poets felt with such intensity the burden on their
souls. At this point Gogol, first of all, became the victim of this
state of things.

The enthusiasm stirred up by his works and by the immense hopes that
he had evoked suddenly elevated him to such a height in the minds of
his contemporaries that he felt real anguish. Artist he was, and now
he forced himself to become a moralist; he rushed into philosophical
speculations which led him on to a nebulous mysticism, from which
his talent suffered severely. When he realized what had happened,
despair seized him, his ideas troubled him, and he died in terrible
intellectual distress.

We see also the great admirer of Gogol--Dostoyevsky--under different
pretexts making known in almost all his novels and especially in
his magazine articles, "Recollections of an Author," his opinions on
the reforms about to be realized. He studies the problems of
civilization which concern humanity in general, and particularly
insists upon the mission of the Russian people, who are destined, he
believes, to end all the conflicts of the world by virtue of a
system based upon Christian love and pity.

Turgenev, himself, although above all an artist, does not remain
aloof from this educational work. In his "Annals of a Sportsman," he
attacks bondage. And when it was abolished, and when in the very
heart of Russian society, among the younger generation, the
revolutionists appeared, Turgenev attempted to paint these "new
men." Thus in his novel, "Fathers and Sons," he sketches in bold
strokes the character of the nihilist Bazarov. This celebrated type
cannot, however, be considered a true representative of the
mentality of the "new men," for it gave only a few aspects of their
character, which, besides, did not have Turgenev's sympathy.

They are valued in an entirely different way by Chernyshevsky in his
novel, "What Is To Be Done?" where the author, one of the most
powerful representatives of the great movement toward freedom from
1860 to 1870, carefully studied the bases of the new morals and the
means to be used in struggling against the prejudices of the old
society. Finally let us mention Tolstoy, whose entire literary
activity was a constant search for truth, till the day when his mind
found an answer to his doubts in the religion of love and harmony
which he preached from then on.

The earnestness which sees an apostle in a writer has not ceased to
grow and has almost blinded the publi