These two young fellows meet, one summer, in the country. Yuri lives with his father, a retired colonel; Sanine, with his mother. Sanine's sister, Lida, is in love with the officer Zaroudine, who abandons her later when she is with child. Lida wants to commit suicide, but Sanine stops her and proposes that she marry Dr. Novikov, who has been in love with her for a long time. Parallel to the history of Lida, the life story of Karsavina is presented. Yuri falls in love with this young and pretty school-teacher. But, although she returns Yuri's love, the young girl, in a moment of passion, gives herself to Sanine, whom she does not love. Disgusted with life, feeling himself weak, neurasthenic, and sick, Yuri, only twenty-six years of age, commits suicide. Karsavina, terribly affected by this act of despair, leaves Sanine. And the latter, after Yuri's funeral, disappears from the city....
All the characters in the book, from Sanine to Karsavina, are continually preyed upon by carnal desires. Long passages of funereal scenes alternate with pictures of the transports of love and the descriptions of masculine and feminine bodies. "Your body proclaims the truth, your reason lies." This is the "leitmotiv" of all the theories that the characters in the book preach.
Let us hasten to add to the praise of the Russian public, that the enormous success of "Sanine" was not justified by the extreme licentiousness of the book, but by the eloquence with which the author claims the right of free love for man and woman.
Although its success was less than that of "Sanine," Artzybashev's second novel, "Morning Shadows," is more interesting and is more realistic than his first.
Tired of their sometimes happy, sometimes monotonous existence, two young people from the provinces, Lisa and Dora, go to St. Petersburg to take some courses there and to join the [revolutionary] movement. They have read Nietzsche, and want to "live dangerously." In order to realize this project, Lisa has not hesitated to break off her engagement with the charming and naïve Lieutenant Savinov. However, their existence in the capital is nothing but a long and bitter deception: Dora's literary ambitions disappointed! the love of Lisa, who has given herself to the student Korenyev, disappointed! In a fit of despair Lisa kills herself, and her friend, who has not had the courage to follow her example, falls victim to a terrorist outrage which the author describes with rare power.
In his recent novel, "Before Expiration,"—which recalls "Sanine" to our minds again,—Artzybashev has found some ingenious variations on the old theme, "love and death." The story of the love affairs of the painter Mikhailov, a cynical and brutal Lovelace who abandons his mistresses when they are with child, is intermingled incessantly with gloomy episodes, such as the agonies of an old man or of a child. It is a book for "blasé" people, a book which a reader with moral health will not read without a certain feeling of uneasiness.
We are also indebted to Artzybashev for a series of highly colored stories. "Sub-Lieutenant Golobov," "Blood," "The Workingman Shevshrev," and "The Millions" are some of the most remarkable.
Like Artzybashev, but with less talent, Anatol Kamensky has written little stories happily enough conceived. Thus, "Laida"—the story of a worldly woman so taken up with liberty that she exhibits herself nude before her husband's guests. Another story called "Four," tells of four women taken from the most diverse social classes, ranging from a young school-girl to the wife of a clergyman, who give themselves to an officer at the end of a trip of twenty-four hours. Then there is also the story of a woman who proposes to an unknown man that he should play a game of cards with her companions, she being the prize. This story is called "The Game." Finally, there is the story of a young man whose agreeable profession consists in living among others gratuitously and in seducing women under the eyes of their husbands.
These stories are sadly spoiled by a crude philosophy and by "anarchistic" protestations against present values.