Petersburg or will she be taken at last to a hospital where she may have a warm blanket and cup of tea? Will the postman abstain from the “fire-water,” and will he get a situation, or not? Surely, to obtain this result with such unconventional means reveals a very great talent; it means, to possess that power of moving one’s readers--of making them love and hate--which makes the very essence of literary talent; and this is why those shapeless, and much too long, and much too dreary novels of Ryeshétnikoff make a landmark in Russian literature, and are the precursors not only of a Górkiy, but, most surely, of a greater talent still. LEVÍTOFF Another folk-novelist of the same generation was LEVÍTOFF (1835 or 1842-1877). He described chiefly those portions of southern Middle Russia which are in the borderland between the wooded parts of the country and the treeless prairies. His life was extremely sad. He was born in the family of a poor country priest in a village of the province of Tambóf, and was educated in a clerical school of the type described by Pomyalóvskiy. When he was only sixteen he went on foot to Moscow, in order to enter the university, and then moved to St. Petersburg. There he was soon involved in some “students’ affair,” and was exiled, in 1858, to Shenkúrsk, in the far north, and next removed to Vólogda. Here he lived in complete isolation from everything intellectual, and in awful poverty verging on starvation. Not until three years later was he allowed to return to Moscow, and, being absolutely penniless, he made all the journey from Vólogda to Moscow on foot, earning occasionally a few shillings by clerical work done for the cantonal Board of some village. These years of exile left a deep trace upon all his subsequent life, which he passed in extreme poverty, never finding a place where he could settle, and drowning in drink the sufferings of a loving, restless soul. During his early childhood he was deeply impressed by the charm and quiet of village life in the prairies, and he wrote later on: “This quietness of village life passes before me, or rather flies, as something really living, as a well defined image. Yes, I distinctly see above our daily life in the village, somebody gliding--a little above the cross of our church, together with the light clouds--somebody light and soft of outline, having the mild and modest face of our prairie girls. ... Thus, after many years spent amidst the untold sufferings of my present existence, do I represent to myself the genius of country life.”