An important division of Russian novelists, almost totally unknown in Western Europe, and yet representing perhaps the most typical portion of Russian literature, are the “Folk-Novelists.” It is under this name that we know them chiefly in Russia, and under this name the critic Skabitchévskiy has analysed them--first, in a book bearing this title, and then in his excellent _History of Modern Russian Literature_ (4th ed. 1900). By “Folk-Novelists” we mean, of course, not those who write _for_ the people, but those who write _about_ the people: the peasants, the miners, the factory workers, the lowest strata of population in towns, the tramps. Bret Harte in his sketches of the mining camps, Zola in _L’Assommoir_ and _Germinal_, Mr. Gissing in _Liza of Lambeth_, Mr. Whiting in _No. 5 John Street_, belong to this category; but what is exceptional and accidental in Western Europe is organic in Russia. Quite a number of talented writers have devoted themselves during the last fifty years, some of them entirely, to the description of this or that division of the Russian people. Every class of the toiling masses, which in other literatures would have appeared in novels as the background for events going on amidst educated people (as in Hardy’s _Woodlanders_), has had in the Russian novel its own painter. All great questions concerning popular life which are debated in political and social books and reviews have been treated in the novel as well. The evils of serfdom and, later on, the struggle between the tiller of the soil and growing commercialism; the effects of factories upon village life, the great coöperative fisheries, peasant life in certain monasteries, and life in the depths of the Siberian forests, slum life and tramp life--all these have been depicted by the folk-novelists, and their novels have been as eagerly read as the works of the greatest authors. And while such questions as, for instance, the future of the village-community, or of the peasants’ Common Law Courts, are debated in the daily papers, in the scientific reviews and the journals of statistical research, they are also dealt with by means of artistic images and types taken from life in the folk-novel.