PREFACE
“The Emigrant” (Emigranta), by L. F. Dostoieffskaya, a daughter of Dostoieffsky the novelist, was published in 1913, and obtained considerable success in Russia. It is a study of the life of a Russian girl (or should we say woman? for she is not young) in Italy. It is a deeply interesting study of contemporary types. In truth, only two Russians take part in the story, the hero and heroine, Prince Gzhatsky and Irene. But the long struggle which is portrayed is a Russian struggle.
These Russians, however, are not the Russians of Dostoieffsky’s time. They are clearly of to-day.
Pride in Russia, and in Russia’s might and wealth and brilliant future, was one of Irene’s greatest joys. The Russian people seemed to her to be a race of chivalrous knights, ever ready to fight for truth and Christianity, and to defend the weak and the persecuted. When the Japanese War broke out, she asked herself, with the sincerest astonishment, how such pitiful monkeys ever could have declared war on such indomitable knights. She even pitied the Japanese for having fallen victims to such madness! Her despair and suffering at the news of our first failures is therefore easy to imagine. None of Irene’s near relations were at the war, but each of our losses, nevertheless, found its echo in her heart, like a personal misfortune. Overwhelmed with grief, she attached no importance either to the Russian revolution, or to the reforms that followed. Like all passionate idealists when their ideal is shattered, Irene rushed to the other extreme—that of a profound contempt for Russia.
And it is in contempt of Russia that the heroine finds consolation in Italy, and is even ready to throw over the Orthodox Church to which she belongs and enter a convent of sœurs mauves.
The chief interest in the book is the conflict between the influence of a certain Père Etienne and the influence of a compatriot of handsome looks and robust mind, Prince Gzhatsky. Irene is in a pension “teeming with old maids.” She is herself forty and unmarried. She is apparently without near of kin, and is lonely beyond words, but also selfish and extremely condemnatory in her outlook. But she is vivacious, spontaneous, engaging, and always asking pertinent questions.
The high demands she made of her ideal hero, the man she might marry, give one the idea that there is a certain amount of autobiography in this volume, for no doubt ideals ranged high in the home of Dostoieffsky. It is strange, however, that the question of selfishness and unselfishness does not arise in this enthralling study of an unsatisfied soul. Dostoieffsky himself was never tired of a certain Gospel sentence, the thought of which might have given calm to Irene: “Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die it abideth alone; but if it die it bringeth forth much fruit.” The whole book, however, has a haunting suggestion of Dostoieffsky—the ghost of the father is somewhere about.