Virgin Soil

READING, today, this story, which really closed the novelist's great period, the reader finds it full of interest as a problem-novel, aside from that interest of passionate patriotism which, a dozen years ago and more, virtually expatriated its author, and made the heart of "young Russia" beat high with hope. The story deals with the formation of the Nihilist party—that formation so secret and so spontaneous—shows, through the dramatic action of the characters, how hopeless yet how inevitable was this movement, and reveals the pitiless insistence of those national questions that cannot be answered for generations. Both hero and heroine, born of the educated classes, suffer death and disaster in their effort to gain one step forward for the masses. Alexai is a weaker Hamlet. Mariana stands for Liberty herself. All the other characters are living and breathing existences—the dilettante patriot and society man, the practical man of affairs who would win a way for the complaining millions were a way possible, the dull and hopeless peasants, the beautiful, cruel, aristocratic women, the enthusiasts for freedom in both sexes, the informers, the officials, the judges—while over the bitter winter and the happy summer stretched the awful shadows of the prison and of Siberia. A book so profoundly felt will not allow itself to be forgotten.