The literature, for instance, cannot go back to the time when there was no political life, because there is a political life now. The Reactionaries may have the best of it; the Liberals may discredit themselves and they may fail again and again; but all this constitutes a thing called political life, and which is reflected directly in the daily Press and indirectly in the literature of the day. Therefore, so far, whatever may be the discouragement felt by political reformers, there is as yet no trace of a note of apathy in the literature of the day. The curious thing is that nearly all the literature which is now appearing--with the exception of a small æsthetic school which has plunged into mysticism, decadentism, and many other isms--has for its subject-matter political events and political events only. Prisons, police, Pogroms, meetings, elections, parties, assassinations, bombs, revolutionaries, reactionaries, anarchists, fanatics--these are the main elements of the new literature. Another interesting point is that with all this stock-in-trade of sensationalism the literature is not sensational. If one compares it with English or German books on the same subject one thinks one is reading about a different country. This is owing to the simple fact that the Russians understand the people about whom they are writing. They know that humanity is not divided into two clearly defined categories--Liberals who are all saints and Conservatives who are all monsters. They know that because a man is a policeman he does not necessarily cease to be a human being, or that because a man is a revolutionary he does not necessarily become a superman, endowed with the resistance of Prometheus, the energy of Cromwell, the kindness of St. John. These writers distinguish. Andreev, for instance, writes a touching story of the Governor of a town, who in a moment of riot gives the order for firing on the crowd. He then relates how this man knows he will be killed, how every one else knows it, and how slowly, deliberately, and helplessly he slides into his doom. Kouprin, one of the most talented writers of the younger generation, tells a story which he says is a true one, of how after one of the Jewish “Pogroms,” when a committee was sitting to organise relief for those who had suffered, a deputation of thieves arrives and addresses the President. The thieves are burning with indignation because they have been accused of having taken part in the “Pogrom.” They are wounded in their most sensitive spot: their _amour propre_. They cannot get over the fact that people such as they--thieves by profession, who take pride in their art, whether it consist in pocketpicking, or housebreaking--should be confused with the inglorious herd of hooligans; and what is to them the unkindest cut of all is that people should have thought them capable of siding with the police, since they say that the “Pogroms” are the work of the police, and that