matory force. A profound
pessimism stifled all originality. Korolenko alone, who was living
during the greater part of this time as a political prisoner in distant
Yakutsk, where he did not imbibe the untoward influences of the
reaction, remained unmoved and strong. Anton Chekhov, too, survived
the gloomy years, and grew beyond them.

He did not, it is true, entirely escape the influences of the time. He
was the delineator of the deplorable social conditions under which he
lived. But he deserves to be better known than he is to the outside
public. His works everywhere express a craving for better things--for
the reforms that never come. His men are helpless. They say indeed:

"No, one cannot live like this. Life under these conditions is
impossible." But they never rouse themselves to any act of
emancipation. They founder on existence and its crushing tyranny.

Chekhov is none the less the gifted artist of many parts, and imbued
with deep earnestness, who gave mature and valuable work to the men of
his time, which, from its significance, will have an enduring
after-effect, and will be prized for its genuine ability long after
weaker, but more noisy and aggressive, talents have evaporated. He
was, however, so finely organised that his brain responded to all the
notes of his epoch, and he only emancipated himself by giving them out
again in his works of art. And so his "Sea-Gull," "Uncle Vanja," and
other dramas, novels, and stories portray the blighted, hopeless,
degenerate men of his day, his country, and its woes . . . like the
productions of many others who worked alongside of him, but did not
attain the same heights of imagination.

Such was the state of Russian Literature and Russian Society at the
time of Maxim Gorki's appearance. He stands for the new and virile
element, for which the reforms of the Sixties had been the preparation.
These reforms, one-sided and imperfect as they may have been, had none
the less sufficed to create new economic conditions. On the one hand,
a well-to-do middle-class, recruited almost entirely from
non-aristocratic strata, sprang up; on the other, an industrial
proletariat. Maxim Gorki emerged from this environment: and as a
phenomenon he is explained by this essentially modern antithesis. He
flung himself into the literary movement in full consciousness of his
social standing. And it was just this self-consciousness, which
stamped him as a personality, that ac