Another writer who excelled in the representation of the type of “_mir_-eaters” in the villages of European Russia is SÁLOFF (1843-1902). PETROPÁVLOVSKIY (1857-1892), who wrote under the pseudonym of KARÓNIN, was, on the other hand, a real poet of village-life and of the cultivation of the fields. He was born in southeastern Russia, in the province of Samára, but was early exiled to the government of Tobólsk, in Siberia, where he was kept many years, and from which he was released only to die soon after from consumption. He gave in his novels and stories several very dramatic types of village “ne’er-do-well’s,” but the novel which is most typical of his talent is _My World_. In it he tells how an “intellectual,” “rent in twain” and nearly losing his reason in consequence of this dualism, finds inner peace and reconciliation with life when he settles in a village and works in the same almost superhuman way that the peasants do, when hay has to be mown and the crops to be carried in. Thus living the life they live, he is loved by them, and finds a healthy and intelligent girl to love him. This is, of course, to some extent an idyll of village life; but so slight is the idealisation, as we know from the experience of those “intellectuals” who went to the villages as equals coming among equals, that the idyll reads almost as a reality. Several more folk-novelists ought to be mentioned. Such are L. MELSHIN (born 1860), the pseudonym of an exile “P. YA.,” who is also a poet, and who, having been kept for twelve years at hard labour in Siberia as a political convict, has published two volumes of hard-labour sketches, _In the World of the Outcasts_ (a work to put by the side of Dostoyévskiy’s _Dead House_); S. ELPÁTIEVSKIY (born 1854), also an exile, who has given good sketches of Siberian tramps; NEFÉDOFF (1847-1902), an ethnographer who has made valuable scientific researches and at the same time has published excellent sketches of factory and village life, and whose writings are thoroughly imbued with a deep faith in the store of energy and plastic creative power of the masses of the country people; and several others. Every one of these writers deserves, however, more than a short notice, because each has contributed something, either to the comprehension of this or that class of the people, or to the working out of those forms of “idealistic realism” which are best suited for dealing with types taken from the toiling masses, and which has lately made the literary success of Maxím Górkiy. MAXÍM GÓRKIY