Remizov is very different. He is steeped in Russian popular and legendary lore. His roots are deep down in the Russian soil. He is the greatest living master of racy and idiomatic Russian. He has also written prose that elbows poetry, and that was looked upon with surprise and bewilderment until people realised that it was poetry. But his importance in the history of the Russian Novel is of another kind. It is firstly in his deliberate effort to "deliteralize" Russian prose, to give it the accent, the intonation, and the syntax of the _spoken_ language. He has fully achieved his ends; he has created a prose which is entirely devoid of all bookishness and even on the printed page gives the illusion of being heard, not seen. Few have been able to follow him in this path; for in the present state of linguistic chaos and decomposition few writers have the necessary knowledge of Russian, the taste and the sense of measure, to write anything like his pure and flexible Russian. In the hands of others it degenerates into slang, or into some personal jargon closely related to Double Dutch. Remizov, however, has been more influential in another way, by his method of treating Russian _life_. The most notable of Remizov's "provincial" stories [Footnote: In the second edition it is called "The Story of Ivan Semenovich Stratilatov." ] _The Unhushable Tambourine _was written at one time with Bely's _The Silver Dove_, in 1909. At the time it met with even greater indifference: it was refused by the leading magazine of the literary "party" to which the author belonged, and could appear only some years later in a collection of short stories. But it at once became known and very soon began to "make school." Remizov's manner was to a certain degree a reversion to the nineteenth century, but to such aspects of that century that had before him been unnoticed. One of his chief inspirers was Leskov, a writer who is only now coming into his own. Remizov's _Tambourine_ and his other stories of this class are realistic, they are "representations of real life," of "byt", but their Realism is very different from the traditional Russian realism. The style is dominated not by any "social" pre-occupation, but by a deliberate bringing forward of the grotesque. It verges on caricature, but is curiously and inseparably blended with a sympathy for even the lowest and vilest specimens of Mankind which is reminiscent of Dostoyevsky. It would be out of place here to give any detailed account of Remizov's many-sided genius, of his _Tales of the Russian People_, of his _Dreams_ (real night-dreams), of his books written during the War and the Revolution (_Mara_ and _The Noises of the Town_). In his later work he tends towards a greater simplicity, a certain "primitiveness" of outline, and a more concentrated style. Remizov's disciples, as might be expected, have been more successful in imitating the grotesqueness of his caricatures and the vivid and