Let us believe that Gogol, Pushkin, Lermontov, Nekrasov, Dostoievsky, Turgenieff, and Tolstoy are classics. As long as Russian, sonorous and beautiful tongue, is spoken, they will never die. And their successors? What is the actual condition of Russian literature at the present time? It is the bare truth to say that a period of stagnation set in during the decade after Turgenieff's death. Emigration carried with it the best brains of the land. We need not dwell upon the publicists, nor yet stir the muddy stream of agitation. It has been the misfortune of Russian literary men to be involved in dangerous political schisms and revolutionary movements; their misfortune, and perhaps their good luck. For dramatic material they have never been at a loss, though their art has suffered, and depth of feeling has been gained at a sad waste of other qualities. That grand old humourist Gogol has had no successors. Humour in Russia is a suspected thing. Even if there were a second Gogol he would never be allowed to put on the boards a second Revizor. We do not mean to assert that humour has died out altogether in literature, but it is not the special gift of those who write nowadays. Since Gogol or coeval with him, only men of secondary importance have been humourists: Uspenski, Ostrovski, Saltykov (Chtchedrine), or the author of the novel Oblomov, Gontcharov by name. Maikov, Nadsohn, Polonski, Garchin, Korolenko, Tchekov were all men of talent; the last in particular, preceptor and friend to Gorky in his days of want, was a novelist of high artistic if morbid powers. He is dead. It is when we turn to the living that we realise what a flatland is Russian literature now. A writer and critic, Madame Z. Hippius, attempted in the Paris _Mercure de France_ to give an idea of the situation. She admitted the inadequacy of her sketch. The troubled political map of Russia has not been conducive to ripe artistic production. As she says, even the writers who refused to meddle with politics are marked men; politics in the shape of the secret police comes to them. Madame Hippius makes the assertion that literature in Russian has never existed in the sense of a literary _milieu_, as an organic art possessing traditions and continuity; for her, Tolstoy, Dostoievsky, and Turgenieff are but isolated men of genius. A glance back at the times and writings of such critics as Bielinski, Dobroliubov, and Nekrasov--a remarkable poet--disproves this statement. Without a Gogol the later novelists would be rather in the air. He first fashioned the bricks and mortar of native fiction. Read Kropotkin, Osip-Luri, E. Semenov, Walizewski, Melchior de Voguee, and Leo Wiener if you doubt the wealth and variety of this literature.