Later on in this book I shall deal at some length with the plays of Anton Tchekov, and in discussing that writer, I hope to make it clear that his work, so far from presenting imitations of unselected people doing unselected things at unselected moments, are imitations of selected but real people, doing selected but probable things at selected but interesting moments. But the difference between Tchekov and most English and French dramatists (save those of the quite modern school) is, that the moments which Tchekov selects appear at first sight to be trivial. His genius consists in the power of revealing the dramatic significance of the seemingly trivial. It stands to reason, as I shall try to point out later on, that the more realistic your play, the more it is true to life; the less obvious action there is in it, the greater must be the skill of the dramatist; the surer his art, the more certain his power of construction, the nicer his power of selection. Mr. Max Beerbohm once pointed this out by an apt illustration. “The dramatist,” he said, “who deals in heroes, villains, buffoons, queer people who are either doing or suffering either tremendous or funny things, has a very valuable advantage over the playwright who deals merely in humdrum you and me. The dramatist has his material as a springboard. The adramatist must leap as best he can on the hard high road, the adramatist must be very much an athlete.” That is just it: many of the modern (and ancient) Russian playwriters are adramatists. But they are extremely athletic; and so far from their work being chaotic, they sometimes give evidence, as in the case of Tchekov, of a supreme mastery over the construction and architectonics of drama, as well as of an unerring instinct for what will be telling behind footlights, although at first sight their choice does not seem to be obviously dramatic. Therefore, everything I have said so far can be summed up in two statements: Firstly, that Russian literature, because it deals with realism, has nothing in common with the work of certain French “Naturalists,” by whose work the word “realism” has achieved so wide a notoriety; secondly, Russian literature, although it is realistic, is not necessarily chaotic, and contains many supreme achievements in the art of selection. But I wish to discuss the peculiar quality of Russian realism, because it appears to me that it is this quality which differentiates Russian literature from the literature of other countries.