except by a few virtuous women who go through life coldly and
destructively, driving the men with whom they come in contact into the
arms of their more generous sisters. Women have fewer defences against
the tyranny of society, which makes all but a very few either
prostitutes or prigs, exploiting their womanhood in emotional and
physical excitement, their motherhood to defend themselves and their
self-respect from the consequences of that indulgence. Men are of
harder stuff. Some of them can escape into the intellectual life; many
preserve only their practical cunning and, for the rest, are insensible
and stupid and fill their lives with small pleasures and trifling
discontents, and feed their conceit with success or failure as they
happen._

_In Vladimir Saline Artzibashef has imagined, postulated, a man who has
escaped the tyranny of society, is content to take his living where he
finds it, and determined to accept whatever life has to offer of joy or
sorrow. Returning to his home, he observes and amuses himself with all
that is going on in the little provincial garrison town, where men and
women--except his mother, who is frozen to the point of living
altogether by formula--are tormented by the exasperation of unsatisfied
desires. He sees Novikoff absurdly and hopelessly in love with his
sister, Lida; he sees Lida caught up in an intrigue with an expert
soldier love-maker, and bound, both by her own weakness and by her
dependence upon society for any opinion of her own actions, to continue
in that hateful excitement; he sees men and women all round him letting
their love and their desire trickle through their fingers; he sees
Semenoff die, and death also in that atmosphere is blurred and
meaningless. Men and women plunge into horrible relationships and
constantly excuse themselves. They seek to propitiate society by
labouring to give permanence to fleeting pleasures, the accidents of