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Erotic Nihilism in Late Imperial Russia
Erotic Nihilism in
Late Imperial Russia

The Case of
Mikhail Artsybashev’s Sanin

Otto Boele

The University of Wisconsin Press

Publication of this volume has been made possible, in part,
through support from
the A ndrew W. M ellon Foundation .

The University of Wisconsin Press

1930 Monroe Street, 3rd Floor
Madison, Wisconsin 53711-2059
uwpress.wisc.edu

3 Henrietta Street
London WC2E 8LU, England
eurospanbookstore.com

Copyright © 2009
The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any format or by any means, digital, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or conveyed via the Internet or a Web site
without written permission of the University of Wisconsin Press, except in the case of
brief quotations embedded in critical articles and reviews.

5 4 3 2 1

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Boele, Otto.
Erotic nihilism in late imperial Russia : the case of Mikhail Artsybashev’s Sanin /
Otto Boele.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-299-23274-0 (pbk.: alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-299-23273-3 (e-book)
1. Artsybashev, M. (Mikhail), 1878–1927. Sanin. 2. Nihilism in literature.
3. Decadence in literature. I. Title.
PG3453.A8S393 2009
891.73´3—dc22
2009013800
Contents

List of Illustrations vii

Acknowledgments ix
A Note on Transliteration, Translation, and Dates xiii

Introduction 3

1 From Onegin to Bazarov: The Canon of

Epoch-making Heroes 27

2 Sanin: A Hero of Our Time? 51

3 Counterliterature: The Search for Poetic Justice 76

4 The Pornographic Roman à Thèse : Publication,

Censorship, Ban 97

5 Sanin and Its Readers: A Bible for

an Entire Generation? 116

6 Hard-core Saninism: The Case of

the Free Love Leagues 143

7 Muscles for Money: Sanin as Ex-student 170

Conclusion 191

Appendix 195
Notes 207
Index 245

v
Illustrations

Mikhail Artsybashev, 1903 9

Caricature of Ignatii Potapenko 44
Handwritten front page of theater adaptation of
Sanin entitled How to Live? 79
Ad for Friedrich Fehér’s 1924 screen version of Sanin 114
Caricature of the free love leagues 164
Caricature of Mikhail Artsybashev 180
Writer Nikolai Breshko-Breshkovskii and
student-wrestler A. Sh. 185

vii
Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the institutions whose financial support has made
this book possible: the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Re-
search, the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Cen-
tre for International Mobility in Helsinki, the University of Groningen,
and the Institute for Cultural Disciplines of the University of Leiden.
Since 1999, I have published a number of articles, some of which
have gone into this book. I thank the publishers for granting me per-
mission to use this material. My discussion of Count Amori’s Sanin’s
Return in chapter 3 was part of an article published as “Melodrama as
Counter-literature? Count Amori’s Response to Three Scandalous Nov-
els” in the collection of essays Imitations of Life: Two Centuries of Melo-
drama in Russia, ed. Louise McReynolds and Joan Neuberger (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2002). Part of chapter 2 is reprinted from my
introduction to Sanin, trans. Michael R. Katz (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Uni-
versity Press, 2001). Part of chapter 1 was published in slightly modified
form as “‘New Times Require New People’: The Demise of the Epoch-
making Hero in Late Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature,” in Dutch
Contributions to the Fourteenth International Congress of Slavists, Ohrid,
September 10–16, 2008 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008).
Many people have played an important part in the writing of this
book, and I want to thank them for their encouragement, advice, and
practical assistance.
Words cannot express how much I owe to Michael Katz, my friend
and colleague of Middlebury College, who invited me to write the
introduction to his new English translation of Sanin. I thank him for
giving me his relentless support, for providing me with various oppor-
tunities to present my research, and for helping me with the translation
ix
x Acknowledgments

of some of the more awkward Russian quotes. Working on Artsybashev

would have been considerably more difficult without Michael’s interest
and wit. I also wish to thank Nicholas Luker (University of Notting-
ham), the only true Artsybashev specialist on the planet, who took a
keen interest in my work from its inception. I am grateful to my former
colleagues at the University of Groningen, my Doktorvater, Joost van
Baak, and my friend Sander Brouwer, for their support throughout my
scholarly career.
In 1997, I had the great good fortune of spending one year as a visit-
ing scholar in the Slavic Department of the University of California at
Berkeley. I thank Irina Paperno, whose work has been a source of inspi-
ration to me, for making that stimulating year at Berkeley possible and
for commenting on early drafts of my work. I am also grateful to Eric
Naiman, who expressed a genuine interest in my research and allowed
me to use his office during the summer break. Additionally, I would
like to thank Olga Matich for her support and to thank a number of for-
mer graduate students who made my year at Berkeley a memorable ex-
perience: Evgenii Bershtein, Ingrid Kleespies, Konstantin Klioutchkine,
and Robert Wessling.
I owe a great debt to Joachim Klein, professor emeritus at the Uni-
versity of Leiden. He has generously supported my applications for
jobs and endowments, and he introduced me to a number of inspira-
tional scholars from Germany, Italy, and the United States. I appreciate
his continuing interest in the fate of Slavic studies at Leiden.
In Russia, several people have been invaluable extending to me their
professional expertise, hospitality, and friendship. I am extremely grate-
ful to my friends and colleagues Vladimir and Marina Abashev and
Elena Vlasova (Perm), Aleksandr Belousov and Elena Dushechkina (St.
Petersburg), and Tatiana Tsivian and Vladimir and Masha Kliaus (Mos-
cow). I would like to express my particular appreciation to Dmitrii Ra-
vinskii of the National Library in St. Petersburg, who always complied
with my bothersome requests to order copies or check obscure sources.
A great number of people have otherwise contributed to this book,
perhaps without even being aware of it. I am grateful to Joe Andrew,
Carolyn Ayers, Peter Barta, Mojmír Grygar, Ben Hellman, Pepijn Hen-
driks, Andrew Kaspryk, Henk Kern, Kirill Kobrin, Arthur Langeveld,
Ronald LeBlanc, Louise McReynolds, Peter Ulf Møller, Susan Morrissey,
Joan Neuberger, Riccardo Nicolosi, Pekka Pesonen, Galina Rylkova,
Igor Smirnov, Willem Weststeijn, Ben Wiegers, and Frederick White.
Acknowledgments xi

Jos Schaeken, head of the Slavic Department in Leiden, merits spe-

cial thanks for his support and, particularly, for his patience. I am grate-
ful to Ellen Rutten and Egbert Fortuin for reading part of the manu-
script and for simply being great colleagues. For her assistance in the
preparation of the final text and her perceptive comments, I should like
to thank Thera Giezen. Of course, the responsibility for the final result
lies entirely with me.
Finally, I would like to thank my wife, Sandra, and my parents-in-
law, Reint and Sanny Molenkamp, for enabling me to complete this
book.
A Note on Transliteration, Translation,
and Dates

In the main text, I have relied on the Library of Congress system of

transliteration with a few exceptions. The names of Russian rulers and
well-known cultural figures are expressed in the more familiar English
versions (Nicholas for Nikolai, Tolstoy for Tolstoi). In the notes I adhere
strictly to the Library of Congress system (Gippius for Hippius). Dates
are expressed in accordance with the Julian calendar. All translations
are mine unless otherwise indicated.

xiii
Erotic Nihilism in Late Imperial Russia
Introduction

I n February 1908 Lev Tolstoy received an agitated letter from a certain

Moisei Dokshitskii, the seventeen-year-old son of a watchmaker,
who claimed to have fallen into a state of utter confusion after reading
Mikhail Artsybashev’s novel Sanin (1907). Always striving for “inner
perfection,” as he put it, Dokshitskii became convinced that the novel’s
eponymous hero embodied his ideal: “[He is] the perfect man who you
want to become once you have seen him.” After acquainting himself
with Tolstoy’s writings, however, he began to doubt whether the un-
abashed sensualist Vladimir Sanin was worth emulating: “I simply
cannot decide what is better, saninstvo or the Christian teaching. . . . If
you can understand the state I am in, please, write to me as soon as
possible.”1
For Tolstoy, this letter was an incentive to read Artsybashev’s novel
himself. In his reply to Dokshitskii, written only a few days later, we
learn that Sanin has filled him with horror “not so much because of the
smut but because of the stupidity, the ignorance, and the self-assurance
[of the author].” Apparently not familiar with the works of either East-
ern or Western philosophers, Artsybashev seemed to revel in “inverted
commonplaces,” cheaply stating the opposite of what was generally ac-
cepted.2 To help Dokshitskii overcome his moral agony, Tolstoy prom-
ised to send him a copy of his “Reading Circle,” his own anthology of
thoughts and statements by famous philosophers, and also suggested
that Dokshitskii read the Gospel.3
Before Tolstoy could even mail his reply, Dokshitskii had managed
to write a second and much calmer letter, in which he stated that his in-
fatuation with saninstvo was over: “After reading Sanin and the like, it
seemed to me that I had found my own essence, but gradually I became
3
4 Introduction

aware of certain incongruities between saninstvo and life.”4 Although

Dokshitskii was still interested in Tolstoy’s opinion of Sanin, the contest
between saninstvo and the Gospel in his own life had now clearly been
decided in favor of the latter.
Was there really a teaching called saninstvo in early twentieth-
century Russia, as Dokshitskii’s letters suggest? The short answer to
this question must be negative. To the best of my knowledge, there are
no manifestos or theoretical writings, other than the novel itself, that se-
riously promoted a coherent ideology under such a heading. And yet,
to many of Artsybashev’s contemporaries, saninstvo or “Saninism” was
not only something very real but also even ubiquitous.5 Newspapers
reported on “Saninists” disturbing public lectures. Critics noted the rise
of a pleasure-seeking, “Sanin-like” hero in Russian literature and the
widespread imitation of his shameless behavior in everyday life. The
main impetus for writing this book was a desire to explain how this no-
tion that saninstvo was a popular and widespread ideology came about
as well as to trace the echoes of this notion in Russia’s cultural memory.
Saninism was never exposed as a false rumor or a concoction of the
press, at least not in a manner convincing to everyone. Even today,
some consider the story of Saninism to be if not incontestably true, then
at least highly plausible. When I recently googled the term “Saninism,”
one of the hits directed me to a site containing an article on the recep-
tion of Russian literature in Japan that not only mentions the Japanese
translation of Sanin (traditionally advanced as the ultimate proof of its
incredible success) but also maintains that early twentieth-century
Russia witnessed an entire movement called Saninism.6 For all the triv-
iality of this source (an internet site on Russian-Japanese cultural rela-
tions), it provides a graphic illustration of how easily and uncritically
the notion of an ideology inspired by the character Vladimir Sanin has
been perpetuated.
As this study attempts to show, Saninism is not a historical phenom-
enon such as communism or populism, the main ideas and figureheads
of which everyone can name. But it is not a mere chimera either. Sanin-
ism, I argue, is a myth that, to many people, “explained” something
about life in Russia during the last decade of the tsarist regime and that
continues to color our perception of the period in question. Precisely
because of this lasting ability to function as a signifier of a perceived
moral decline during the twilight of the Russian empire, closer analysis
of the myth’s assumptions and implications can yield vital insights into
early twentieth-century Russian culture. In what circles, for example,
Introduction 5

did Saninism reportedly occur? What was the social and political back-
ground of its alleged followers? What genres did writers use to vent
their concern? By asking these questions, I hope to show that the myth
of Saninism is more than a number of sensationalist reports in the
boulevard press and more than simply a catchall term used to desig-
nate whatever was felt to be wrong with the nation. The myth of Sanin-
ism, I contend, is a system of interlocking discourses on adolescence,
sexuality, Russia’s system of secondary education, and the legacy of the
radical intelligentsia of the 1860s. To many of Artsybashev’s contempo-
raries, Saninism served as an interpretative framework that allowed
them to make sense of both the “failed” revolution of 1905, which had
nearly toppled the monarchy, and the equally confusing events that im-
mediately followed it. This is not to say, of course, that these issues
were necessarily addressed with explicit reference to Sanin. Many of
them predated the publication of the novel. Yet it is the case that, after
its publication, Sanin was widely acknowledged to be the most out-
spoken expression of the “spirit of the time,” an emblem of the intelli-
gentsia’s often bemoaned “egotistic” mentality after the rebellion of
1905. As the influential critic Vladimir Kranikhfel’d put it in 1909, “You
may not like Sanin, but you cannot ignore him. He is an undeniable fact
of Russian life.”7

The Ugly Face of the Silver Age

The myth of Saninism inevitably intersects with an even more powerful

one in the history of Russian culture. This is the myth of what is now
commonly referred to as the Silver Age, a period of aesthetic and spiri-
tual blossoming that is usually situated between the rise of symbolism
in the early 1890s and the Bolshevik takeover in October 1917. Al-
though this period is now considered one of the finest in the history of
Russian literature and art, its reputation was downright unfavorable in
the 1920s and early 1930s, when it was associated with sexual deprav-
ity, overt hedonism, and pornographic literature.8
Predictably, it is this view that Soviet historiography and literary
criticism preferred to uphold, since it allowed for the implication that
the October Revolution of 1917 had been both purgative and inevitable.
Speaking at the first convention of Soviet writers in 1932, Maxim Gorky
set the tone when he characterized the last decade of the old regime as
“the most shameful and impudent decade in the history of the Russian
6 Introduction

intelligentsia.”9 After the revolution of 1905, the intelligentsia had

betrayed its traditional ideals of self-abnegation and political activism,
Gorky believed, and instead had dedicated itself to the petty pursuit of
personal happiness. Literature could not but reflect this mood, and so it
was not surprising that novels suffused with themes of sex and suicide
enjoyed such enormous success: “Shrewd Vasilii Rozanov propagated
eroticism, Leonid Andreev wrote nightmarish stories and plays, Artsy-
bashev chose a lascivious vertical male-goat wearing pants as his hero
[i.e., Vladimir Sanin].”10 For years, this narrative of moral and cultural
degeneration, followed by revolutionary salvation, would be the stan-
dard Soviet story of the decade 1907–17. Even Elem Klimov’s sophisti-
cated, if controversial, film Agony (Agoniia [1974]) on the murder of the
debauched mystic Grigorii Rasputin in December 1916 does not refrain
from reproducing this scheme. In the epilogue, a voice-over briefly out-
lines the historic events that followed the murder of Rasputin, but it
deliberately avoids mentioning the February Revolution. Thus, the im-
pression is created that it was the October Revolution, not its “bourgeois
precursor,” that put an end to the monarchy and liberated the Russian
people.11
Russian emigrants were less inclined to view the establishment of
Bolshevik power in such positive terms, of course, but for a long time
they too regarded Russia’s fin de siècle as a time of cultural decline and
moral corruption. In 1926 Vladislav Khodasevich, an emigrant poet
who had collaborated with several figureheads of Russian modernism,
described the intellectual climate before the revolution as follows: “We
were living in those years that followed the year 1905: these were the
years of spiritual fatigue and of pervading aestheticism. In literature
[this period was marked] by numerous low-quality imitators of the
modernist school, which suddenly became recognized precisely for
those aspects [of it] that were bad and insignificant. In society, frail bare-
foot girls were resurrecting Hellenism. The bourgeoisie, who suddenly
discovered an appetite for a ‘daring life,’ ran up against ‘sexual ques-
tions.’ The sanintsy and ogarki were multiplying at the lower level. Deca-
dent buildings were built on the streets. And, without being noticed,
electric charges were slowly accumulating above it all.”12
Despite the snobbish overtones in Khodasevich’s words, his charac-
terization of the interrevolutionary years does not differ fundamentally
from Gorky’s. Not only do both men agree on the loathsomeness of
much that was published in these years, but, writing from the vantage
point of history, they also invest their account with a conspicuous sense
Introduction 7

of doom suggesting that a dramatic apotheosis was imminent. Regard-

less of their ideological, political and aesthetic differences, then, Gorky
and Khodasevich arrived at rather similar conclusions regarding the
moral standards of prerevolutionary Russian culture and the inevitabil-
ity of its ruin.
This disparaging view of prerevolutionary modernism continued to
dominate Soviet scholarship well into the 1970s, but a more positive at-
titude began to take shape among emigrants in the late 1930s.13 Turn-of-
the-century culture came to represent the pinnacle of modern Russian
poetry and religious thought, an inexhaustible source of cultural rich-
ness created by the nation’s finest minds. As a consequence, the Octo-
ber Revolution came to be remembered as a national disaster that had
brutally interrupted the “natural” course of Russian cultural evolu-
tion.14 Even if this process of reappraisal would never completely erad-
icate the initial vision of Russia’s fin de siècle as that of a period of deca-
dence and all-pervasive aestheticism, the image that finally emerged
and came to be cherished by members of the emigrant community, and
by dissidents in the 1960s, was that of a vital and thriving culture tragi-
cally cut short.
The myth of Saninism fit in well with the Soviet narrative of revolu-
tionary salvation. While it would have been inconceivable to devote an
individual monograph to either Sanin or other “pornographic” litera-
ture, historical studies, biographical dictionaries and even memoirs
could mention it in passing so as to conjure up a befitting image of the
most “shameful and impudent decade in the history of the Russian in-
telligentsia.” It is equally understandable that the myth of Saninism
proved incompatible with the lofty image of the Silver Age as a time of
cultural revival. This explains why the sanintsy figuring in Khodase-
vich’s 1926 article were seemingly erased from cultural memory once
the positive reputation of the Silver Age was firmly established.15 An
exile himself and an ardent opponent of the Bolsheviks, Artsybashev is
rarely mentioned in emigrant sources after the 1930s; between his death
in 1927 and the very end of the Soviet Union, his work was never pub-
lished again, either in Russia or abroad.16
I am not suggesting that Sanin and the scandal it created were en-
tirely forgotten in emigrant circles. In his well-known Contemporary
Russian Literature (1926), D. S. Mirsky devoted a few lines to Artsyba-
shev that have been reproduced in more recent histories of Russian liter-
ature (and to which I return in chapter 5). But all in all, it may be fair to
say that the myth of the Silver Age, as it was created in memoirs, essays
8 Introduction

and (auto-)biographies, was purged of names and works that contra-

dicted the perceived essence of that period. One of the goals of this
book is to trace the blind spots of this myth by studying the reception of
Sanin and to restore, as it were, the ugly face of the Silver Age.

Modernism and Neorealism

It could be objected that the connection between Artsybashev and the

Silver Age is rather tenuous and that any attempt to make it look more
significant must fail. After all, Artsybashev was, and considered him-
self to be, an exponent of the realist school, precisely the style with
which modernism sought to break.17 In a 1913 interview, he made his
views on literature clear: “Common sense, consistency, argumentation,
a clear and concrete idea of one’s subject that constitutes the plot of the
work, a thoughtful evaluation of the phenomena introduced in the
novel, clarity and concreteness—these are the things I demand of a lit-
erary work.”18 In addition, one could argue that the quality of his work
simply proved too poor to stand the test of time and that it was forgot-
ten because it is inferior, not because of some deeply felt need among
emigrants or dissidents to create a mythic past that was carefully
cleansed of suspicious names.
Echoing Iurii Tynianov’s ideas on literary evolution, scholars have
often treated Artsybashev’s work as a “vulgarization” of a more re-
spectable movement—realism or modernism—already in decline.19 We
find this notion in studies discussing Artsybashev’s alleged indebted-
ness to the work of Ivan Turgenev (see chapter 2) and the ideas of Frie-
drich Nietzsche. Edith Clowes, for instance, discusses Sanin as an ex-
ample of Nietzsche’s “distorted popularization,” ranking its author
next to other “lowbrow writers” such as Anastasiia Verbitskaia and
Anatolii Kamenskii.20 Using a vaguely defined, but essentially similar,
tripartite classification of prerevolutionary fiction, Jeffrey Brooks places
Sanin not in the lowest but in the middle segment, viewing it as a “male
equivalent to the women’s fiction [of Verbitskaia].”21 These and other
scholars seem to agree that Sanin and Verbitskaia’s bestseller Keys to
Happiness (Kliuchi schast’ia [1909–13]) catered to the needs of a semi-
intellectual audience, allowing them to appropriate themes and images
introduced in the highbrow writings of modernist authors.22
This study is not intended to redefine the canon of early twentieth-
century Russian literature by claiming Sanin as a forgotten masterpiece.
Mikhail Artsybashev, 1903.
10 Introduction

On the whole, I agree that Artsybashev was not a particularly original

writer. I do think, however, that the relationship between Artsybashev
and modernism is more complicated than the traditional distinction be-
tween realist and modernist writing, and between high and low litera-
ture, suggests. While it is true that many modernist authors thoroughly
disliked Artsybashev’s work, it is equally true that aesthetic and ideo-
logical differences did not prevent them from collaborating with him.23
Under the editorship of Artsybashev and on his personal initiative, the
liberal monthly Sovremennyi mir (Contemporary World) published sev-
eral of Aleksandr Blok’s poems. Blok, for his part, was one of the very
few reviewers who admitted to being impressed with Sanin, which he
called “Artsybashev’s most significant work so far.”24 Symbolist Fiodor
Sologub was a regular contributor to the almanac Zhizn’ (Life), which
Artsybashev had set up as a counterpoint to Gorky’s almanac Znanie
(Knowledge). After the October Revolution, other symbolists, such as
Zinaida Hippius and Dmitrii Merezhkovskii, who shared his hatred
of the Bolshevik regime, forged political alliances with Artsybashev.
Without ignoring the skepticism with which the symbolists treated the
realist camp and Artsybashev personally, I propose a more lenient ap-
proach to the distinction between realism and symbolism on which lit-
erary historiography has traditionally insisted. Artsybashev was not
that much of an alien in the eyes of the symbolists that they would
refuse to work with him. I would not venture to say the same about
Verbitskaia.
Even more important for the purpose of this study: the boundaries
that we may be tempted to draw between serious literature and popu-
lar fiction, between the experimental and subtle prose of Andrei Bely or
Mikhail Kuzmin and the more conservative aesthetics of Artsybashev
or Anatolii Kamenskii, were not all that obvious to the popular press
and its readership that together played a crucial role in spreading the
idea of a massive Saninist movement. Authors as divergent as Artsyba-
shev, Sologub, Kamenskii, Bal’mont, and Kuzmin were often grouped
together on the assumption that they all wrote pornography and
openly professed sexual license. It is ironic that Artsybashev considered
Mikhail Kuzmin’s homoerotic novel Wings (Kryl’ia [1907]) a distortion
of his own ideas and that Kuzmin felt equally uncomfortable being as-
sociated with Artsybashev.25 Whatever his actual place in the extremely
varied landscape of early twentieth-century Russian literature, Artsy-
bashev was widely perceived as a key figure of “modern” literature
with all the ambivalent associations that such an identification entailed.
Introduction 11

Finally, it is my contention that when Artsybashev’s novel was pub-

lished in 1907, it lived up to the idea of what many authoritative critics
then considered “serious” literature. In terms of style, plot develop-
ment, and narration, Sanin is an extremely traditional novel that never
tries to conceal its indebtedness to nineteenth-century realism. From
the vantage point of literary history, the novel’s conservative aesthetics
may be sufficient reason to discard it as a one-time hit of an epigone of
the great realist writers; to Artsybashev’s contemporaries, however,
this traditional orientation may have prompted them to take the novel
seriously in the first place and to read it in a “traditional” manner as an
important chronicle of contemporary life. Whatever we may think of
Artsybashev’s lack of innovation, it appears to have been an essential
precondition for the emergence of the myth of Saninism.

Sanin: The Scandal

Most students of Russian literature know, even without having read the
novel, that Sanin caused a huge scandal owing to its “pornographic” or,
at least, licentious content and that it was officially banned because of
it. By Russian standards, its bawdiness makes it an exceptional book, if
we are to believe writer Viktor Erofeev. Overlooking the barren land-
scape of erotic literature in Russia, Erofeev could not produce any ex-
amples of such texts with the exception of a “few stories by Aleksei Tol-
stoy” and “of course . . . Sanin.”26
When viewed in the international context of fin-de-siècle culture,
however, Sanin looks anything but unique. At the turn of the century,
under the influence of such thinkers as Max Stirner and especially Frie-
drich Nietzsche, European authors started to challenge the repressive
sexual morality of their age, professing a life-affirming and individual-
istic philosophy of life that legitimized the pursuit of sensual pleasure.
Like Artsybashev, some of these authors had difficulties getting their
work published or performed. In Germany, Frank Wedekind’s notori-
ous play Spring Awakening (Frühlingserwachen), which openly deals with
teenage pregnancy and homosexuality, finally premiered in 1906, fif-
teen years after it was completed, but with significant cuts.27 In 1960 the
belated publication of D. H. Lawrence’s linguistically far more explicit
novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover (first privately printed in Italy in 1928)
caused public outrage in England, which resulted in an obscenity trial
against its publisher, Penguin Books.28 Sanin, then, we might be tempted
12 Introduction

to conclude, is simply the Russian version of a literary scandal that

other European countries also witnessed.
To a considerable extent, this conclusion is valid. Although Artsyba-
shev stubbornly maintained not to have read Nietzsche, in Sanin and
some of his other stories, the German philosopher looms large. If any-
thing, the felt presence of Nietzsche illustrates the extent to which his
ideas must have been “in the air” in Russia (as is now commonly ac-
cepted) and, consequently, how unoriginal Sanin really is.29 Yet, just as
Spring Awakening and Lady Chatterley’s Lover have unique reception his-
tories that were determined by the literary traditions and moral sensi-
tivities of German and British readers respectively, so too the Sanin
scandal cannot be reduced to a “general European” clash between the
competing value systems of the nineteenth century and modernity. The
question remains how this general clash manifested itself in Russia and
what uniquely political, religious, and social connotations it acquired in
the perception of various groups of Russian readers. Far from advocat-
ing an approach that posits the uniqueness of Russian history as op-
posed to a supposedly unified path of development in “the” West, I
nonetheless explore the scandal of Sanin with an eye toward its cultural
and national specificity. Thus, I hope to show that the erotic descrip-
tions in the novel (which are tame by any standard) cannot fully ac-
count for the indignation it caused, even if it was eventually banned by
the 1001st statute, popularly known as the “statute on pornography.”
But what about the Russian context? Is Artsybashev’s novel really
that exceptional, as Erofeev seems to think? Despite Erofeev’s apparent
inability to name any erotic texts in Russian literature besides a “few
stories by Aleksei Tolstoy” and Sanin, the fact that the latter was widely
regarded as a “sign of the times” would suggest that there were other
texts professing similar ideas, albeit in a less outspoken manner. In
their introduction to the abridged translation of Verbitskaia’s novel Keys
to Happiness, Beth Holmgren and Helena Goscilo speak of a “canoni-
cally neglected fund of racy fin-de-siècle texts,” which includes, among
others, Kuzmin’s aforementioned Wings, Lidiia Zinov’eva-Annibal’s
“Thirty-Three Abominations” (“Tridstat’-tri uroda” [1907]), Evdokiia
Nagrodskaia’s Wrath of Dionysus (Gnev Dionisa [1910]), Verbitskaia’s
Keys to Happiness, and, of course, Sanin. What these texts have in com-
mon, according to Holmgren and Goscilo, is that they “blend philoso-
phy and pseudo-science with melodrama, to promote individual free-
dom through sexual nonconformism or transgression.”30 Inasmuch as
this list could easily be extended, we might want to ask whether Sanin
Introduction 13

is really that unique, even when viewed within the narrower context of
turn-of-the-century Russian literature.
Here again, I should stress that I am not in any way attempting to
“save” Sanin, for example, by claiming that Artsybashev was the first
to promote sexual nonconformism or by arguing that, as a writer, he
should still be ranked above Verbitskaia, the creator of “Sanin in a
skirt.”31 I fully acknowledge that, apart from reflecting a more general
preoccupation with sexuality that manifested itself in late-tsarist Rus-
sia, the novel is indeed one of many fictional texts written around that
time in which traditional sexual morality is challenged.32 The reason
to restrict myself to Sanin is that I do believe its reception history to
be quite exceptional. By studying its reception, we can learn not only
about Russia’s appropriation of alternative models of sexuality or
about the emancipation of the middle-class reader but also about the
way in which the paradigm of nineteenth-century realism continued to
inform the tastes of readers and critics alike. I contend that it was not so
much the novel’s promise of unbridled sex as the paradox of an “egotis-
tical” and “rapacious” ideology being expressed in a work that was sty-
listically of a piece with the tradition of the nineteenth-century novel
that unsettled Artsybashev’s contemporaries. Because critics on the left
invariably associated realism with democratic sympathies and the
struggle for social improvement (opposing it to the supposedly escapist
literature of modernist writers), a traditional but “antihumanistic”
novel such as Sanin was likely to leave a bewildering impression. Like
Nikolai Chernyshevsky and Tolstoy, Artsybashev employed an omni-
scient narrator who regularly interrupts the story with pedantic di-
gressions on man’s moral hypocrisy and self-deceit. Yet, Sanin’s often
quoted maxim that man should strive to “satisfy his natural needs,
even if they are evil” was obviously at odds with Chernyshevsky’s con-
cept of egotistical rationalism, not to mention with Tolstoy’s insistence
on the need for total abstinence.33
In terms of the public outcry it generated, Sanin may well be com-
pared to other notorious texts in Russian literature, such as the first let-
ter of Piotr Chaadaev’s Lettres philosophiques (Filosofischeskie pis’ma), first
published in 1836; Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends (Vy-
brannye mesta iz perepiski s druziami [1847]), Nikolai Gogol’s reactionary
collection of reflections and exhortations; and What Is to Be Done? (Chto
delat’? [1863]), Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s utopian novel. Even if the cul-
tural and historical significance of these works is much greater than
that of Sanin, the vehemence of the debate that Artsybashev’s novel
14 Introduction

provoked suggests that it had contemporary significance. Interestingly,

the case of Sanin resembles in some respects the three earlier scandals.
Like Gogol, who was widely considered the champion of socially criti-
cal literature until he spoke out in favor of serfdom and autocracy, Ar-
tsybashev lost his reputation as a progressive writer the moment he
published Sanin. Henceforth, leftist critics and Soviet scholars would
consider him a “reactionary” and “decadent” writer who unresistingly
recorded the debauched spirit of late-tsarist Russia. Artsybashev’s fall-
ing into disfavor with the left did not redeem him in the eyes of the
authorities, however. To them, his novel was a politically suspect work
that was likely to conduce to the corruption of youth and the spread of
revolutionary ideas. In this respect, the brouhaha over Sanin recalls the
publication history of What Is to Be Done? Indeed, the censor explicitly
compared the reception of the two books.34 Artsybashev was spared the
lamentable fate of Chaadaev, who was placed in an asylum for allegedly
besmirching his fatherland in his “philosophical letters,” but he was
nearly turned into an outcast as well when, in 1910, Bishop Germogen
threatened to anathematize him.35 Perhaps Sanin may even be regarded
as the ultimate scandal in the history of prerevolutionary literature for
contriving to evoke simultaneously the wrath of the authorities, the
church, and the intelligentsia.

Mikhail Artsybashev

This study is not primarily concerned with either the life and career of
Mikhail Artsybashev or with his complete oeuvre. It discusses a rela-
tively small part of his literary output and completely ignores the post-
revolutionary years, which he spent for the most part as an emigrant in
Poland. Finally, I do not attempt to present a coherent picture of Artsyba-
shev’s ideas or of his development as a writer and thinker, nor do I
present new interpretations of the novel itself (although I do make a
gesture in the direction of an alternative reading of it in chapter 7).
However, a brief outline of the main landmarks in Artsybashev’s life
and work will certainly help to place this writer in his proper literary-
historical context.
Prior to the publication of Sanin, Mikhail Artsybashev enjoyed a
modest but relatively sound reputation as a talented writer with ap-
propriately liberal ideas. Born in 1878 into a family of minor landown-
ers in the Ukraine, Artsybashev seems to have wavered for some time
Introduction 15

between literature and the visual arts as possible future careers. At

sixteen, without having completed his formal education, he started
working as a clerk for an insurance agent and in 1897 he enrolled at the
Kharkov School of Arts, where he made a favorable impression on his
teachers. His plans to enter the Academy of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg
never materialized, however. After his move to the capital in 1900, he
soon gained recognition as a writer and gave up professional painting.36
Artsybashev’s first major stories appeared in periodicals like Mir
bozhii (God’s World), Russkoe bogatstvo (Russian Wealth), and Zhurnal dlia
vsekh (Journal for All), prestigious monthly journals with an outspoken
preference for solid realist fiction. They presented an obvious platform
for an author like Artsybashev, who showed little affinity for modernist
experiments. Just like Gorky, Leonid Andreev, and Aleksandr Kuprin,
other regular contributors to the aforementioned journals, Artsybashev
was hailed as a promising author following in the footsteps of the so-
cially engaged writers of the nineteenth century.37
Artsybashev’s first “mature” product (according to the author him-
self) was the short story “Pasha Tumanov.” It was accepted for publica-
tion in Russkoe bogatstvo by no one less than Nikolai Mikhailovskii, one
of the most influential and radical critics of his time. The story revolves
around a boy who fails a crucial exam, is expelled from the gymnasium,
and eventually shoots the headmaster for refusing to readmit him. Al-
though the expulsion is formally justified, the narrator does not place
the blame for the tragedy with the victim or with the good-natured
headmaster who tries to comfort the boy but with the impersonal
school system, which is held responsible for ignoring pupils’ real needs
and thus taken to account for Pasha’s violent protest. One of numerous
turn-of-the-century stories to attack the classical gymnasium, “Pasha
Tumanov” seemed to meet all the criteria by which critics like Mikhai-
lovskii judged a literary work. The censor’s decision to ban the story
only added to Artsybashev’s profile as an author radically opposed to
the existing order.38
One would have expected Artsybashev’s worldview to have
thoroughly changed during the years between “Pasha Tumanov,” with
its explicit social criticism, and Sanin, after the publication of which Ar-
tsybashev garnered the reputation of a reactionary writer. On closer in-
spection, however, his oeuvre shows remarkably little development in
style and philosophical outlook. Although his work would eventually
become gloomier, the themes of suicide, marriage versus “free love,”
and life’s economic struggle, with which he was familiar from personal
16 Introduction

experience, would continue to occupy him throughout his career.39

Speaking in more general terms, most of Artsybashev’s work deals
with the “timeless” notion of man’s vanity and his proclivity for self-
deceit. The lines from Ecclesiastes that serve as the epigraph to Sanin
may well serve as a motto for his entire oeuvre: “This alone have I
found: that God, when he made man, made him straightforward, but
men invent endless subtleties of their own.”40 Time and again, Artsyba-
shev drives home the message that there is a fundamental discrepancy
between the way in which people behave as socially conditioned be-
ings and how they would behave if they followed their own instincts.
This discrepancy can manifest itself in education (“Pasha Tumanov”),
man’s living conditions (urban as opposed to rural), and erotic love.
But the very suggestion of some disturbing incongruity between inner
essence and outer appearance is always sustained. Borrowing Peter Ulf
Møller’s characterization of Tolstoy’s method, we can say that, in Ar-
tsybashev’s work, reality is usually presented “in a form of the compar-
ative, that is, it is presented as more real or truer than something else that
is also given in the text.”41
The autobiographical story “The Wife” (“Zhena” [1906]), Artsyba-
shev’s first published work to explore the theme of free love, reads as a
textbook example of this comparative method. The “I” falls passion-
ately in love with a woman but immediately loses interest as soon as he
marries her. Once he is forced to play the official role of loving husband,
he feels estranged from his wife who, in contrast, entirely lives up to
her obligations as a married woman and becomes ever more jealous. At
the end of the story, when they have already broken up, she comes to
appreciate her husband’s unorthodox ideas about complete sexual free-
dom. In a rather implausible scene, he convinces her that their separa-
tion is for the best and that lovers should never commit themselves to
one another for life. When she timidly remarks that their son will now
grow up without his father, he removes the last traces of her doubt by
casually replying that it is more natural for children to be brought up by
their mothers.
In “The Wife,” as in Sanin, marriage is rejected precisely because it
is an institutionalized form of erotic love. It restricts man in his natu-
ral pursuit of sexual satisfaction. Characteristically, the hero gains this
understanding only after a long period of delusion and a number of
painful confrontations with society. When he finally discovers the
“truth” about marriage (about sexual relationships, about life in
Introduction 17

general), it turns out to be something surprisingly simple and acces-

sible to all. The only precondition for internalizing this truth is a will-
ingness to give in to one’s “natural” inclinations and ignore the social
conventions, which cripple man’s life.
Artsybashev’s disgust with rules and conventions and his eagerness
to expose their “absurdity” found their ultimate expression in Sanin. In
addition to ridiculing such petty bourgeois values as strict monogamy
(or monandry) and social respectability, the novel also attacks the anti-
bourgeois, yet equally dogmatic and “petrified,” morality of the radical
intelligentsia that insisted on political commitment and complete self-
abnegation. Artsybashev was not the only author to criticize the revo-
lutionary movement on these grounds, of course, but the unfortunate
timing of the novel’s publication, which coincided with Prime Minister
Stolypin’s coup d’état, and the narrator’s undivided sympathy for the
main character, who treats the behavioral imperative of the revolution-
aries as yet another “invention,” contributed to the novel’s being per-
ceived as a direct assault on the most sacred ideals of the intelligentsia.42

Sanin: A Synopsis

Although there have been several new editions of Sanin since the early
1990s, when the Russian book market opened up and became inun-
dated with forgotten masterpieces, its place in Russian literary history
has remained fairly marginal. Whatever modern readers expected to
find in Sanin, perhaps tempted by its reputation as a pornographic
work, its rediscovery has not led scholars or critics to reassess Artsyba-
shev’s standing; he is still viewed as no more than a second-rate writer.
Because of its lasting obscurity, I provide a short synopsis of the novel,
highlighting only those characters and episodes that provoked the
strongest reactions from the critics. A true novel of ideas, Sanin offers a
plethora of secondary characters and subplots, which we can safely ig-
nore for the purpose of the present discussion.
Sanin tells the story of the former student Vladimir Petrovich Sanin,
an unruffled and muscular young man who, after an extended period
of absence, returns to his native town somewhere in the provinces. A
former political activist who has become “bored” with the revolution-
ary movement, Sanin spends three months with his mother and his
younger sister, Lida. His carefree behavior and hedonistic philosophy
18 Introduction

of life clearly set him apart from the local intelligentsia, whose ostenta-
tious devotion to the revolutionary cause he observes with a mixture of
bewilderment and amusement.
During his stay in the nameless provincial town, Sanin only reluc-
tantly interferes with other people’s business, and yet he plays a crucial
role in their lives. He drives his sister’s intended fiancé, the conceited
officer Zarudin, to suicide by knocking him to the ground in public.
He also unwittingly drives Soloveichik, a far from steadfast Tolstoyan
who cannot accept the meaninglessness of life, to suicide. Yet, if Sanin
is technically responsible for these two deaths, the reader is left with no
doubt that he functions only as a catalyst, accelerating a process that
had already begun in both men. If Soloveichik is mentally unfit for life,
then Zarudin becomes the victim of his own foolish pride, as he cannot
imagine going on with his life after the humiliating scuffle with Sanin
(who was merely acting out of self-defense). Even when Sanin forces
the attractive school teacher Zinaida Karsavina to have sex with him in
a rowboat (perhaps the novel’s most notorious scene), the implied au-
thor manipulates us into believing that what we are witnessing is not
rape but a young woman’s initiation into a happier and more natural
way of life.
The novel also features a suicide attempt by Sanin’s pregnant sis-
ter, who tries to drown herself (but is saved by her brother), and a
successful suicide by the student Iurii Svarozhich, an intelligent yet
self-preoccupied young man whose vicissitudes mirror Sanin’s in the
negative. Expelled from Moscow University on the suspicion of revolu-
tionary activities, Iurii moves in with his father and sister Lialia, who
introduces him to her friend Karsavina. A romance develops but, when
he is about to make love to Karsavina for the first time, Iurii suddenly
recoils from her, convincing himself that he is above such bestial de-
sires. Sanin then takes advantage of the situation and deflowers her on
the same evening.
After some three months of relaxing, drinking, and discussing, Sa-
nin decides it is time to move on. Tired of his meddlesome family and
narrow-minded revolutionaries, he leaves without saying goodbye and
boards a train for an unknown destination. The last chapter describes
how Sanin, sitting in a third-class railway carriage, takes umbrage at
the coarseness of his fellow travelers, leaves the compartment, and fi-
nally jumps off of the train. He stands up unharmed and gives a cry of
pleasure marveling at the vastness of the steppe around him. The last
paragraph is worth quoting in full: “Sanin breathed easily and gazed
Introduction 19

cheerfully at the endless expanse of earth, advancing with powerful,

broad steps farther and farther toward the bright, joyous light of dawn.
And when the steppe awoke, its distant fields blazing blue and green,
when it spread itself beneath the immense vault of the sky, and when
the sun rose sparkling and shining ahead of him, it seemed as if Sanin
were striding forth to meet it.”43
I return to certain episodes in more detail in the course of this
study but, for the moment, I draw the reader’s attention to the conspic-
uous idealization of the hero, of which the final paragraph is a telling ex-
ample. Not only is Sanin given ample opportunity to expound his ideas
in eloquent fashion and to demonstrate their supposed soundness
throughout the novel, but, in contrast to most other characters, who are
forced to reconsider and give up their strongest convictions, he also
does not change at all. In other words, Sanin is “right,” whatever ideo-
logical or physical opposition he meets. It was this suggestion that out-
raged Artsybashev’s readers, even if they differed fundamentally on
the question of Sanin’s larger historical and political significance.

The Problem and the Method

Inasmuch as the subject of this book is indissolubly connected with the

fate and reception of a single novel, it would seem only logical to use an
approach that draws at least some of its inspiration from the theoretical
insights of reader response criticism, which emerged in the United
States and Germany (the so-called Konstanz school) in the 1960s and
early 1970s. Through the course of this book, we will come across nu-
merous reactions of and references to professional critics and ordinary
readers alike who were offended by Artsybashev, mocked his hero, or
simply bemoaned the state of affairs in Russia, which they believed to
be epitomized by the publication of a licentious work like Sanin. Surely,
a theory that posits the importance of the “addressee’s active contribu-
tion” for the “historical life of a literary work” would have much to
offer.44 But how exactly could this study benefit from reader-response
criticism or the “aesthetics of reception” (Rezeptionsästhetik), as it is usu-
ally called in continental Europe?
First of all, the reception of Sanin constitutes somewhat of a special
case in that it can hardly be studied from a diachronic perspective. The
novel was banned less than a year after its serialization in the journal
Sovremennyi mir and would not be reprinted in Russia until 1990.45
20 Introduction

Inasmuch as the novel virtually did not exist for the Russian reader for
over seventy years (except for a handful of scholars), the idea of its “his-
torical life” becomes problematic. Yet, it is precisely this assumption of
a work being read by a number of consecutive generations (i.e., dia-
chronically) that lies at the heart of reader-response criticism. Concen-
trating on the canon of Western literature, it disregards works that last
only for one generation or works whose historical lives are abruptly
ended by the censor’s interference.
A more important drawback of reader-response criticism concerns
its practical applicability. The more experimental approaches do seek
to collect empirical data among contemporary readers, but reader-
response theorists such as Wolfgang Iser and Hans-Robert Jauss are pri-
marily interested in reconstructing the assumed reception of a text by
the implied reader. Their goal is not to develop a method for the docu-
mentation and analysis of historical readers’ reactions but to theorize
how the reader must have interpreted text X back then. Jauss’s famous
concept of “horizon of expectation” (Erwartungshorizont) may be useful
for establishing in what way a canonical text proved to be innovative
(for example, Pushkin’s “Station Master” against the tradition of the
sentimental novella), but it shows that his primary concern lies with
the evolution of literature rather than with the actual role of the ad-
dressee.46 Since Sanin is anything but innovative, applying a method
designed to evince artistically more progressive tendencies does not
seem to be very productive.
This study does focus on the immediate reactions of professional
critics and anonymous readers (as far as recorded). The aim is not so
much to take stock of these reactions and determine their underlying
political agendas as to contest two widely held notions: first, that Sanin
primarily appealed to readers insufficiently equipped to digest the
“real thing”; and second, that the response of these readers was both
massive and uncritical. Trying to explain what she believes to be the
source of the “popularity” of Sanin, Neia Zorkaia, for example, refers to
the novel’s “formulaic monotony” and its use of clichés, especially in
the “deindividualized” portrayal of the female characters—devices that
betray its proximity to the literary style of the boulevard.47 Zorkaia’s
condescending observations conjure up the hackneyed image of non-
professional readers as passive consumers who happily content them-
selves with the vulgarized leftovers of highbrow modernism. Such a
notion of reading as mass consumption is misleading, as Michel de
Certeau has persuasively argued, for it denies the highly diverse and
Discovering Diverse Content Through
Random Scribd Documents
for him.”
“He kin be doctored in jail,” said Hood.
“That’s right, ma’am,” said Lunt. “The doctor can ’tend him in jail.
We gotter take him now. Where is he?”
“It would kill him to move him to-night!”
“Well, what of it? He’ll likely be hung anyhow,” retorted the bitter
old ferryman.
“That is not true and you know it!” cried Mrs. O’Dell. “You are
persecuting him in wicked spite. You are a spiteful, hateful old man!
And you, Melchar Lunt—you must be crazy to enter this house,
armed, and threaten me and my guests!”
Hood uttered a jeering laugh.
“We got the warrants all straight and proper,” said Lunt. “I’m in
my rights, performin’ my duty under the law, whatever ye may think.
We wouldn’t be so ha’sh if we wasn’t in a hurry.”
“You are in a hurry because you know that you haven’t much time
for your dirty, cruel, cowardly work, and you are afraid!”
“Misnamin’ us won’t help ye none, nor the murderer upstairs
neither,” sneered Hood, moving toward her.
She sprang to her feet and stood with her back to the narrow foot
of the staircase. Noel Sabattis made a jump at Hood, but Lunt seized
him and flung him down and threatened him with the gun. Hood
advanced upon Mrs. O’Dell and suddenly clutched at her, grabbing
her roughly by both arms. He gripped with all the strength of his
short, hard fingers and tried to wrench her away from the staircase.
She twisted, freed a hand and struck him in the face, twisted again,
freed the other hand and struck him again. He staggered back with
one eye closed, then rushed forward and struck furiously with his big
fists, blind with rage and the sting in his right eye. Several blows
reached her but again she sent him staggering back.
“Quit that!” cried Lunt. “Ye can’t do that, ye old fool!”
He grabbed Hood by the collar, yanked him back and shook him.
“Are ye crazy?” he continued. “Young O’Dell would tear ye to bits
for that! Go tie the Injun’s legs. Then we’ll move her out of the way
both together, gentle an’ proper, an’ go git the prisoner.”
Hood obeyed sullenly. He bound Noel’s feet together with a piece
of clothesline and tied him, seated on the floor, to a leg of the heavy
kitchen table.

Little Marion Sherwood had heard the dogs and the wheels and
immediately slipped out of bed. Perhaps it was Ben, she had
thought. That would be fine, for she missed Ben. Or it was Uncle Jim
and the doctor from Woodstock to make the sick man well. She had
gone to the top of the back stairs and stood there for a long time,
listening, wondering at what she heard. She had been puzzled at
first, then frightened, then angered. She had fled along the upper
halls to the head of the front stairs and down the stairs. She had felt
her way into the library and to a certain bookcase and from beneath
the bookcase she had drawn the shallow, mahogany box which
contained the little pistols with which gentlemen had proved
themselves gentlemen in ancient days.
She had opened the box and worked with frantic haste—with
more haste than speed. She had worked by the sense of touch alone
and fumbled things and spilled things. Bullets had rolled on the floor,
powder had spilled everywhere, wads and caps and the little ramrod
had escaped from her fingers again and again; but she had retained
enough powder, enough wads, two bullets and two caps. She had
returned up the front stairs and along the narrow halls.

Now that Noel was tied down, Lunt stood his gun against the wall
and gave all his attention to Mrs. O’Dell.
“I don’t want to hurt ye,” he said. “An’ I ain’t goin’ to hurt ye. But
I gotter go upstairs, me an’ Tim Hood, an’ fetch down the prisoner
ye’ve got hid up there. I’m sorry Tim mussed ye up, ma’am, but ye
hadn’t ought to obstruct the law. Will ye kindly step aside, Mrs.
O’Dell?”
“I won’t! If you force your way past me and carry that man off to-
night you’ll be murderers, for he’ll die on the road. If you try, I’ll
fight you from here every step of the way.”
“We’re in our rights, ma’am. I’m a constable an’ here’s the
warrant. It ain’t my fault he’s sick—even if that’s true. You grab her
left arm, Tim, an’ I’ll take her right, an’ we’ll move her aside an’ nip
upstairs. But no rough stuff, Tim!”
A voice spoke in a whisper behind Mrs. O’Dell, from the darkness
of the narrow staircase.
“Put your right hand back and take this pistol.”
The woman recognized the voice but failed to grasp the meaning
of the words. The little girl was frightened, naturally. That thought
increased her unswerving hot rage against the men in front of her.
She did not move or say a word in reply.
She felt something touch her right hand, which was gripped at her
side. Again she heard the whisper.
“Take it, quick. It’s all loaded, the way Ben told me. I have the
other. Point it at them, quick!”
The men moved toward her. She opened her fingers and closed
them on the butt of a pistol. She felt a weight on her shoulder and
saw a thin arm and small hand and the other old dueling pistol
extended past her ear. She raised her own right hand and cocked
the hammer with a click.
“They are loaded!” cried the little girl shrilly. “And the caps are on,
and everything. Ben showed me how to load them. And I’ll pull the
trigger if you come another step, you old man with the queer
whiskers! The bullets are big. And I put two in each pistol and plenty
of powder.”
“Stand close together, you two, and move to the left,” said Mrs.
O’Dell. “Do you hear me, Lunt? Do as I tell you, or I’ll shoot—and so
will the little girl. These are real pistols. That’s right. That’s far
enough. Stand there and stand steady.”
“This is a serious matter, Mrs. O’Dell,” exclaimed Lunt. “You are
guilty of threatenin’ the law with deadly weapons—of resistin’ it with
firearms.”
Mrs. O’Dell put up her left hand and relieved the child of the other
pistol, at the same time speaking a few words in a low voice but
without taking her glance or her aim off the intruders. Marion
slipped past her, ran over and took Lunt’s gun from where he had
stood it against the wall.
 “‘STAND THERE AND STAND STEADY.’”

“Steady, both of you,” warned the woman. “Keep your eyes on

me. You will notice that I am not aiming at your heads. I’m aiming
at your stomachs—large targets for so short a range.”
Marion carried the shotgun over to the table and placed it on the
floor beside old Noel Sabattis. Then, moving swiftly and with
precision, she opened a drawer in the table, drew out a knife and
cut the thin rope which bound the Maliseet’s legs together and to
the table.
Noel seized the gun at the breech with his manacled hands and
got quickly to his feet. With both hands close together on the grip of
the stock, he pushed the lever aside with a thumb. The breech fell
open, disclosing the metal base of a cartridge. He closed the breech
by knocking the muzzle smartly on the edge of the table. His hands
had only an inch of play, but that was enough. They overlapped
around the slender grip, with the hammer within easy reach of a
thumb and the trigger in the crook of a finger.
“Dat a’right,” he said, glancing over the intruders. “Good gun,
hey? Light on de trigger, hey?”
“Sure she’s light on the trigger!” cried Lunt. “Mind what ye’re
about, Noel! A joke’s a joke—but ye’ll hang for this if ye ain’t
careful!”
Noel smiled and told them to sit down on the floor. They obeyed
reluctantly, protesting with oaths. Then he asked the little girl to
open the door and admit the dogs, which she did. The red dogs
bounded into the kitchen, took in the situation at a glance and
surrounded the two seated on the floor. Red Chief and Red Lily
showed their gleaming fangs, whereupon old Tim Hood became as
silent and still as a man of wood.
“I think you have them safe, Noel,” said Mrs. O’Dell.
Noel nodded.
“Then I’ll go up and give him his quinine,” she said, handing the
pistols over to the enthusiastic little girl.
 Noel and Marion sat down on chairs in front of the constable and
the ferryman. The three dogs stood. Everything pointed at the two
on the floor—five pairs of eyes, the muzzles of firearms and the
muzzles of dogs.
“Forgit it, Noel,” said Mr. Lunt. “Cut it out. What’s the use? I’m
willin’ to let bygones be bygones. Call off yer dogs an’ swing that
there gun o’ mine off a p’int or two an’ Tim an’ me will clear out.
Careful with them pistols, little girl, for Heaven’s sake! Noel, ain’t she
too young to be handlin’ pistols? She might shoot herself.”
Noel smiled and so did Marion.
“I’ll give ye the warrants, Noel, an’ say no more about it,”
continued the constable. “We got three warrants here—an’ the
charges agin’ ye are real serious—but I’m willin’ to forgit it. So there
ain’t no sense in keepin’ us here, clutterin’ up Mrs. O’Dell’s kitchen.”
“She don’t care,” replied Noel. “An’ Marion don’t care. You like it
fine, Marion, hey? ’Taint every night you git a chance for to set up so
late like dis, hey?”
“Yes, thank you, I enjoy it,” said the little girl. “It is great fun. It is
like a story in a book, isn’t it, Noel?”
“Hell!” snorted old Tim Hood.
Noel cocked an eye at the ferryman and he cocked the gun at the
same time.
“Lemme unlock yer handcuffs for ye,” offered Lunt. “Ye’ll feel
more comfortable without ’em, Noel.”
“Guess not,” returned Noel. “Feel plenty comfortable a’ready.”
Wheels sounded outside, and voices; and the youngest of the red
dogs barked and turned tail to his duty and frisked to the door. The
others stood firm and kept their teeth bared at the men on the floor,
but their plumed tails began to wag. Old Noel’s glance did not waver,
but Marion’s eyes turned toward the door.
The door opened and men crowded into the kitchen and halted in
a bunch and stared at the unusual scene before them. There was
Doctor Scott, with a black bag in his hand. There was Uncle Jim,
with a white bandage on his head which made his hat too small for
him. And there was Sheriff Corker fixing a cold glare on the two men
seated on the floor. And over all showed the smiling face of young
Ben O’Dell.
Jim McAllister was the first to speak.
“Where’s Flora?” he asked.
“Upstairs,” answered Noel. “Everyt’ing a’right an’ waitin’ for de
doctor.”
He stood up, lowered the hammer of the gun and placed the
weapon on the table.
“Now you take dis handcuffs off darn quick, Mel Lunt,” he said.
The constable scrambled heavily to his feet and obeyed.
Doctor Scott crossed the room and vanished up the narrow stairs.
Sheriff Corker found his voice then and addressed Lunt and old Tim
Hood at considerable length and with both force and eloquence. His
words and gestures seemed to make a deep and painful impression
on them, but the rest of the company paid no attention. Ben kissed
the little girl, shook hands with Noel Sabattis, grabbed the leaping
dogs in his arms, told fragments of his Quebec adventures to any
one who chose to listen and asked question after question without
waiting for the answers.
Uncle Jim seated himself beside the table and lit a cigar, cool as a
cucumber, smiling around. Sheriff Corker marched Lunt and Hood
out of the kitchen and out of the woodshed, still talking, still
gesticulating violently with both hands. Those in the kitchen heard
wheels start and recede a minute later. Marion went to Uncle Jim
and asked him what he had done to his head. He told her of his
difficulty with the young policeman which had caused all the delay,
of the home-coming of the sheriff when Doctor Scott was bandaging
his head, and of the arrival of Ben and Mr. Brown at the sheriff’s
house a few minutes later.
“But what are you doing with those old pistols?” he asked.
“Those two men came to take the sick man away,” she said. “They
tied Noel to the table and fought with Aunt Flora. I heard them; so I
loaded the pistols—and then they were at our mercy.”
Mrs. O’Dell appeared and ran into her son’s arms. She backed out
presently, and they both moved over to where Uncle Jim and the
little Sherwood girl sat side by side, hand in hand. Noel Sabattis and
the dogs followed them.
“The doctor says it is slow fever, but that the worst is over with,”
said Mrs. O’Dell. “He must have had it for weeks and weeks. And the
arm can be saved. The crisis of the fever came to-night—and a drive
into town to-night would have killed him.” She slid an arm around
the little girl. “But for Marion, they would have taken him,” she
continued. “Noel was tied to the table and I couldn’t have kept them
off much longer—and she loaded the dueling pistols in the dark and
brought them to me—just in the nick of time.”
“She saved his life, sure enough,” said Jim McAllister.
“Flora done mighty good too,” spoke up old Noel Sabattis. “She fit
’em off two-t’ree time an’ bung Hood on de eye.”
Mrs. O’Dell laughed and blushed.
“I did my best—but you and the old pistols saved him, dear,” she
whispered in Marion’s ear. “And by to-morrow, perhaps, or next day,
he will be well enough to thank you.”
The child looked intently into the woman’s eyes and the lights in
her own eyes changed gradually. Her thin shoulders trembled.
“Who—is—he?” she whispered in a shaken thread of voice.
“Your very own dad,” replied Mrs. O’Dell, kissing her.
Jim McAllister made coffee. The doctor joined the men in the
kitchen, for his patient was sleeping. Ben told of his and Mr. Brown’s
successful search for the man who had shot Louis Balenger on
French River. He admitted that the actual capture of Balenger’s old
enemy had been made by the police of Quebec—but he and Dave
had been very busy. While he talked he toyed with the pistols which
Marion had left on the table. He removed the caps. He looked into
one barrel and saw that it was loaded to within a fraction of an inch
of the muzzle. He produced a tool box in the shape of a knife from
his pocket and opened a blade that looked like a small ice pick. With
this he picked a few paper wads out of the barrel. With the last wad
came a stream of black powder.
“Hullo!” he exclaimed, forgetting his adventures in Quebec.
 He thumped the muzzle of the pistol on the table until another
wad came out, followed by two bullets. The others, watching
intently, exchanged glances in silence. Ben withdrew the charge
from the other pistol.
“She put the bullets in first!—in both of them!” he cried.
“But it worked,” said Uncle Jim. “It turned the trick. She saved her
pa’s life—so I guess that’s all right!”

THE END
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE RED PIROGUE:
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