appear in Tolstoi, in Dostoevski, in Gorki, in Artsybashev? Why has
Sienkiewicz described the racial temperament in two words,
improductivite slave? It is generally agreed that no man has succeeded
better than Chekhov in portraying the typical Russian of the last
twenty years of the nineteenth century. In 1894 some one sent to him
in writing this question, "What should a Russian desire at this
present time?" He replied, "Desire! he needs most of all desire--force
of character. We have enough of that whining shapelessness." Kropotkin
says of him: "He knew, and more than knew--he felt with every nerve of
his poetical mind--that, apart from a handful of stronger men and
women, the true curse of the Russian 'intellectual' is the weakness of
his will, the insufficient strength of his desires. Perhaps he felt it
in himself. . . . This absence of strong desire and weakness of will
he continually, over and over again, represented in his heroes. But
this predilection was not a mere accident of temperament and
character. It was a direct product of the times he lived in." If it
was, as Kropotkin says, a direct product of the times he lived in,
then Rudin is not a transitional type, for the direct product of the
forties and fifties, when compared with the direct product of the
eighties and nineties, is precisely the same. Turgenev's Rudin is far
from obsolete. He is the educated Slav of all time; he to a large
extent explains mapless Poland, and the political inefficiency of the
great empire of Russia. There is not a single person in any English or
American novel who can be said to represent his national type in the
manner of Rudin. When we remember the extreme brevity of the book, it
was an achievement of the highest genius.

Rudin, like the Duke in "The Statue and the Bust," is a splendid
sheath without a sword, "empty and fine like a swordless sheath." His
mind is covered with the decorations of art, music, philosophy, and