It is a curious coincidence that the youngest two literatures of the world, American and Russian, should each have contributed so materially to the development of the short-story. During the eighteenth century American literature was compassing a slow growth; but in Russia literature was virtually sleeping. Later, both come to effective expression at about the same time. While Irving, Hawthorne, Poe, Harte, Stockton, James, and O. Henry were telling wonderful stories in our land, Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenev, Tolstoi, Dostoevski, Korolenko, Garshin, Chekhov, Andreev, and Gorki were doing the like in Russia. The balance dips toward America for literary art, but for sheer strength it unmistakably drops on the side of the Slav. Thus throughout the nineteenth century and till now the short-story has been a form to be reckoned with in any adequate estimate of Russian writers, just as in the two other literatures whose recent development follows similar lines--American and French. When the modern short-story was born in its technical perfection in America, France, and Russia almost simultaneously, the French Revolution had worn out most of its evil effects and the New Spirit was beneficently at work in every enlightened land. The superior value of human beings, the benumbing effects of slavery, the priceless qualities of real liberty, and the absolute necessity for an enlightenment which should be something more than education, became ideals worth fighting and dying for. It is important to note here that great short-stories from that day to this have developed themes vital to the people for whom and by whom they were written. * * * * * But we must look deeper than the spirit of an _era_ if we are to account for a national tone in any given literature, and in the characteristic Russian temperament we shall in this case find the inspiring cause. The word _Slav_ has given to the world our word _slave_. In the pathetic and expressive phrase of Waliszewski, “The Slav race, the latest comer into the world of civilization, has always been at school, always under some rod or sway. Whether it be the Oriental and material conquests of the thirteenth century, or the Western and moral one of the eighteenth, it merely undergoes a change of masters.” Yet in the face of all this the Russian people has persistently maintained, and even accentuated, its personality. To me, this personality is marked by six great characteristics: _hugeness_, _passion_, _simplicity_, _religiousness_, _suffering_, and _fatalism_. Herzen said that “sadness, skepticism, irony, are the three strings of Russian literature--the skepticism is not typical; the other qualities are.”