Besides his novels Merezhkovsky has published several essays, on Pushkin, Maykov, Korolenko, Calderon, the French neo-romanticists, Ibsen and others.... The most important of all are: "The Causes of the Decadence of Modern Russian Literature" and "Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky." He reveals here a fine and penetrating power of observation, which, however, is often obscured because of his obsession by Nietzschean ideas. Moreover, he does not hide his antipathy to the people whose literary tastes and ideas differ from his. From this characteristic comes strange exaggerations and a somewhat limited appreciation of men and events. An example of this, for instance, is the impression that he gives in his study of the causes of the decadence of modern Russian literature, the subject of which imposes upon the author the double task of looking up the causes of this decadence and also proving that it exists. He has not succeeded. In fact, it appears that this idea of decadence exists only in the minds of the author and of a small circle of writers who have the same ideas about the mission of literature. Merezhkovsky is absolutely right in all that he says about the fact that Russian writers live solitary, deprived of that precious excitation which is felt when one is in contact with original and different temperaments; but if you add to this, as he has done, the statement that Russia does not possess a literature worthy of the name, you go too far. Without being a great scholar, it is easy to perceive that our contemporary Russian authors are legitimate sons of Turgenev, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, and grandsons of Gogol, who himself is closely related to Pushkin. A democratic and humanitarian realism--widely separated from the Nietzscheism of Merezhkovsky--strongly characterizes the Russian lineage. In his book on Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky he spends a long time in differentiating between the artistic intuition of these two great masters, who are, according to him, the most profound expression of the popular and higher element of Russian culture. What strikes him first in Tolstoy is the insistence with which he describes "animal man." In a kind of "leitmotiv" Merezhkovsky has shown us the Tolstoyan characters individualized by very particular corporal signs. "Tolstoy," he says, "has, to the very highest degree, the gift of clairvoyance of the flesh; even when dead, the flesh has a tongue." He is the subtle painter of all sensations and he is a master in this domain. But his art diminishes singularly, and even disappears when he tries to analyze the soul within the flesh. Dostoyevsky, on the other hand, triumphs in his dialogue; one sees his characters because one shares all their sadness, their passions, their intelligence, and their sensibility. Dostoyevsky is the painter of the depths of the human soul, which he portrays with almost supernatural acuteness. And, as Tolstoy is "the seer of the flesh," so is Dostoyevsky "the seer of the soul."