomed,
characteristic trifles; minute particles of life, that Kuprin
excels. The detailism which crowds his pages is like the stippling
of Whistler; or the enumerations of the Bible; or the chiselling
of Rodin, that endows the back of the Thinker with meaning.

"We all pass by these characteristic trifles indifferently, like
the blind, as though not seeing them scattered about under our
feet. But an artist will come, and he will look over them
carefully, and he will pick them up. And suddenly he will so
skillfully turn in the sun a minute particle of life, that we
shall all cry out: 'Oh, my God! But I myself--myself!--have seen
this with my own eyes. Only it simply did not enter my head to
turn my close attention upon it.' But our Russian artists of the