Futility: A Novel on Russian Themes (Classic Reprint) - Hardcover

William Gerhardie

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9780266552970: Futility: A Novel on Russian Themes (Classic Reprint)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0266552978 ISBN 13: 9780266552970

Publisher: Forgotten Books, 2018

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Excerpt from Futility: A Novel on Russian Themes

There are few novelists nowadays, I suppose, who will not readily acknowledge that, in certain most intrinsic qualities of the art, the great Russians are what Henry James once called Balzac: the masters of us all.

To many readers of the western world, however, there was - there still is, despite the blinding glare which the Russian disaster has shed on the national character - a recurring sense of bewilderment in trying to trace the motives of the strange, seductive and incoherent people who live in the pages of Dostoevsky, Tolstoi, and their mighty group. In Balzac, at all times, the western mind feels at home even when the presentment is obviously a caricature, one knows what is being caricatured. But there are moments -to me at least - in the greatest of Russian novels, and just as I feel the directing pressure of the novelist most strongly on my shoulder, when somehow I stumble, the path fades to a trail, the trail to a sand-heap, and hopelessly I perceive that the clue is gone, and that I no longer know which way the master is seeking to propel me, because his people are behaving as I never knew people to behave.

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This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

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About the Author

William Alexander Gerhardie was born in St Petersburg, Russia, in 1895. As a young man he went to London and, when the First World War broke out, joined the army. He was first sent to Russia and later travelled the world before beginning to write. Futility (1922), his first novel, was sponsored by Katherine Mansfield, and other notable works of his include The Polyglots (1925) and Of Mortal Love (1936). Gerhardie's writing was acclaimed as an influence on many of his peers, including Anthony Powell, H. G. Wells, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene and Olivia Manning. He died in London in 1977.

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