If it is very difficult to avoid romantic sentimentalism, when the author who describes the monotony of the everyday life of a middle-class crowd intends to make the reader sympathise nevertheless with this crowd, the difficulties are still greater when he descends a step lower in the social scale and deals with peasants, or, still worse, with those who belong to the lowest strata of city life. The most realistic writers have fallen into sentimentalism and romanticism when they attempted to do this. Even Zola in his last novel, _Work_, falls into the trap. But that is precisely what Ryeshétnikoff never did. His writings are a violent protest against æsthetics, and even against all sorts of conventional art. He was a true child of the epoch characterised by Turguéneff in Bazároff. “I do not care for the form of my writings: truth will speak for itself,” he seems to say to his readers. He would have felt ashamed if, even unconsciously, he had resorted anywhere to dramatic effects in order to touch his readers--just as the public speaker who entirely relies upon the beauty of the thought he develops would feel ashamed if some merely oratorical expression escaped his lips. For myself, I think that a great creative genius was required in order to pick, as Ryeshétnikoff did, out of the everyday, monotonous life of the crowd, those trifling expressions, those exclamations, those movements expressive of some feelings or some idea without which his novels would have been quite unreadable. It has been remarked by one of our critics that when you begin to read a novel of Ryeshétnikoff you seem to have plunged into a chaos. You have the description of a commonplace landscape, which, in fact, is no “landscape” at all; then the future hero or heroine of the novel appears, and he or she is a person whom you may see in every crowd--with no claims to rise above this crowd, with hardly anything even to distinguish him or her from the crowd. This hero speaks, eats, drinks, works, swears, as everyone else in the crowd does. He is not a chosen creature--he is not a demoniacal character--a Richard III. in a fustian jacket; nor is she a Cordelia or even a Dickens’ “Nell.” Ryeshétnikoff’s men and women are exactly like thousands of men and women around them; but gradually, owing to those very scraps of thought, to an exclamation, to a word dropped here and there, or even to a slight movement that is mentioned--you begin to feel interested in them. After thirty pages you feel that you are already decidedly in sympathy with them and you are so captured that you read pages and pages of these chaotic details with the sole purpose of solving the question which begins passionately to interest you: Will Peter or Anna find to-day the piece of bread which they long to have? Will Mary get the work which might procure her a pinch of tea for her sick and half crazy mother? Will the woman Praskóvia freeze during that bitterly cold night when she is lost in the streets of St.