That he paints directly from life is evident: he tells us that in him is the débris of a painter compelled by poverty to relinquish his ambitions because he had not money enough to buy paper, pencil, colour. Such a realistic brush has seldom been wielded as the brush of Artzibashef. I may make one exception, that of J.-K. Huysmans. The Frenchman is the greater artist, the greater master of his material, and, as Havelock Ellis puts it, the master of "the intensest vision of the modern world"; but Huysmans lacks the all-embracing sympathy, the tremulous pity, the love of suffering mankind that distinguishes the young Russian novelist, a love that is blended with an appalling distrust, nay, hatred of life. Both men prefer the sordid, disagreeable, even the vilest aspects of life. The general ideas of Artzibashef are few and profound. The leading motive of his symphony is as old as Ecclesiastes: "The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be." It is not original, this theme, and it is as eternal as mediocrity; but it has been orchestrated anew by Artzibashef, who, like his fellow countrymen, Tschaikovsky and Moussorgsky, contrives to reveal to us, if no hidden angles of the truth, at least its illusion in terms of terror, anguish, and deadly nausea produced by mere existence. With such poisoned roots Artzibashef's tree of life must soon be blasted. His intellectual indifferentism to all that constitutes the solace and bravery of our daily experience is almost pathological. The aura of sadism hovers about some of his men. After reading Artzibashef you wonder that the question, "Is life worth living?" will ever be answered in the affirmative among these humans, who, as old Homer says, hasten hellward from their birth. The corollary to this leading motive is the absolute futility of action. A paralysis of the will overtakes his characters, the penalty of their torturing introspection. It was Turgenev, in an essay on Hamlet, who declared that the Russian character is composed of Hamlet-like traits. Man is the only animal that cannot live in the present; a Norwegian philosopher, Sören Kierkegaard, has said that he lives forward, thinks backward; he aspires to the future. An idealist, even when close to the gorilla, is doomed to disillusionment. He discounts to-morrow.