vements; their misfortune, and
perhaps their good luck. For dramatic material they have never been at
a loss, though their art has suffered, and depth of feeling has been
gained at a sad waste of other qualities. That grand old humourist
Gogol has had no successors. Humour in Russia is a suspected thing.
Even if there were a second Gogol he would never be allowed to put on
the boards a second Revizor. We do not mean to assert that humour has
died out altogether in literature, but it is not the special gift of
those who write nowadays. Since Gogol or coeval with him, only men of
secondary importance have been humourists: Uspenski, Ostrovski,
Saltykov (Chtchedrine), or the author of the novel Oblomov,
Gontcharov by name.

Maikov, Nadsohn, Polonski, Garchin, Korolenko, Tchekov were all men of
talent; the last in particular, preceptor and friend to Gorky in his
days of want, was a novelist of high artistic if morbid powers. He is
dead. It is when we turn to the living that we realise what a flatland
is Russian literature now. A writer and critic, Madame Z. Hippius,
attempted in the Paris _Mercure de France_ to give an idea of the
situation. She admitted the inadequacy of her sketch. The troubled
political map of Russia has not been conducive to ripe artistic
production. As she says, even the writers who refused to meddle with
politics are marked men; politics in the shape of the secret police
comes to them. Madame Hippius makes the assertion that literature in
Russian has never existed in the sense of a literary _milieu_, as an
organic art possessing traditions and continuity; for her, Tolstoy,
Dostoievsky, and Turgenieff are but isolated men of genius. A glance
back at the times and writings of such critics as Bielinski,
Dobroliubov, and Nekrasov--a remarkable poet--disproves this
statement. Without a Gogol the later novelists would be rather in the
air. He first fashioned the bricks and mortar of native fiction. Read
Kropotkin, Osip-Luri, E. Semenov, Walizewski, Melchior de Voguee, and
Leo Wiener if you doubt the wealth and variety of this literature.

Among living prose writers two names are encountered: Maxim Gorky and
Leonide Andreiev. Of the neurotic Gorky there is naught to be said
that is encouraging. He was physically ill when in America and as an
artist in plain decadence. He had shot his bolt in his tales about his
beloved vagabonds. He had not the long-breathed patience or artistic
skill for a novel. His novel