Virgin Soil

Turgenev was the first writer who was able to interpret modern Russia to the outside world, having both Slavic and general imagination for this, and virgin lands were the last word of his great will. It was a book that many British readers were destined to meet a generation earlier, and the effect of this, such as Swinburne's Songs Before Sunrise, Mazzini's Tasks of Man, and other intimate documents, was to break the closed boundaries in which they had grown up and expand their new horizons. After that, Tolstoy, the powerful and antipathetic novelist Turgenev, and Dostoevsky and many other Russian writers continued to read: but since he was the greatest artist of all, his individual revelation about the impasse of his country did not lose its effect. By writing prose, without using false music, he arrived at his own style, which approached poetry as much as narrative prose: through its realism or irony, he cast a glimpse of the mixed modern and oriental fantasy that belonged to his temperament. In his youth, he suffered and suffered violently from the romantic sickness of his century and this other sickness of Russia, both of which expressed themselves in what M. Haumand called Hamletism. But in Tselina she is an easy and almost careless master of her instrument, and although she is exiled and sometimes sharply angered, she gathers experience around her theme, because she is an artist who enriched the art of Ley only by surviving her youth, without forgetting her torments, joys, mortifications and love songs.

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