During a period of twenty or thirty years the novel and the critic were everything to Russia; the national intelligence lived in them, and within their precincts it elaborated a free world after its own heart. Like a maiden perpetually shut away from the outside world, dreaming of some romantic lover whom she has never known or seen, consoling herself with novels, and fancying that all the fine adventures in them have happened to herself, Russia has written into the national novel her own visionary nature, her thirst for political adventures, and her eagerness for transcendental reforms. One most important reform may be said to be directly the work of the novel, namely, the emancipation of the serfs. When the more clement Alexander II. succeeded the austere Nicholas I., and the restraints laid upon the political press were loosened so that it could spread its wings, the novel suffered in consequence. The hope of great events to come, the approaching liberation of the serfs, the formation of a sort of liberal cabinet, the efflorescence of new illusions that bud under every new régime, concurred to infuse the literature with civic and social tendencies. Beautiful and bright and poetical is art for art's sake, and as Puchkine understood it; but at the hour of doubt and strife we ask even art for positive service and practical solutions. Who stops to see whether the life-preservers thrown to drowning men struggling with death are of elegant workmanship? In speaking of nihilism I have mentioned the most important one of the directive Russian novels, called "What to Do?" by the martyr Tchernichewsky,--a work of no great literary merit, but which was the gospel of young Russia. In his wake followed a host of novelists of this tendency, but inferior, obscure, and without even the inventive power of their leader in dressing up their ideas as symbolic personages, like his ascetic socialist Rakmetof, who laid himself down upon a board stuck through with nail-points. In their turn came the reactionaries, or rather the conservatives, and in novels as absurd as those of their predecessors they clothed the nihilists in purple and gold; it finally resulted that everybody was as ready to produce a novel as to write a serious article, or to handle a gun at a barricade. If any one of the neophytes of the school of directive novels possessed genius, it was swallowed up in the froth of political passion.