"Russia is not Germany," answered the man who taught Americans to read Turgenieff. "The people of Russia are not militaristic as the people of Germany are militaristic. In Germany war has for a generation been the chief idea of every one. The nation has had a militaristic obsession. And this, naturally, has stifled the imagination. "But in Russia nothing of the sort has happened. Whatever the designs of the ruling classes may be, the people of Russia keep their simplicity, their large intellectuality and spirituality. And, therefore, their imagination and other great intellectual and spiritual gifts find expression in their great novels and plays. "I well remember how the Russian novelists impressed me when I was a young man. They opened to me what seemed to be a new world--and it was only the real world. There is Tcheckoff--have you read his _Orchard_? What life, what color, what beauty of truth are in that book! "Then there is Turgenieff--how grateful I am for his books! It must be thirty years since I first read him. Thomas Sargent Perry, of Boston, a man of the greatest culture, was almost the first American to read Turgenieff. Stedman read Turgenieff in those days, too. Soon all of the younger writers were reading him. "I remember very well a dinner at Whitelaw Reid's house in Lexington Avenue, when some of us young men were enthusiastic over the Russian novel, and the author we mentioned most frequently was Turgenieff. "Dr. J. G. Holland, the poet who edited _The Century_, lived across the street from Mr. Reid, and during the evening he came over and joined us. He listened to us for a long time in silence, hardly speaking a word. When he rose to go, he said: 'I have been listening to the conversation of these young men for over an hour. They have been talking about books. And I have never before heard the names of any of the authors they have mentioned.'" "Were those the days," I asked, "in which you first read Tolstoy?" "That was long before the time," answered Mr. Howells. "Tolstoy afterward meant everything to me--his philosophy as well as his art--far more than Turgenieff. Tolstoy did not love all his writing. He loved the thing that he wrote about, the thing that he lived and taught--equality. And equality is the best thing in the world. It is the thing for which the Best of Men lived and died. "I never met Tolstoy," said Mr. Howells. "But I once sent him a message of appreciation after he had sent a message to me. Tolstoy was great in the way he wrote as well as in what he wrote. Tolstoy's force is a moral force. His great art is as simple as nature." "Do you think that the Russian novelists have influenced your work?" I asked.