“Your book has changed much in my conception of life. I was too Martha. These last two years of captivity have been a pilgrimage for me though I have stayed in one place. Still I console myself by thinking that if I am suffering others also are, when I should, on the contrary, remember that what happens to me happens to no one else. “I have just been told that my translations may not be sent out of Germany, but I hear that one book will soon appear in Russia. It will be good for Russians to read it now. “You are right saying that we shall be mad with joy at our relief. I cannot yet feel myself free spiritually in prison, and for me the body’s freedom is still the greatest thing on earth, but I think of the day of deliverance as something so remote and so beautiful that I compare it with our resurrection from death.” VIII RUSSIAN LITERATURE IN 1916 I READ, as ever, a great number of contemporary Russian books, spent many hours in bookshops, and it may not be out of place to give my impression of the literature of the hour. Undoubtedly the great emotional impulse of the opening of the war in Russia has passed. This is reflected very clearly in current literature. The flood of printed lectures, war-pamphlets, and poems has ceased. Volumes of war stories are no longer printed, and indeed the war as a literary topic has become of minor interest. In the clearance it is now possible to observe the great desolation which the war has wrought. There is a strange silence in Russia. What was before the war has passed; what shall be after has not begun to be. There is as yet no promise of the future anywhere. Not that books have not been published in 1916. They have been published thickly, despite the absence of genius, the scarcity of paper, and the supposed dearth of readers. Fonvisin gets into her eighteenth thousand with “Innocent and Yet to Blame,” and “The Keys of Happiness” goes into the sixth sequel. “The End of the War,” a novel by Lef Zhdanof, runs through several editions. “Russian Master,” an enthralling yellow-back of 470 pages by Lappo-Danilevsky, is reprinted many times. The translation of the novels of W. J. Locke flood over every bookseller’s counter and railway station book-stall. New books are certainly as plentiful as ever. But they are mostly interim volumes whose object is to pass the time away till the clamour of the war be over.