r places. Like all genuine
St. Petersburg tchinovniks (officials), he has great faith in the
miraculous power of Imperial ukazes and Ministerial circulars, and
believes that national progress consists in multiplying these documents,
and centralising the Administration, so as to give them more effect.
As a supplementary means of progress he highly approves of aesthetic
culture, and he can speak with some eloquence of the humanising
influence of the fine arts. For his own part he is well acquainted with
French and English classics, and particularly admires Macaulay, whom
he declares to have been not only a great writer, but also a great
statesman. Among writers of fiction he gives the palm to George Eliot,
and speaks of the novelists of his own country, and, indeed, of Russian
literature as a whole, in the most disparaging terms.

A very different estimate of Russian literature is held by Alexander
Ivan'itch N----, formerly arbiter in peasant affairs, and afterwards
justice of the peace. Discussions on this subject often take place
between the two. The admirer of Macaulay declares that Russia has,
properly speaking, no literature whatever, and that the works which
bear the names of Russian authors are nothing but a feeble echo of the
literature of Western Europe. "Imitators," he is wont to say, "skilful
imitators, we have produced in abundance. But where is there a man of
original genius? What is our famous poet Zhukofski? A translator. What
is Pushkin? A clever pupil of the romantic school. What is Lermontoff? A
feeble imitator of Byron. What is Gogol?"

At this point Alexander Ivan'itch invariable intervenes. He is ready to
sacrifice all the pseudo-classic and romantic poetry, and, in fact, the
whole of Russian literature anterior to about the year 1840, but he will
not allow anything disrespectful to be said of Gogol, who about that
time founded the Russian realistic school. "Gogol," he holds, "was
a great and original genius. Gogol not only created a new kind of
literature; he at the same time transformed the reading public, and
inaugurated a new era in the intellectual development of the nation. By
his humorous, satirical sketches he swept away the metaphysical dreaming
and foolish romantic affectation then in fashion, and taught men to see
their country as it was, in all its hideous ugliness. With his help the
young generation perceived the rottenness of the Administration, and
the meanness, stupidity, dishonesty,