It is not that Tchekoff despaired in the least of the advent of the dawn, only he felt he would not live to see it, and that it would break upon another generation. They would march prospering not from his presence; Songs shall inspirit them not from his lyre. The dawn came quicker probably than he expected. Tchekoff’s last play was performed in 1904, and he himself died soon after, while the war was still going on. Then came the bursting of the dam, and with the swift and tumultuous events of the political movement, with the granting of the freedom of the Press and the inflooding of Russia with a light which it had never before known, came a new literary renascence. It is too soon as yet to discern and to gauge what is the literary value of the thick and turbulent mass of production which has been poured out in Russia during the last two years. But one thing is certain, namely, that there is nothing stagnant in the new phenomena. The writers of the younger generation are still often pessimistic in the extreme; they dip their pencils in the “hues of earthquake and eclipse,” but it is the gloom of the earthquake and not the monotonous greyness of a sunless atmosphere. They shriek, they vociferate and they anathematise, but they do not say: “There is nothing to be done. Let us sit down and play Vindt.” It is true that this revolutionary outburst was succeeded by weariness and apathy. It is true that reaction was again in its turn as triumphant as it was in France during the reign of Louis XVIII., that the Liberal movement suffered a great blow owing to the fact that a considerable part of the population, namely, the landed proprietors and all people of means, who were until 1905 nearly all of them staunch supporters of the Opposition, frightened by the spectres of expropriation, revolution, and anarchy and ruin, veered to the Right. It is true that some people think that it will need another war, a famine, an epidemic of cholera, and several other disasters of the kind to set the movement going again. But in spite of this we shall never get back to the old stagnation, because of the flood of light which has been let into the country, and which cannot now ever be driven out again.