The Brothers Karamazov

Dostoevsky satirizes the Russian “liberals” who promoted European-style social reform in his depiction of Adelaida Ivanovna’s cousin, Pyotr Alexandrovich Miusov: 

He lived abroad for many years, but at the time he was still a very young man, and, among the Miusovs, an unusual sort of man—enlightened, metropolitan, cosmopolitan, a lifelong European, and at the end of his life a liberal of the forties and fifties. In the course of his career he had relations with many of the most liberal people of his epoch [...] and he particularly liked to recall and describe [...] the three days of the February revolution in Paris in forty-eight, letting on that he himself had almost taken part in it on the barricades.

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While describing the eloquent articles written by Ivan in order to support himself financially while in college, the narrator satirizes the student population of Russia, whom he considers to be unoriginal and overly reliant upon French ideas and culture: 

These little articles, they say, were always so curiously and quaintly written that they were soon in great demand; and even in this alone the young man demonstrated his practical and intellectual superiority over that eternally needy and miserable mass of our students of both sexes who, in our capitals, from morning till night, habitually haunt the doorways of various newspapers and magazines, unable to invent anything better than the eternal repetition of one and the same plea for copying work or translations from the French.

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