Sanine
PREFACE _"Sanine" is a thoroughly uncomfortable book, but it has a fierce energy which has carried it in a very short space of time into almost every country in Europe and at last into this country, where books, like everything else, are expected to be comfortable. It has roused fury both in Russia and in Germany, but, being rather a furious effort itself, it has thriven on that, and reached an enormous success. That is not necessarily testimony of a book's value or even of its power. On the other hand, no book becomes international merely by its capacity for shocking moral prejudices, or by its ability to titillate the curiosity of the senses. Every nation has its own writers who can shock and titillate. But not every nation has the torment of its existence coming to such a crisis that books like "Sanine" can spring to life in it. This book was written in the despair which seized the Intelligenzia of Russia after the last abortive revolution, when the Constitution which was no constitution was wrung out of the grand dukes. Even suppose the revolution had succeeded, the intellectuals must have asked themselves, even suppose they had mastered the grand dukes and captured the army, would they have done more than altered the machinery of government, reduced the quantity of political injustice, amended the
untroubled by the ecstasy of his too exuberant imagination he listened
with religious awe and would not utter a single word. The Count
respected the internal travail of his soul. Till half-past twelve
Gambara sat so perfectly motionless that the frequenters of the opera
house took him, no doubt, for what he was--a man drunk.
On their return, Andrea began to attack Meyerbeer's work, in order to
wake up Gambara, who sat sunk in the half-torpid state common in
drunkards.
"What is there in that incoherent score to reduce you to a condition
of somnambulism?" asked Andrea, when they got out at his house. "The
story of _Robert le Diable_, to be sure, is not devoid of interest,
and Holtei has worked it out with great skill in a drama that is very
well written and full of strong and pathetic situations; but the
French librettist has contrived to extract from it the most ridiculous
farrago of nonsense. The absurdities of the libretti of Vesari and
Schikander are not to compare with those of the words of Robert le
Diable; it is a dramatic nightmare, which oppresses the hearer without
deeply moving him.
"And Meyerbeer has given the devil a too prominent part. Bertram and
Alice represent the contest between right and wrong, the spirits of
good and evil. This antagonism offered a splendid opportunity to the
composer. The sweetest melodies, in juxtaposition with harsh and crude
strains, was the natural outcome of the form of the story; but in the
PREFACE _"Sanine" is a thoroughly uncomfortable book, but it has a fierce energy which has carried it in a very short space of time into almost every country in Europe and at last into this country, where books, like everything else, are expected to be comfortable. It has roused fury both in Russia and in Germany, but, being rather a furious effort itself, it has thriven on that, and reached an enormous success. That is not necessarily testimony of a book's value or even of its power. On the other hand, no book becomes international merely by its capacity for shocking moral prejudices, or by its ability to titillate the curiosity of the senses. Every nation has its own writers who can shock and titillate. But not every nation has the torment of its existence coming to such a crisis that books like "Sanine" can spring to life in it. This book was written in the despair which seized the Intelligenzia of Russia after the last abortive revolution, when the Constitution which was no constitution was wrung out of the grand dukes. Even suppose the revolution had succeeded, the intellectuals must have asked themselves, even suppose they had mastered the grand dukes and captured the army, would they have done more than altered the machinery of government, reduced the quantity of political injustice, amended the