No one ever seems to love his compatriots when
he observes them in foreign lands; if Americans complain that Henry
James has satirised them in his international novels, they ought to
read "Smoke," and see how Turgenev has treated his travelling
countrymen. They talk bad German, hum airs out of tune, insist on
speaking French instead of their own tongue, attract everybody's
attention at restaurants and railway-stations,--in short, behave
exactly as each American insists other Americans behave in Europe.
The book is filled with little portraits, made "peradventure with a
pen corroded." First comes the typical Russian gasbag, who talks and
then talks some more.
"He was no longer young, he had a flabby nose and soft cheeks, that
looked as if they had been boiled, dishevelled greasy locks, and a fat
squat person. Everlastingly short of cash, and everlastingly in
raptures over something, Rostislav Bambaev wandered, aimless but
exclamatory, over the face of our long-suffering mother-earth."
Dostoevski was so angry when he read this book that he said it ought
to be burnt by the common hangman. But he must have approved of the
picture of the Petersburg group, who under a thin veneer of polished
manners are utterly inane and cynically vicious. One of them had "an
expression of constant irritability on his face, as though he could
not forgive himself for his own appearance.
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