Písemskiy wrote also, during the early part of his literary career, a few tales from the life of the peasants (_The Carpenters’ Artel_, _The St. Petersburg Man_, etc.), and a drama, from village life, _A Bitter Fate_, all of which have a real literary value. He displayed in them a knowledge of peasant life and a mastery of the spoken, popular Russian language, together with a perfectly realistic perception of peasant character. There was no trace of the idealisation which is so strongly felt in the later productions of Grigoróvitch, written under the influence of George Sand. The steady, common-sense peasant characters that Písemskiy pictured are taken from a real, sound observation of life, and rival the best peasant characters of Turguéneff. As to the drama of Písemskiy (he was, by the way, a very good actor), it loses nothing from comparison with the best dramas of Ostróvskiy, and is more tragic than any of them, while in powerful realism it is by no means inferior to Tolstóy’s _Power of Darkness_, with which it has much in common, and which it perhaps surpasses in its stage qualities. The chief work of Potyékhin was his comedies, mentioned in the preceding chapter. All of them are from the life of the educated classes, but he wrote also a few less known dramas from the peasant life, and twice--in his early career in the fifties, and later on in the seventies--he turned to the writing of short stories and novels from popular life. These stories and novels are most characteristic of the evolution of the folk-novel during those years. In his earlier tales Potyékhin was entirely under the spell of the then prevailing manner of idealising the peasants; but in his second period, after having lived through the years of realism in the sixties, and taken part in the above-mentioned ethnographic expedition, he changed his manner. He entirely got rid of benevolent idealisation, and represented the peasants as they were. In the creation of individual characters he was undoubtedly successful, but the life of the village--the _mir_--without which Russian village-life cannot be represented, and which so well appears in the works of the later folk-novelists, is yet missing. Altogether one feels that Potyékhin knew well the outer symptoms of the life of the Russian peasants, including their way of talking, but that he had not yet grasped the real soul of the peasant. This came only later on. ETHNOGRAPHICAL RESEARCH