cruel yoke of a shrewish mother-in-law, or puppets in all the hands of an ambitious father, like Avdotia, in the to comedy Everyone in his Place,' who is driven to the estate verge of desperation by the discovery that she has sacrificed her honour and her father's affection to a e worthless fortune-hunter who only eloped with her to secure a rich wife. The heroes, hardly to be called such, are ineffectual figures, lacking energy to overcome, or fortitude to endure, adversity. These are gloomy pictures, but they are alive and arresting.

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The same criticism applies to Gorki, who depicts the bourgeoisie with equally relentless realism, but also reveals, as it were incidentally, a spiritual ideal never wholly eclipsed in the encompassing darkness. His 'Foma Gordeiev' is a minutely faithful picture of the tragedy of wealth allied to unbridled sensuality. Ignatius Gordeiev, the father of Foma, is a successful merchant, given to coarse pleasures and incapable of generosity or any unselfish action, His advice to his son is shrewd and unprincipled.

'It's utterly impossible to walk perfectly straight in a matter of business; one must be politic! So, my boy, when you approach a man, hold honey in your left hand, and in your right-a knife! Every man wants to purchase a fiveego kopek piece for two kopéks. . . . Life, my dear Foma, is very edge simply regulated: Bite everybody, or lie in the mud.'

ealthy

s. E

whi

The life-story of Foma Gordeiev is the story of a man of whom one may say that he never had a chance. mation although he passed through the

st ma

ust.

from

But,

same stages of debauchery and sensuality as his father before him, es fr there is always a flicker of aspiration towards something higher, which struggles, although too feebly to be effectual, towards a better life. In the tragic hour when his reason becomes disordered, he utters the truth that

few

duction

&

dres in him to a group of merchants who have set on him

ders and bound him hand and foot.

...

'What justification have you all in the sight of God? Why do you live? . I have lived. I have observed. I have thought. Now I am utterly worn out.

Some

thing flared up within me; it has burned out and there is nothing left, nevertheless, although my truth against you is weak, it is the truth. You are accursed!'

By the mental collapse of Foma, his evil geni Mayakim gains control of his large fortune, amass wealth and leaves a flourishing business to his childre but we are made to feel that in the despised a degraded Foma there is a spark of the divine fire, feet but unextinguished. It is in this instinctive sympatl with moral weakness, with failure and crime itself, th the Russian writer appears most different from ourselv English readers expect to find in fiction the golden pri of success and the happiness which has eluded the grasp in actual life. To men of British race failure abhorrent, almost sinful; and moral lapses may be co doned but are not to be forgiven. Our modern ficti has sometimes sought to exalt the sinner, but the natio as a whole resents the attempt.

In placing Gorki before Uspenski and Zlatovratsky have departed from chronological order, so as to prese the social grades of the Russian people in due sequen from top to bottom. I am led to make this variatio from the usual manner of treating my subject, becau it is not merely a question of describing Russis Literature, but of defining its significance. It appea to me in the light of an unending struggle toware political liberty; a struggle originating with th educated upper class and slowly extending to the lowe strata. It may be traced in the letters of the nob Chiuski written in exile to Ivan the Terrible; strengthened the Freemason Novikov to brave he sovereign's displeasure; it led countless men of literar genius to endure exile, imprisonment and death, in th hope that they might thereby arouse their countryme and free them from ignorance and slavery.

Russian literature is consistently saturated wit politics in some shape or other, and in modern time has been devoted almost exclusively to the cause of th ignorant and down-trodden peasantry. The Russia phrase, 'going in among the people,' was not simply a equivalent for 'slumming.' It meant that men and wome of education and refinement were exiling themselves t isolated villages far distant from the capital, becoming doctors, teachers, nurses, and fellow-labourers with un taught, uncomprehending moujiks, who were hard t

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conciliate and slow to believe in their good faith, But the seeds of culture and political unrest sown year by year did gradually penetrate the soil. Revolution became not only inevitable, as it had always been, but imminent; and the signs of its approach were written large throughout the country.

Uspenski and Zlatovratsky are among those whose peasant stories are most instinct with reality. Of the two, the latter is on the whole the more optimistic; but neither writer gives way to sentiment. Each is giving utterance to his political faith disguised as a work of fiction. Zlatovratsky founded his hopes for the betterment of Russia on the communal life of the moujik. He rejoiced in all that made for unity of purpose, in the artel or workman's unions, in the co-operative farms and the mir or village council. He desired to see the Intellectuals associating themselves with the peasantry, and devoting themselves less exclusively to their own culture. But he makes no attempt to idealise the moujik. Foundations, the Story of a Village,' and 'Rural Weekdays,' are two novels in which he puts forward these ideas with characteristic force. Peter, the hero of 'Foundations,' after receiving a rudimentary education, has been placed by his father in a business house in Moscow. His affairs prosper, and he presently returns home, becoming the owner of a farm and a man of substance. In this position he grows arrogant and merciless towards the poor and the drunken and unthrifty. The villagers grow restive when he wishes to reserve the communal land for those who will work it most profitably. He returns in disgust to Moscow. Zlatovratsky points out that his failure is due to want of education, and to a false idea of his own superiority.

Uspenski, a contemporary of Zlatovratsky, goes still further in the direction of unvarnished realism. Tolstoy of in his short stories of peasant life had given the world many beautiful and pathetic pictures. He described the miserable condition of the moujik and at the same time held him up as worthy of imitation. In stories such as selve The Death of Ivan Ilitch' and 'The Snowstorm,' it is the servant and the man of humble birth who appears as a type of simple unconscious heroism and self-sacrifice. Uspenski saw the peasant as a less lovable being. In

becom

with

bard

his earlier works he describes him as a drunken sot, wit hardly a redeeming quality. To him we owe a repulsiv picture of the village bully, a word which, however, do not accurately define the exact meaning of the origina A Kulak is a well-to-do peasant, of a usurious turn. Tł whole village is under his thumb.

What is this phenomenon?

What is a Kulak? T opinion obtains that the village is being ruined by a ma who comes from outside. In truth, wonders are being accor plished before our eyes. Here is the Barin losing thousand of roubles on his estate, not knowing what to do; and he is a moujik making a fortune out of tallow candles. Yer literally out of tallow candles. How is it possible to make profit on a tallow candle, the price of which is a penny Well, as every one knows, there are soirées on winter evening organised by the village girls. As the young men have nowhere to go, they perforce attend these entertainments, th cost of which is borne by the girls, so that the prospectiv bridegrooms may be put to no expense. The girls pay fo the hire and lighting of the room. For the former the charg is not high, about forty kopėks [1s.] a month, but the lightin is another matter; for this they go to the one practical ma of the village. He provides the candles, doling out to each gi two or three, which she must pay for in labour, at the rat of five kopeks a candle. For each five kopéks' worth o lighting the girls undertake to cut ten sheaves of corn. Now reckon up how many candles are burned and with how muc labour they are purchased. This practical man of the villag knows everything-when the hens lay, when the wome want money; in a word, he knows the most secret thought of the village, and on this knowledge he thrives.'

And Uspenski sums up the Kulakchestvo as a pheno menon that is native to village life; not a blot to be effaced, but an ulcer, a disease.'

Uspenski's best novel is considered by Russian critics to be The Power of the Soil.' Written under happier auspices than his first novels, it sets forth a more sympathetic view of peasant life and character, although, like his predecessors, he still surveys the peasant from above. The hero of this story, Ivan Petrov, from leading a life of prosperity in a good position, becomes an agricultural labourer, and by close contact with nature is redeemed from the moral abyss into which he was

alling. He embodies, in fact, the new faith in The Power of the Soil' which Uspenski had learnt to feel. At the same time he is under no illusions as to the moujik's vaunted patriotism in war-time.

'No one ever explains anything to him and he himself has lost the habit of asking or finding out. I should tell an untruth if I were to assert that a desire to go to fight or the childish wish to defend the right is concealed in that absence of deliberation which we see in the people. There is nothing of the kind in him. No one knows why, nor what is the matter, but every one goes without a murmur, because he is accustomed to go; he is accustomed to pay when he is told to pay, and has quite lost the habit of asking whither, why, or wherefore. For the idea of a greater or lesser phenomenon happening in the general life of the empire has never reached his village. The village never even knows the circumstances which react on its own economical position.'

It is noteworthy that Russian realism has undergone & process of change during the past twenty years. The novels of Turguenev, Tolstoy, and others of their generation depicted the peasant in a light which the later writers regard as sentimental or unreal. Tolstoy, in particular, fell a victim to his own ideals. He drew the peasant, as Landseer drew dogs and horses, th with super-senses to which they had no claim.

He

brought to the surface qualities that might be and probably were latent, but of which the ordinary observer could see little or nothing. In the novels of to-day another method is apparent. The peasant is still, or more than ever, the central dominant figure, but he is shorn and denuded of every vestige of false sentiment. Modern realism has retained the detailed description of nature, of dress and appearance, but the classical synthetic vision has given place to a thirst for individualism, to a beclouded dream of a free unfettered eristence where the naked truth is to be enthroned and Worshipped. Among the leading representatives of this hotest development of Russian literature are to be frumbered Veresaev, Saitsev, and Yushkevich.

crit

app

ead

Of the representatives of the younger generation, Tushkevich is one of the most gifted. He presents the Bufferings of the individual, the stupefying effect of remitting toil, the wail of the hungry, in a way that

1