Zlatovrátskiy’s novels are thus an important ethnographical contribution, and they have at the same time an artistic value. His _Everyday Life in the Village_, and perhaps even more his _Peasant Jurymen_ (since 1864, the peasant heads of households have acted in turn as jurors in the law courts), are full of the most charming scenes of village-life; while his _Foundations_ represents a serious attempt at grasping in a work of art the fundamental conceptions of Russian rural life. In this last work we also find types of men, who personify the revolt of the peasant against both external oppression and the submissiveness of the mass to that oppression--men, who, under favourable conditions might become the initiators of movements of a deep purport. That types have not been invented will be agreed by everyone who knows Russian village-life from the inside. * * * * * The writers who have been named in the preceding pages are far from representing the whole school of folk-novelists. Not only has every Russian novelist of the past, from Turguéneff down, been inspired in some of his work by folk life, but some of the best productions of the most prominent contemporary writers, such as Korolénko, Tchéhoff, Oertel and many others (see next chapter), belong to the same category. There are besides quite a number of novelists distinctively of this class, who would be spoken of at some length in any course of Russian literature, but whom, unfortunately, I am compelled to mention in but a few lines. NAÚMOFF was born at Tobólsk (in 1838) and, settling in Western Siberia after he had received a university education at St. Petersburg, he wrote a series of short novels and sketches in which he described life in West Siberian villages and mining towns. These stories were widely read, owing to their expressive, truly popular language, the energy with which they were imbued, and the striking pictures they contained of the advantage taken of the poverty of the mass by the richer peasants, known in Russia as “_mir_-eaters” (_miroyéd_). ZASÓDIMSKIY (born 1843) belongs to the same period. Like many of his contemporaries, he spent years of his youth in exile, but he remains still the same “populist” that he was in his youth, imbued with the same love of the people and the same faith in the peasants. His _Chronicle of the Village Smúrino_ (1874) and _Mysteries of the Steppes_ (1882) are especially interesting, because Zasódimskiy made in these novels attempts at representing types of intellectual and protesting peasants, true to life, but usually neglected by our folk-novelists. Some of them are rebels who revolt against the conditions of village-life, chiefly in their own, personal interest, while others are peaceful religious propagandists, and still others are men who have developed under the influence of educated propagandists.