From the preface written by Edith Wharton: Then I fell upon Futility. Some one said: "It's another new novel about Russia" -and every one of my eager feelers curled up in a tight knot of refusal. But . . . I read on, amused, moved, absorbed, till the tale and the journey ended together. This, it seems to me, is the most striking quality of Mr. Gerhardi's book: that he has enough of the true novelist's "objectivity" to focus the two so utterly alien races to whom he belongs almost equally, by birth and bringing-up - the English and the Russian - to sympathize with both, and to depict them for us as they see each other, with the play of their mutual reactions illuminating and animating them all.
