hough
on a lower level of art and creative power than Pisemsky and Leskov,
he was the pioneer in Russian literature of peasant literature. He
anticipated Turgenev's _Sportsman's Sketches_, and for the first time
made Russian readers cry with sympathy over the annals of the peasant.
Like Turgenev, he was a great landscape painter. In his "Fishermen" he
paints the peasant and the artisan's life, and in his "Country Roads"
he gives a picture of the good old times--replete with rich humour,
and in sharp contrast to Saltykov's sunless and trenchant etching of
the same period. Humour, the pathos of the poor, landscape--these are
his chief qualities.

CHAPTER VI

TOLSTOY AND DOSTOYEVSKY

With TOLSTOY and DOSTOYEVSKY, we come not only to the two great
pillars of modern Russian literature which tower above all others like
two colossal statues in the desert, but to two of the greatest figures
in the literature of the world. Russia has not given the world a
universal poet, a Shakespeare, a Dante, a Goethe, or a Moliere; for
Pushkin, consummate artist and inspired poet as he was, lacks that
peculiar greatness which conquers all demarcations of frontier and
difference of language, and produces work which becomes a part of the
universal inheritance of all nations; but Russia has given us two
prose-writers whose work has done this very thing. And between them
they sum up in themselves the whole of the Russian soul, and almost
the whole of the Russian character; I say almost the whole of the
Russian _character_, because although between them they sum up all
that is greatest, deepest, and all that is weakest in the Russian
_soul_, there is perhaps one element of the Russian _character_,
which, although they understood it well enough, their genius forbade
them to possess. If you take as ingredients Peter the Great,
Dostoyevsky's Mwyshkin--the idiot, the pure fool who is wiser than the
wise--and the hero of Gogol's _Revisor_, Hlestyakov the liar and
wind-bag, you can, I think, out of these elements, reconstitute any
Russian who has ever lived. That is to say, you will find that every
single Russian is compounded either of one or more of these elements.

For instance, mix Peter the Great with a sufficient dose of
Hlestyakov, and you get Boris Godunov and Bakunin; leave the Peter the
Great element unmixed, and you get Bazarov, and many of Gorky's
heroes; mix it slightly with Hlestyakov, and you get Lermontov; let
the Hlestyako