He came from a family of country squires and grew up in the literary tradition of the times in which that social class dominated Russian culture, created a literature occupying a place of honour in contemporary Europe, and led to fatal political movements.
The result was one of the most sombre and cruel works even in Russian literature, where such works are by no means rare.
The author gives no historical explanation of the decadence of the muzhikí, except for the brief information that the grandfather of the two principal characters in the novel was deliberately tracked to death by his master's greyhounds.
...The very fact that he is discussing literature at all when he ought,-quite obviously, to be either discussing something important like economic conditions or at least producing some work of art calculated to further social progress militates against him...
...The conception of a detached or neutral literature, of an art whose only end is the pleasure which art itself gives, is, he has now discovered, a conception born only of the bourgeois decadence...
...Literature and Utopia By JOSEPH WOOD KRUTCH I THE American intellectual is no longer much interested in literature as such...
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