But--to quote the perfectly correct estimate of Skabitchévskiy--“all this does not, however, determine Písareff’s position in Russian literature. In all this he only embodied a certain moment of the development of Russian youth, with all its exaggerations.” The real cause of Písareff’s influence was elsewhere, and may be best explained by the following example. There appeared a novel in which the author had told how a girl, good-hearted, honest, but quite uneducated, quite commonplace as to her conceptions of happiness and life, and full of the current society-prejudices, fell in love, and was brought to all sorts of misfortunes. This girl--Písareff at once understood--was not invented. Thousands upon thousands of like girls exist, and their lives have the same run. They are--he said--“Muslin Girls.” Their conception of the universe does not go much beyond their muslin dresses. And he reasoned, how with their “muslin education” and their “muslin-girl conceptions,” they must unavoidably come to grief. And by this article, which every girl in every educated family in Russia read, and reads still, he induced thousands upon thousands of Russian girls to say to themselves: “No, never will I be like that poor muslin girl. I will conquer knowledge; I will think; and I will make for myself a better future.” Each of his articles had a similar effect. It gave to the young mind the first shock. It opened the young man’s and the young woman’s eyes to those thousands of details of life which habit makes us cease to perceive, but the sum of which makes precisely that stifling atmosphere under which the heroines of “Krestóvskiy-pseudonym” used to wither. From that life, which could promise only deception, dulness and vegetative existence, he called the youth of both sexes to a life full of the light of knowledge, a life of work, of broad views and sympathies, which was now opened for the “thoughtful realist.”