There are, I have just said, no heroes in Ryeshétnikoff’s novels: that means, no “heroes” in our usual literary sense; but you see before you real Titans--real heroes in the primitive sense of the word--heroes of endurance--such as the species must produce when, a shapeless crowd, it bitterly struggles against frost and hunger. The way in which these heroes support the most incredible physical privations as they tramp from one part of Russia to another, or have to face the most cruel deceptions in their search for work--the way they struggle for existence--is already striking enough; but the way in which they die, is perhaps even more striking. Many readers remember, of course, Tolstóy’s _Three Deaths_: the lady dying from consumption, and cursing her illness; the peasant who in his last hours thinks of his boots, and directs to whom they shall be given, so that they may go to the toiler most in need of them; and the third--the death of the birch tree. For Ryeshétnikoff’s heroes, who live all their lives without being sure of bread for the morrow, death is not a catastrophe: it simply means less and less force to get one’s food, less and less energy to chew one’s dry piece of bread, less and less bread, less oil in the lamp--and the lamp is blown out. Another most terrible thing in Ryeshétnikoff’s novels is his picture of how the habit of drunkenness takes possession of men. You see it coming--see how it must come, organically, necessarily, fatally--how it takes possession of the man, and how it holds him till his death. This Shakespearian fatalism applied to drink--whose workings are only too well known to those who know popular life--is perhaps the most terrible feature of Ryeshétnikoff’s novels. Especially is it apparent in _The Glúmoffs_, where you see how the teacher in a mining town, because he refuses to join the administration in the exploitation of children, is deprived of all means of living and although he marries in the long run a splendid woman, sinks at last into the clutches of the demon of habitual drunkenness. Only the women do not drink, and that saves the race from utter destruction; in fact, nearly every one of Ryeshétnikoff’s women is a heroine of persevering labour, of struggle for the necessities of life, as the female is in the whole animal world; and such the women are in real popular life in Russia.