This cause has been abandoned by several writers during the last few years. From 1905 to 1910, an evolution, accelerated by the most audacious hopes and the most lively beliefs, has transformed the story and the novel, and has brought to the front certain authors who, up to this time, had scarcely been known. It seems as if suddenly the ancient tradition of Russian literature had been broken. Contrary to the rule of their predecessors, whose thoughts were on justice and liberty, and whose works breathe forth a wholesome quality, a large number of the present writers have been gradually attracted by metaphysical questions, which fill their works with a veritable chaos of morbid conceptions and disenchantment. Some express with acuteness man's unconquerable fear of life or death; others treat of the divine or satanic principles in man; still others study, with a sickly passion, the problems of the flesh in all of its manifestations.[18] [18] Happily, this literary crisis seems to have been ephemeral. Since the beginning of 1910, according to a Russian critic, "the salubrity of the atmosphere" has been accomplished. The "cursed questions" are less prominent in recent works, and it seems that the crisis which desolated Russian literature for several years has come to an end, and that the writers are going back to the old traditions of Russian literature. Among the latter, Michael Artzybashev is a writer of great breadth, whose erotic tendencies have spoiled some of his best traits. His novel, "Sanine," which recently caused so much talk, pretends to paint the youth of to-day in Russia. If we believed the author, we should conclude that the above-mentioned youth consisted of hysterical people in whom chastity was the least of virtues. The heroes of his novel are two representatives of the revolutionary youth, Sanine and Yuri Svagorich. Both of them have deserted "the cause," Sanine, through lassitude, and Yuri, who has met nothing but a despairing indifference among those whom he wanted to save from "the oppression of the shadows," through scorn. Yuri, "a man of the past," is an "intellectual" entirely impregnated with generous altruism, haunted by social and political preoccupations. But he is also a "failure" who falls from one deception into another, because he is thoroughly powerless to combat life. On the other hand, his friend, Vladimir Sanine, "the man of the future," is, without a doubt, capable of living. None is freer than he from all social and political preoccupations, and none is more than he resolved to obey only his lucid egotism, or the suggestions of his instincts.