his rough and rebellious heroes, instead of playing the
Hamlet, or of finding the solution of life in charity and humility or
submission, are partisans of the survival of the fittest with a
vengeance, the survival of the strongest fist and the sharpest knife;
yet are these new heroes really so different from the uncompromising
type that we have already seen sharing one half of the Russian stage,
right through the story of Russian literature, from Bazarov back to
Peter the Great, and on whose existence was founded the remark that
Peter the Great was one of the ingredients in the Russian character?
Put Bazarov on the road, or Lermontov, or even Peter the Great, and
you get Gorky's barefooted hero.

Where Gorky created something absolutely new was in the surroundings
and in the manner of life which he described, and in the way he
described them; this is especially true of his treatment of nature:
for the first time in Russian prose literature, we get away from the
"orthodox" landscape of convention, and we are face to face with the
elements. We feel as if a new breath of air had entered into
literature; we feel as people accustomed to the manner in which the
poets treated nature in England in the eighteenth century must have
felt when Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley and Coleridge began to write.

Chekhov worked on older lines. He descends directly from Turgenev,
although his field is a different one. He, more than any other writer
and better than any other writer, painted the epoch of stagnation,
when Russia, as a Russian once said, was playing itself to death at
_vindt_ (an older form of _Bridge_). The tone of his work is grey, and
indeed resembles, as Tolstoy said, that of a photographer, by its
objective realism as well as by its absence of high tones; yet if
Chekhov is a photographer, he is at the same time a supreme artist, an
artist in black and white, and his pessimism is counteracted by two
other factors, his sense of humour and his humanity; were it not so,
the impression of sadness one would derive from the sum of misery
which his crowded stage of merchants, students, squires, innkeepers,
waiters, schoolmasters, magistrates, popes, officials, make up between
them, would be intolerable. Some of Chekhov's most interesting work
was written for the stage, on which he also brought Scenes of Country
Life, which is the sub-title of the play _Uncle Vanya_. There are the
same grey tints, the same weary, amiable, and slack pe