“It exposes, as you will see, the whole mechanism of the social movement--but a mechanism that is painted only in poetic colours. Each spring of that engine is touched upon, and each degree of the social scale held up to the light. We see summoned to the bar, as it were, a weak, but vicious, lord, with a swarm of blackmailers who are engaged in cheating him. Also various categories of fallen women are dissected--French women, German women, and others; the whole being done with vivid and striking verisimilitude. Certain extracts from the poem have come to my ears, and I may say that the author is a great man--one hears in him the notes both of Dante and of Shakespeare.” “And whence has he originated?” asked Oblomov, leaning forward in astonishment; but Penkin, perceiving that he had now said too much, merely repeated that Oblomov must read the poem, and judge for himself. This Oblomov declined to do. “Why?” asked Penkin. “The thing will make a great stir and be much talked about.” “Very well: _let_ people talk. ’Tis all some folks have to do. ’Tis their _métier_.” “Nevertheless, read it yourself, for curiosity’s sake.” “What have I not seen in books!” commented the other. “Surely folk must write such things merely to amuse themselves?” “Yes; even as I do. At the same time, what truth, what verisimilitude, do you not find in books! How powerfully some of them move one through the vivid portraiture which they contain! Whomsoever these authors take--a _tchinovnik_, * an officer, or a blackmailer--they paint them as living creatures.” * Government official. “But what have those authors to worry about, seeing that if, as you say, one chooses to take a given model for amusement’s sake, the picture is sure to succeed? Yet no: real life is _not_ to be described like that. In a system of that kind there is no understanding or sympathy, nor a particle of what we call humanity. ’Tis all self-conceit--no more. Folk describe thieves and fallen women as though they were apprehending them in the streets and taking them to prison. Never in the tales of such writers is the note of ‘hidden tears’ to be detected--only that of gross, manifest malice and love of ridicule.” “And what more would you have? You yourself have said (and very aptly so) that seething venom, a taste for bilious incitement to vice, and a sneering contempt for the fallen are the only ingredients needed.”