Speaking of literary critics, I was thinking yesterday of Rozanov’s devastating critique of Herzen: He is so good, wrote Rozanov, so reasonable, so sane—and yet he will never make a young girl cry over a page of his prose.

But then I thought, as I do whenever I think of that line: What’s so great about making young girls cry?

But also, this time: If a young girl ran into Herzen in the comments section of a blog, he would almost certainly make her cry.

Are you happy now, Rozanov?