rated by the greatest Russian artist and thinker, Tolstoy, who
was the very incarnation of the ideas named above, and who always
appears to us as a highly cultured peasant. The hero of
"Resurrection" sums up in a few words this sympathy for the people:
"This is it, the big world, the true world!" he says, on seeing the
crowd of peasants and workingmen packed into a third-class
compartment.

In the last half of the 19th century, Russian literature took a
further step in the way of democracy. It passed from the hands of
the nobility into the hands of the middle class, as the conditions
under which it existed brought it closer to the people and made it
therefore more accessible to their aspirations. It is no longer the
great humanitarians of the privileged class who paint the miserable
conditions among which people vegetate; it is the people themselves
who are beginning to speak of their miseries and of their hopes for
a better life. The result is a deep penetration of the popular mind,
in conjunction with an acute, and sometimes sickly, nervousness,
which is shown in the works of the great Uspensky, and, more
recently still, in Tchekoff, Andreyev, and many others.

None of these writers belong to the aristocracy, and two of
them--Tchekoff and Gorky--have come up from the masses: the former
was the son of a serf, and the latter the son of a workingman. Let
me add that, among the women of letters, the one who is most
distinguished by her talent in describing scenes from popular
life--Mme. Dmitrieva--is the daughter of a peasant woman.

Thus, as we have shown, the Russian writers alone, under the cover
of imaginative works which became expressive symbols, could
undertake a truly efficacious struggle against tyranny and
arbitrariness. They found themselves in that way placed in a
peculiar social position with corresponding duties. Men expected
from them, naturally, a new gospel and also a plan of conduct
necessary in order to escape from the circle of oppression. The best
of the Russian writers have undertaken a difficult and perilous
task; they have become the guides, and, so to speak, the "masters"
of life. This tendency constitutes a new trait in Russian
literature, one of its most characteristic; not that other
literatures have neglected it, but no other literature in the world
has proclaimed this mission with such a degree of energy and with
such a spirit of sacrifice. Never, in any other country, have
novelists or