A book dealing with the literature of a foreign country appeals to a double audience: the narrow circle of people who are intimately familiar with that literature in its original tongue, and the large public which is imperfectly acquainted even with translations of some of its books. One of these audiences must necessarily be sacrificed. For if you address yourself exclusively to the specialists, the larger public will be but faintly interested; while if you have the larger public in view alone, the narrower circle of those who are familiar with the language will hear nothing from you which they do not already know too well. In the case of a literature such as Russian, it is obvious which audience has the claim to the greater consideration; but while this book is addressed to those who are interested in but not intimately familiar with Russian literature, I entertain the hope that these essays may not prove entirely uninteresting to the closer students of Russian. I have tried to make a compromise, and while especially addressing myself to the majority, not to lose sight of the minority altogether. The standpoint from which I approach Russian literature is less that of the scholar than of an admiring and sympathetic friend. I have tried to understand what the Russians themselves think about their own literature, and in some manner to reflect their point of view as it struck me either in their books or in conversation with many men and women of many classes throughout several years. It has always seemed to me that there are two ways of writing about a foreign literature: from the outside and from the inside. Take a language like French, for instance, and the study of French poetry in particular. Many English students of French poetry seem to me to start from the point of view that although much French verse has many excellent qualities, those qualities which are peculiarly French and which the French themselves admire most are not worth admiring. Thus it is that we have had many excellent critics telling us that although the French poetry of the Renaissance is admirable and the French Romantic epoch produced men of astounding genius, yet the poets of another sort, whom the French set up on a permanent pinnacle as models of classic perfection, such as Racine or La Fontaine, are not poets at all. Some critics have even gone further, and have maintained that admirable as the French language is as an instrument for writing prose, it cannot properly be used as a vehicle for writing poetry, and that French poetry cannot be considered as being in the same category or on the same footing as the verse of other nations. This is what I call the outside view, and I am not only not persuaded of its truth, but I am convinced that it is false, for two reasons:--