Gorky, who appears more and more as an editor and essayist, has issued a volume of translated Armenian literature, but he is putting forth no creative artistic work, and perhaps finds little time for it. As a reward, however, politically-minded Radical Russia certainly looks to him for light and leading. Andreef goes on writing, but seems to have fallen into minor importance. Viacheslaf Ivanof has just written an excellent book of essays on Dostoevsky, Solovyof, Tolstoy, etc., which ought to be translated into English together with his former book “From Star to Star.” Artsibashef continues to write salacious stories for the Russian middle-class, and seems to reflect their life and mind. Igor Severanin is quiescent, but his latest volume of poems, printed on bad paper, is dedicated to his “Thirteenth,” by which he apparently means his thirteenth “lady friend.” A curious volume lately confiscated by the police is “Father Leontius and his Lady Admirers,” an account of Rasputin, written in the form of a fictitious narrative by a serious student of sectarianism and religious phenomena--Prugavin. The society ladies circle round Leontius and cry out “Alleluia!” “Sabaoth!” “Three in One and One in Three!” which seems very shocking and novel to Russians, though it only reminds the English reader of the Agapemonites at Clapton and similar phenomena. Greater than the problem of the psychology of Leontius seems to be the problem of the psychology of the refined and normal women who can hail him as God. Lef Zhdanof’s popular novel on the war is very friendly to the German people and gives them a new chance after a political revolution. Balmont, the popular poet, has written an essay in one volume entitled “Poetry as Magic,” and parts are highly reminiscent of Stevenson’s “Art of Writing.” He analyses the functions of the letters of the alphabet: _L_ is a caress; _o_ is space triumphant; _u_ is the music of noise, the cry of terror; _m_ is man shutting his lips, it is all the dumb can say in their anguish, etc.