The Russian countenance is typically sad, almost despairing. The yoke worn for so many ages by the masses, the bitterness of a life devoted to service for the “big man,” the hopelessness born of petty and major oppressions, result for the Russian, as for all barbaric peoples--for Russia is still largely barbaric--in a resigned suffering which has not yet begun to be mitigated by the great increase of revolutionary ideas among the people. Indeed, protest against the ruling order has thus far yielded only greater present sadness, how hopeful soever the future may be. And lastly we have that most terrible, most pathetic, most depressing temper--fatalism. And yet this is not the precise word, for no single English word expresses the pessimism, the apathy, the expectation of nothing, the anticlimax of ambition in which a whole race begins as a Napoleon and--peters out. All this may sound unlovely. And doubtless it is, for loveliness is not the tone of Nihilism, nor is beauty the consort of despair. Yet the towering ambition that ends in puny deeds shows even now signs of a more effective result, and larger liberties, the outgrowth of contact with the world without, must sooner or later bring to life a more ardent and hope-cherishing Russia. * * * * * The short-story of today in Russia is strong--terribly strong, for the most part, for it is not charming, certainly. But as an augury of what the Russian people will yet become it has a thousand-fold more promise than may be found in the perfumed politeness of an anæmic fiction such as floods the magazines of England and America. Notwithstanding all her gloom, Russia’s strength is her bow of promise. PUSHKIN AND THE NEW ERA Alexander Sergyevitch Pushkin was born in Moscow, June 7, 1799, at a time when Russia was aswirl with various currents. Therefore, to gain some clear vision of the distinguished service which he rendered the literature of his native land, we must at least glance at the great intellectual and political tides--they were largely coincident--which swept Russia, first away from her own self-sufficient life, then toward France, next in the direction of Germany, and finally out into a national thought-channel of her own. Pushkin is one of those writers who are big enough to have founded and dominated an era, not solely because of his own preëminent genius, but for the deeper reason that he represented in himself the culmination of a series of national steps, each as definite as it was important.