sian
literature its pre-eminence. It could not have been otherwise, since
Russia is young as a literary nation, and did not come of age until
the period at which the novel was almost the only form of literature
that counted. If, therefore, Russia was to gain distinction in the
world of letters, it could be only through the novel. Of the measure
of her success there is perhaps no better testimony than the words of
Matthew Arnold, a critic certainly not given to overstatement. "The
Russian novel," he wrote in 1887, "has now the vogue, and deserves to
have it... The Russian novelist is master of a spell to which the
secret of human nature--both what is external and internal, gesture
and manner no less than thought and feeling--willingly make themselves
known... In that form of imaginative literature, which in our day is
the most popular and the most possible, the Russians at the present
moment seem to me to hold the field."

With the strict censorship imposed on Russian writers, many of them
who might perhaps have contented themselves with expressing their
opinions in essays, were driven to conceal their meaning under the
guise of satire or allegory; which gave rise to a peculiar genre of
literature, a sort of editorial or essay done into fiction, in which
the satirist Saltykov, a contemporary of Turgenev and Dostoyevsky, who
wrote under the pseudonym of Shchedrin, achieved the greatest success
and popularity.

It was not however, until the concluding quarter of the last century
that writers like Korolenko and Garshin arose, who devoted themselves
chiefly to the cultivation of the short story. With Anton Chekhov the
short story assumed a position of importance alongside the larger
works of the great Russian masters. Gorky and Andreyev made the short
story do the same service for the active revolutionary period in the
last decade of the nineteenth century down to its temporary defeat in
1906 that Turgenev rendered in his series of larger novels for the
period of preparation. But very different was the voice of Gorky, the
man sprung from the people, the embodiment of all the accumulated
wrath and indignation of centuries of social wrong and oppression,
from the gentlemanly tones of the cultured artist Turgenev. Like a
mighty hammer his blows fell upon the decaying fabric of the old
society. His was no longer a feeble, despairing protest. With the
strength and confidence of victory he made onslaught upon onslaught on
the o