The most powerful among this school of writers, and the only one who can perhaps be called a man of genius, is Michael Artsybashev. He came honestly by his hot, impulsive temperament, being, like Gogol, a man of the South. He was born in 1878. He says of himself: "I am Tartar in name and in origin, but not a pure-blooded one. In my veins runs Russian, French, Georgian, and Polish blood. I am glad to name as one of my ancestors the famous Pole, Kosciusko, who was my maternal great-grandfather. My father, a retired officer, was a landed proprietor with very little income. I was only three years old when my mother died. As a legacy, she bequeathed to me tuberculosis. . . . I am now living in the Crimea and trying to get well, but with little faith in my recovery." "Sanin" appeared at the psychological moment, late in the year 1907. The Revolution was a failure, and it being impossible to fight the government or to obtain political liberty, people in Russia of all classes were ready for a revolt against moral law, the religion of self-denial, and all the conventions established by society, education, and the church. At this moment of general desperation and smouldering rage, appeared a work written with great power and great art, deifying the natural instincts of man, incarnating the spirit of liberty in a hero who despises all so-called morality as absurd tyranny. It was a bold attempt to marshal the animal instincts of humanity, terrifically strong as they are even in the best citizens, against every moral and prudential restraint. The effect of the book will probably not last very long,--already it has been called an ephemeral sensation,--but it was immediate and tremendous. It was especially powerful among university students and high school boys and girls--the "Sanin-morals" of undergraduates were alluded to in a speech in the Duma. But although the book was published at the psychological moment, it was written with no reference to any post-revolution spirit. For Artsybashev composed his novel in 1903, when he was twenty-four years old. He tried in vain to induce publishers to print it, and fortunately for him, was obliged to wait until 1907, when the time happened to be exactly ripe.