"A Confession" is the story of a restless soul who untiringly searches for the God of truth and goodness. Found as a child in a village of central Russia, Matvey was first taken by a sacristan, and, after his death, by Titov, the inspector of the domain. In order to debase Matvey, whose superiority irritates him, Titov asks him to participate in his extortions. Having become the son-in-law of his adopted father, Matvey, on account of his love for his wife, accepts the shameful life. But the God in whom Matvey has placed his distracted confidence, seems to want to chastise him cruelly. After having lost, one after the other, his wife and child, he goes away at a venture. He enters a monastery where, among the dissolute monks, whose vices are most repugnant, his soul gradually shakes off the Christian dogma. On one of his pilgrimages, he gets to Damascus. Among the workingmen, where chance has taken him, he feels his heart opening to the truth, which he follows up with the determination of a real Gorkyan hero. The life of the people appears to him in its sublime simplicity. And it is in the midst of a dazzling apotheosis--which reminds one of the most grandiose pages of Zola's "Lourdes"--that he finally confesses the God of his ideal: it is the people. "People! you are my God, creator of all the gods that you have formed from the beauty of your soul, in your troubled and laborious search! "Let there be no other gods on the earth but yourself, for you are the only God, the creator of miracles!" * * * * * "The Spy" is a study of the Russian police. The novel treats of the terrible Okhrana, whose mysterious affairs have become the laughing-stock of all the foreign papers. The principal character, about whom circle the police spies and secret agents, is a poor orphan, weak and timid, called Evsey Klimkov, whom his uncle, the forger Piotr, has taken into his house and brought up with his son, the strong and brutal James. Beaten by his schoolmates and by his cousin, the child lives in a perpetual trance. Life seems formidable to him, like a jungle in which men are the pitiless beasts. Everywhere, brute force or hypocrisy triumph; everywhere, the weak are oppressed, downtrodden, conquered. And in his feverish imagination, daily excited by facts which his terror distorts, Evsey delights in conceiving another existence, all made of love and goodness, an existence that he unceasingly opposes against the hard realities of daily life, with the stubborn fervor of a mystic.