The novel, now regarded as the chief form of Russian literature, was first cultivated by Zagoskin and Lazhechnikoff under the Scott-like influence of Karamsin. It has since reached its height of unforgiving and terrible realism in the minutely psychological and morbid stories of Dostoievski, whose "Crime and Punishment" is his masterpiece, and Count Lyof Tolstoi, whose greatest works are "War and Peace," a tale of the Napoleonic War, and “Anna Karénina,” an impressive picture of erring womanhood. His "Kreutzer Sonata" was a sensational attack on marriage. In other works he has advocated a return to primitive Christianity and an extreme literal observance of the precepts of Jesus. Nihilism has had its most famous novelist in Stepniak, who lived in exile in England until his death in 1896. Two young Russian women, Marie Bashkirtseff and Sonya Kovalevsky, have attracted attention by their startling revelations of an inner soul life which mirrors the extreme yearnings and woes of modern womanhood.

N. M. KARAMSIN.

THE poet Pushkin declared that Karamsin had discovered ancient Russia no less than Columbus discovered America, since he gave the empire its first great history. His European travels, while saturating his literary spirit with the sentimentalism of the English Sterne and Goethe's "Sorrows of Werther," convinced him that his countrymen could "in Russia alone become good Russians." He struck the keynote of Slavophilism, which Turgenieff was to oppose later, just as Pushkin was to rise from Karamsin's sentimentalism into a grander romanticism. This sentimentalism was reflected in Karamsin's treatment of his country's history. He idealized Ivan the Terrible as a kind-hearted autocrat. His panegyrical history has been styled "the Epic of Despotism." Choosing Ivan III. and Ivan the Terrible, instead of Peter the Great, as the real founders of Russia's greatness, he pictured the mediæval, barbarous Russia in a falsely-enchanting light. In his tale of "Martha, the Mayor's Daughter," he had declared: "Political order can exist only where absolute power has been

established." As Pushkin once wrote, only to have it blotted out by the censor, Karamsin "admired absolutism and the charms of the knout" (introduced by Ivan). Karamsin divided Russian history arbitrarily, to fit his own conception, into three epochs: Rurik to Ivan III., representing the principle of division; Ivan to Peter the Great, representing unity; Peter to Alexander I., representing regeneration of social life. But though utterly wrong in his philosophy of history, he painted its external aspects with an eloquent pencil. His portraits of the old Russians are magnificent, and his battle-picturessuch as the Field of Koulikovo, and the Taking of Kazanare thrilling.

Nikolai Mikhailovich Karamsin was born in 1766, and lived from the first years of Catherine's reign to the death of his patron, Alexander I. He died in the imperial palace, having brought the eleventh volume of his History down to the accession of Michael Romanoff, in 1613. Muravieff had made him Court historigrapher. His melodramatic History has been since displaced by the greater works of more scientific historians.

I. A. KRILOFF.

To Ivan Andreevitch Kriloff properly belongs the surname of the Russian Lafontaine. Not only was he a born fabulist, whose fables are on every Russian's lips, but he was strangely like Lafontaine in his simple-hearted nature, his careless life, and his uncouth personality. A tutor to the children of Prince Galitzin, and under that noble's protection in the middle part of his life, he was, in his childhood, the care of a poor, illiterate widow, whose father had fought against the Cossack Pougatcheff. During these early days the young Ivan was always strolling about the wharves, among the markets, and through the streets of his native Moscow, and on these roamings he stored his mind with the familiar idioms, the humorous scenes, the Russian spirit, all of which is so strikingly conspicuous in his fables. Poverty drove him to journalism and dramatic writing, but in 1809, when he was forty-five years old, he published his first "Fables," twenty-three in number. His very first-"The Oak and the Reed"—was a

translation from Lafontaine. Before his death he had written one hundred and ninety-eight, of which one hundred and sixty-one were of his own invention. In 1838, a jubilee festival was celebrated in his honor, and after his death, in 1844, a statue was raised to his memory in the Summer Garden.

THE MONARCH CAHIB.

CAHIB was a mighty sovereign, and of course renowned for his wisdom, though he never read nor consulted a book, since books are seldom written by caliphs, and it would have been beneath his dignity to learn from any of lower rank than himself. He patronized literature and science, but in a judicious way; for, by occasionally hanging a few of the learned men of his country, he took care that their number should never become dangerously great: "since they are like candles: let a moderate number burn, and a pleasant light is provided, but have too many, and there is danger of a fire." His palace was furnished with every luxury, and amongst other curiosities could boast of a small but unique collection of apes, which had been trained to bow and grimace with such elegance, that many of the nobility, in their eagerness to learn graceful manners, did their best to imitate these clever animals, and succeeded so well that it was difficult to decide which made the best courtiers, they or the apes.

Naturally Cahib had in his retinue paid poets, who never failed to turn their verses to good account. One of them, indeed, once wrote a glowing ode in honor of a certain vizier, but, when he came to present his poetical tribute of homage, was informed that the minister had been beheaded early that morning, whereupon he immediately changed the title, and dedicated it to his late patron's enemy and successor; "for odes," as he slily remarked to a friend, "are like silk stockings, and can be stretched to fit any foot." When Cahib's poets did not write odes, they indulged in idyllic descriptions of the innocence and charms of shepherd life, and so excited the caliph's curiosity that he resolved with his own eyes to enjoy the sight of rustic felicity. Accordingly one day he set forth, accompanied by two or three wise viziers, and in

truth found a shepherd sitting beneath a hedge, though he was not playing on an oaten reed, but crunching a morsel of stale bread; and when the monarch, surprised that he was not being cheered by the company of his sweet Lesbia, inquired where the shepherdess was, he was told that "she had gone to town to sell a load of wood and their last fowl in order to buy some food."

There is abundant evidence that in every respect Cahib was the happiest of rulers, and no sovereign could boast of ministers more devoted, or less disposed to question the wisdom of his decisions, or contravene any of his fancies or caprices. And the means by which he contrived to surround himself with such pliant and faithful servants were as simple as they were effectual. He did not fail to assemble them on stated occasions in solemn council, and invariably commenced their deliberations by informing them what line of policy he wished to pursue, and then solicited their advice by addressing them in a speech to the following purport: "Gentlemen, if any one of you desires to express his views on the matter, he is at liberty to speak freely and without restraint, having first received fifty stripes, after which we shall be most happy to listen to what he has to say." In this way the wise Cahib escaped an immense amount of palaver, secured the unanimity of his ministers, and never experienced the annoyance of hearing opinions that were contrary to his own.

ALEXANDER PUSHKIN

PRINCE of Russian poets was Alexander Pushkin, the laureate of Czar Nicholas. Zhukovski was really the originator of the new Romantic school in poetry, twenty years before this overshadowing disciple of Byron stepped in and bore off all the laurels. But it needed the giant genius of Pushkin to transform the sickly sentimentality of the Russia of the end of the eighteenth century into a more vigorous and He was descended from

more truly national romanticism.

an Abyssinian negro, a slave in the seraglio at Constantinople, who had been stolen and brought to Russia by a corsair, and then not only adopted, but ennobled by Peter the Great. Pushkin was really proud of his thick lips and crisp curly hair. He was "a drop of Afric blood on Arctic snows." Perhaps this same blood kept him from becoming truly Russian as Gogol, Turgenieff, and Tolstoi were, just after him. One has only to compare Pushkin's "Songs of Western Slavs" with Tolstoi's "Cossacks" to appreciate the essential difference of spirit. Pushkin, admired by Prosper Merimée, did not venture far from the Byronic manner. He had, however, just found his path when he was killed in a self-provoked duel, in the zenith of his fame, at the age of thirty-eight (1837). He may be said to have inspired Gogol and paved the way for him.

Pushkin was but twenty-one years old when he published his romantic poem "Ruslan and Liudmila," the scene of which was laid at Kieff, and the story of which has been beautifully rendered in opera by Glinka. Vladimir, the "Bright Sun" of the old legends, shines again. Then, banished, because of a daring “Ode to Liberty," to the sea regions of the Danube and the Crimea, Pushkin sang of the "Fountain of Bakhchisarai," the old palace of khans. In "The Prisoner of the Caucasus " he glorifies the love of a Circassian girl for a captive Russian officer (Pushkin was a general of dragoons himself). He sang gipsy (Tzigani) songs of love and vengeance. On leaving Odessa he wrote a Byronic "Ode to the Sea." In 1825 he gave the Russian stage its first play in Shakespearean style in his tragedy of "Boris Godunoff," the great usurper who ranks with the Pretender Dmitri as a dramatic figure. Mazeppa's treachery is lashed in his "Poltava," a narrative poem in which the battle scene of Pultowa is described in glowing colors. He also undertook a history of Pougatcheff's revolt against Catherine, left unfinished, and wrote some prose tales, such as "The Captain's Daughter." But his masterpiece was "Eugene Oneguin " (1837), who was an incarnation of the purposeless, restless Russian nobleman of that day. The hero of the poem flies the court to escape ennui, rejects the passionate love of the countryfied Natalia,