red light of a lamp”; the crowing of the cocks in the night; the sounds from the frozen river, where the ice cracks, snores, bubbles, and tinkles like a breaking glass; and the young man who, from the night outside, looks through the window at the young girl who does not see him: seated near the table in the flickering light of the little lamp—Katusha, pensive, dreaming, and smiling at her dreams.
The lyrical powers of the writer are given but little play. His art has become more impersonal; more alien to his own life. The world of criminals and revolutionaries, which he here describes, was unfamiliar to him;[1] he enters it only by an effort of voluntary sympathy; he even admits that before studying them at close quarters the revolutionaries inspired him with an unconquerable aversion. All the more admirable is his impeccable observation—a faultless mirror. What a wealth of types, of precise details! How everything is seen; baseness and virtue, without hardness, without weakness, but with a serene understanding and a brotherly pity… The terrible picture of the women in the prison! They are pitiless to one another; but the artist is the merciful God; he sees, in the heart of each, the distress that hides beneath humiliation, and the tearful eyes beneath
- ↑ While on the other hand he had mixed in all the various circles depicted in War and Peace, Anna Karenin, The Cossacks, and Sebastopol; the salons of the nobles, the army, the life of the country estate. He had only to remember.
