When Uspénskiy began writing his first sketches of village life--it was in the early seventies--Young Russia was in the grip of the great movement “towards the people,” and it must be owned that in this movement, as in every other, there was some idealisation. Those who did not know village-life at all cherished exaggerated, idyllic illusions about the village-community. In all probability Uspénskiy, who was born in a large industrial town, Túla, in the family of a small functionary and hardly knew country life at all, shared these illusions to some extent, very probably in their most extreme aspect; and still preserving them he went to a province of southeastern Russia, Samára, which had lately become the prey of modern commercialism, and where, owing to a number of peculiar circumstances, the abolition of serfdom had been accomplished under conditions specially ruinous to the peasants and to village-life altogether. Here he must have suffered intensely from seeing his youthful dreams vanishing; and, as artists often do, he hastened to generalise; but he had not the education of the thorough ethnographer, which might have prevented him from making too hasty ethnological generalisations from his limited materials, and he began to write a series of scenes from village-life, imbued with a deep pessimism. It was only much later on, while staying in a village of Northern Russia, in the province of Nóvgorod, that he came to understand the influences which the culture of the land and life in an agricultural village may exercise upon the tiller of the soil; then only had he some glimpses of what are the social and moral forces of land cultivation and communal life, and of what free labour on a free soil might be. These observations inspired Uspénskiy with perhaps the best thing he wrote, _The Power of the Soil_ (1882). It will remain, at any rate, his most important contribution in this domain--the artist appearing here in all the force of his talent and in his true function of explaining the inner springs of a certain mood of life. ZLATOVRÁTSKIY AND OTHER FOLK-NOVELISTS