The Russian short-story is even more pronouncedly national in theme, in tone, and in treatment than is its French contemporary; indeed, Muscovite literature is the most markedly national of any in Europe. This would not be so significant a statement were modern Russian literature--by which I mean all such literature which really counts--more than a century old; but this ancient, remote, and self-sufficient people really lived for so long a time apart from the great highways of Continental thought that they were not nationally conscious of those titanic upheaving and levelling passions whose fitful and at times appalling force shook France, England, and even Poland to the very heart and forced their thinkers to express the spirit of the revolutionary era in undying prose. Instead, Russian writers of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries occupied their pens with imitations of foreign--chiefly French--literature, or wrote minute local descriptions which were important not so much for what they were as for what they pointed to--a new national consciousness. * * * * * But in order to get an understanding of modern Russian literature we turn backward in our swift survey. When Peter the Great, that much magnified and more maligned potentate, ascended the throne, he found Russia the home of bigotry, prejudice, and barbarism. But before his unceremonious blows the doors swung reluctantly open, and from the west a steady concourse of European ideas, often accompanied in person by their thinkers, moved through the gates and penetrated every upper circle. Naturally, literature was the first of the arts to throb with this infusion of outside blood, and naturally, also, its first expressions were in that form of flattery which is alleged to be most sincere. But when national consciousness is awakened, national pride soon begins to utter lusty sounds, and its theme is certain to be as national as its form of expression. So, with the dawn of the nineteenth century--Lomonosoff, Kantemier, Sumarakov, the Empress Catherine, Von Viezin, Derzhavin, Karamsin, and Zhukovski having in the previous century done fine service in poetry, history, and the drama--there opened a new era: the period of artistic Russian fiction. The barbaric richness and fearless crudity of the old poetry were exchanged for sophisticated prose. Kriloff deserves special mention here, even though to Gogol and Pushkin must go the trail-blazers’ honor. His fables and tales were distinctly in advance of previous similar work, but the real fictive creators were yet to come. Kriloff was at once the last of the old and the first of the new prose-writers. * * * * *