Title | Russia's gift to the world |
Creator (LCNAF) |
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Publisher | Hodder and Stoughton |
Place of Creation (TGN) |
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Date | 1915 |
Subject.Geographic (TGN) |
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Genre (AAT) |
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Language | English |
Type (DCMI) |
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Original Item Extent | 48 pages; 22 cm. |
Original Item Location | DK32.7.M3 1915 |
Original Item URL | http://library.uh.edu/record=b8304497~S11 |
Original Collection | Socialist and Communist Pamphlets |
Digital Collection | Socialist and Communist Pamphlets |
Digital Collection URL | http://digital.lib.uh.edu/collection/scpamp |
Repository | Special Collections, University of Houston Libraries |
Repository URL | http://libraries.uh.edu/branches/special-collections |
Use and Reproduction | This item is in the public domain and may be used freely. |
File Name | index.cpd |
Title | Image 17 |
Format (IMT) |
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File Name | uhlib_1315132_016.jpg |
Transcript | I n Russia's Gift to the World is Russian writer whose name, and some at least of whose works, are known everywhere. Turgenev is a supreme artist; Dostoyevsky rejects art in his consuming passion for humanity; with Tolstoy, " art happens," he cannot help being a great artist. No modern writer, hardly any one ancient or modern, has approached him in two things. One of these is his power of creating people and situations that are not so much like life as they are life itself. The other is his power of stirring thought and awakening conscience by going straight to the heart of things, and to the human heart itself. In his narrative, one feels not only that things happened so, but that they could not have happened otherwise ; it is as though Nature herself took the pen and wrote for him. This is the effect produced by all his work ; alike in the vivid descriptive work of his earlier years, like The Cossacks and Sevastopol; or in his vast historical epic of War and Peace, which paints, or rather sets out in the solid, in flesh and blood, a whole civilisation, and a whole generation of the world's history ; or in Anna Karenina, where Russian society comes to life on a large canvas ; or in his autobiographic writings, like Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth ; or in those exquisite short stories, like What Men Live by, Master and Man, The Two Pilgrims, Where Love is, there God is also, where he gives us life in its simplest elements, among poor peasants and artisans, and which are full of infinite fragrance and beauty, of incomparable truth and tenderness and power. He thought little of his own art, for he was too deeply concerned with life, with religion, and with the salvation of mankind, to care about other things. Fame came to him against his will. In his later years, his house at Yasnaya Polyana became a place of pilgrimage from all Europe, like Ferney in the old age of Voltaire, like Weimar in the old age of Goethe. He was not only an artist but a prophet, |