This brief summary of the epoch would be still more incomplete than it is without the mention of yet another novelist, GRIGOROVICH. Although on a lower level of art and creative power than Pisemsky and Leskov, he was the pioneer in Russian literature of peasant literature. He anticipated Turgenev's _Sportsman's Sketches_, and for the first time made Russian readers cry with sympathy over the annals of the peasant. Like Turgenev, he was a great landscape painter. In his "Fishermen" he paints the peasant and the artisan's life, and in his "Country Roads" he gives a picture of the good old times--replete with rich humour, and in sharp contrast to Saltykov's sunless and trenchant etching of the same period. Humour, the pathos of the poor, landscape--these are his chief qualities. CHAPTER VI TOLSTOY AND DOSTOYEVSKY With TOLSTOY and DOSTOYEVSKY, we come not only to the two great pillars of modern Russian literature which tower above all others like two colossal statues in the desert, but to two of the greatest figures in the literature of the world. Russia has not given the world a universal poet, a Shakespeare, a Dante, a Goethe, or a Molière; for Pushkin, consummate artist and inspired poet as he was, lacks that peculiar greatness which conquers all demarcations of frontier and difference of language, and produces work which becomes a part of the universal inheritance of all nations; but Russia has given us two prose-writers whose work has done this very thing. And between them they sum up in themselves the whole of the Russian soul, and almost the whole of the Russian character; I say almost the whole of the Russian _character_, because although between them they sum up all that is greatest, deepest, and all that is weakest in the Russian _soul_, there is perhaps one element of the Russian _character_, which, although they understood it well enough, their genius forbade them to possess. If you take as ingredients Peter the Great, Dostoyevsky's Mwyshkin--the idiot, the pure fool who is wiser than the wise--and the hero of Gogol's _Revisor_, Hlestyakov the liar and wind-bag, you can, I think, out of these elements, reconstitute any Russian who has ever lived. That is to say, you will find that every single Russian is compounded either of one or more of these elements.