Every movement among the educated classes in favour of the poorer classes begins by an idealisation of the latter. It being necessary to clear away, first of all, a number of prejudices which exist among the rich as regards the poor, some idealisation is unavoidable. Therefore, the earlier folk-novelist takes only the most striking types--those whom the wealthier people can better understand and sympathise with; and he lightly passes over the less sympathetic features of the life of the poor. This was done in the forties in France and England, and in Russia by Grigoróvitch, Márko Vovtchók, and several others. Then came Ryeshétnikoff with his artistic Nihilism: with his negation of all the usual tricks of art, and his objectivism; his blunt refusal to create “types” and his preference for the quite ordinary man; his manner of transmitting to you his love of his people, merely through the suppressed intensity of his own emotion. Later on, new problems arose for Russian literature. The readers were now quite ready to sympathise with the individual peasant or factory worker; but they wanted to know something more: namely, what were the very foundations, the ideals, the springs of village life? what were they worth in the further development of the nation? what, and in what form, could the immense agricultural population of Russia contribute to the further development of the country and the civilised world altogether? All such questions could not be answered by the statistician alone; they required the genius of the artist, who must decipher the reply out of the thousands of small indications and facts, and our folk-novelists understood this new demand of the reader. A rich collection of individual peasant types having already been given, it was now the life of the village--the _mir_, with its advantages and drawbacks, and its promises for the future--that the readers were anxious to find in the folk-novel. These were the questions which the new generation of folk-novelists undertook to discuss. In this venture they were certainly right. It must not be forgotten that in the last analysis every economical and social question is a question of psychology of both the individual and the social aggregation. It cannot be solved by arithmetic alone. Therefore, in social science, as in human psychology, the poet often sees his way better than the physiologist. At any rate, he too has his voice in the matter.