Vladimir, the typical young Russian, is a promising writer, wrapped up in his work, and safely past the period of gay carousing. At night he returns to his room and his “only friend,” Vasyuk, a little black-haired dog, who adores his master. “My friend, my only friend,” are words often on Vladimir’s lips, but at length he comes to love Natalia, and Vasyuk gets his favorite dish of liver less often. One day the dog is taken ill, but in his haste to visit Natalia, Vladimir does not take Vasyuk to the veterinary. By and by it is too late. In months to come, Vladimir fails to make good his literary promise, and-- ... then, like the cover of a coffin, heavy, dead oblivion fell upon him. The woman had also forsaken him; she too considered herself deceived. The fumy, vaporous nights went by, also the mercilessly punishing white days, and often, more often than before ... he lay in his bed ... and whispered: “My friend, my only friend!” And his quivering hand fell faintly upon the empty place. From the foregoing, and even more from that which follows, we may conclude it to be a peculiar property of the sketch-form in fiction that its story may not be told in synopsis. Indeed, in the true sketch there _is_ no story. Atmosphere, character-drawing, swift outlining of a situation, impressions of mood and feeling--all these permeate the sketch, but crises in human lives, complications arising therefrom, and the untangling of the plotted skein--these belong to the short-story and the novel. For this reason much of Andreev’s shorter work defies our efforts to retell it; one must go to the writer himself for his final phrase, his subtly suggested situation, his almost uncanny evocation of mood. “Valia,” for example, is one of his sketches which baffle the second-hand narrator: as well try to reconstruct an old-time beauty by dressing up a lay-figure in hand-me-downs.