A third period may be distinguished in the art of N. Hvóschinskaya, after the end of the seventies. The novels of this period--among which the series entitled _The Album: Groups and Portraits_ is the most striking--have a new character. When the great liberal movement which Russia had lived through in the early sixties came to an end, and reaction had got the upper hand, after 1864, hundreds and hundreds of those who had been prominent in this movement as representatives of advanced thought and reform abandoned the faith and the ideals of their best years. Under a thousand various pretexts they now tried to persuade themselves--and, of course, those women who had trusted them--that new times had come, and new requirements had grown up; that they had only become “practical” when they deserted the old banner and ranged themselves under a new one--that of personal enrichment; that to do this was on their part a necessary self-sacrifice, a manifestation of “virile citizenship,” which requires from every man that he should not stop even before the sacrifice of his ideals in the interest of his “cause.” “V. Krestovskiy,” as a woman who had loved the ideals, understood better than any man the real sense of these sophisms. She must have bitterly suffered from them in her personal life; and I doubt whether in any literature there is a collection of such “groups and portraits” of deserters as we see in _The Album_, and especially in _At the Photographer’s_. In reading these stories we are conscious of a loving heart which bleeds as it describes these deserters, and this makes of “The groups and portraits” of N. D. Hvóschinskaya one of the finest pieces of “subjective realism” we possess in our literature. Two sisters of N. D. Hvóschinskaya, who wrote under the _noms-de-plume_ of ZIMAROFF and VESENIEFF, were also novelists. The former wrote a biography of her sister Nathalie. POETS OF THE SAME EPOCH Several poets of the epoch described in the last two chapters ought to be analysed at some length in this place, if this book pretended to be a Course in Russian literature. I shall have, however, to limit myself to very short notes, although most of the poets could not have failed to be favourites with other nations if they had written in a language better known abroad than Russian. Such was certainly KOLTSOFF (1808-1842), a poet from the people, who has sung in his songs, so deeply appealing to every poetical mind, the borderless steppes of Southern Russia, the poor life of the tiller of the soil, the sad existence of the Russian peasant woman, that love which is for the loving soul only a source of acute suffering, that fate which is not a mother but a step-mother, and that happiness which has been so short and has left behind only tears and sadness.