It is absurd to join in the chorus that calls Turgenev old-fashioned, when we find his words accurately, if faintly, echoed by a Russian who died in 1904! Hope springs eternal in the human breast, and wishes have always been the legitimate fathers of thoughts. My friend and colleague, Mr. Mandell, the translator of "The Cherry Garden,"* says that the play indicates that the useless people are dying away, "and thus making room for the regenerated young generation which is full of hope and strength to make a fruitful cherry garden of Russia for the Russian people . . . the prospects of realisation are now bright. But how soon will this become a practical reality? Let us hope in the near future!" Yes, let us hope, as Russians hoped in 1870 and in 1900. Kropotkin says that Chekhov gave an "impressive parting word" to the old generation, and that we are now on the eve of the "new types which already are budding in life." Gorki has violently protested against the irresolute Slav, and Artsybashev has given us in Jurii the Russian as he is (1903) and in Sanin the Russian as he ought to be. But a disease obstinately remains a disease until it is cured, and it cannot be cured by hope or by protest. *Published at Yale University by the "Yale Courant." Chekhov was a physician and an invalid; he saw sickness without and sickness within. Small wonder that his stories deal with the unhealthy and the doomed. For just as Artsybashev's tuberculosis has made him create the modern Tamburlaine as a mental enjoyment of physical activity, so the less turbulent nature of Chekhov has made him reproduce in his creatures of the imagination his own sufferings and fears. I think he was afraid of mental as well as physical decay, for he has studied insanity with the same assiduity as that displayed by Andreev in his nerve-wrecking story "A Dilemma."