To explain why this is so I must state briefly what are the chief characteristics of the Russian stage. It differs entirely from the European stage in that it escaped the influence of the modern French stage and the French ideals of stagecraft, of the “well-made” play, which produced the skill of Scribe, the ingenuity of Sardou, the logic of Alexandre Dumas _fils_, which left so deep an imprint on the stage of all other European countries. This tradition of stagecraft and these ideals were absorbed by Henrik Ibsen, who, as soon as he had made himself absolute master of all tricks which this craft comprised, threw them overboard and wrote plays in which he showed how at a given moment Fate may deal to mortals terrific blows arising from their deeds in the past, and often what they considered to be their good deeds--the aforesaid blows making themselves manifest in that by the ordinary course and conversations of everyday life. Ibsen was, therefore, the great reformer of the modern stage; and he not only cast away the tricks of the French school, but he wrote plays about human beings ruthlessly and vividly portrayed instead of conventional puppets. In France there was likewise a revolt against the “well-made” play, and dramatists of the naturalist school gave to the public what they called “slices of life,” which in its turn produced a reaction towards romanticism and artificial comedy. But in spite of the various phases of Scribisme and naturalism, and in spite of the fact that the Scribe-Sardou tradition has been thrown to the winds, certain ideals belonging to this school remain in the modern French stage, namely, the necessity of “situations,” or of fundamental theses to be worked out logically, which cause many modern French plays to resemble mathematical problems. The Russian stage differs entirely from both the French and the Scandinavian. The Sardou-Scribe school never reigned in Russia, so that there was no necessity to dethrone it, but apart from this significant fact the Russian stage has just as little in common with Ibsen, the French naturalist school, and the modern French play _à thèse_ as it has with Sardou or Dumas _fils_. This is where the difference lies. Ibsen shows us human beings at a moment when Fate in the shape of the inevitable result of their actions falls upon them like a thunderbolt; the French naturalist school gave us slices of raw life, but slices of brutally raw life so brutal as to be exaggerated, abnormal, and therefore unreal; the modern French play _à thèse_ goes back for its machinery to the old ideal of the well-made play; that is to say, the wine is new, but the skins are old.