“Yes, for some reason I began it, but I could not read it. Do you remember how, when one is a child, one sometimes gets a piece of meat which one chews and chews and chews, and one can’t deal with it, and at last one quietly spits it out and throws it under the table.” Then Tolstoi remembered B.’s story which he read recently: “It begins with a superb description of nature--a little shower, which is done as Turgenev even could not do it, let alone myself. And then there is a girl. She dreams of him” (Tolstoi shortly told the plot of the story), “and all this--the girl’s silly emotion, the little shower--all this is needed, in order that B. may write a story. Just as in ordinary life, when people have nothing to say they talk about the weather, so writers, when they have nothing to write about, write about the weather, and it is time to put an end to it. Yes, there was a little shower; there might just as well have been no shower at all. I think that all this must come to an end in literature. It is simply impossible to read any longer. “I once belonged to the guild of authors, and from habit I watch and am interested in everything that goes on there.” Tolstoi quoted a few instances of misstatements and inaccuracies in writers like Uspensky and Korolenko, but said that these were only slips. But when psychological mistakes are made, when the characters in novels and stories do what, from their spiritual nature, they cannot do, it is a terrible failing, and the works of the Andreevs, etc., are full of such mistakes. Even in Gorky it is always happening. For instance, it is the case in his story about the silver clasps, or in the opinions of the women in _Three_. His _Burghers_ is utterly uninteresting. The surroundings are indefinite, untypical; nobody can make anything of it at all. “I am always afraid of falling into the old man’s habit of being unable to appreciate or to understand the present. But I try my best and genuinely can find no beauty in the modern tendencies of art. There has recently appeared a very just article by E. Markov on Gorky. The writer, rather timidly--for Gorky has become such an idol that people dare not speak of him--has pointed out correctly that modern Russian literature has completely turned away from those high moral problems which it formerly pursued. And indeed what a complete denial of moral principles there is! You may be vicious, you may rob or kill; there is nothing to restrain the individual; all is allowed.... “But still I am impressed by the fact that Gorky is translated in Europe and greatly read there. Undoubtedly there is something new in him. His chief merit is that he was the first to draw the world of outcasts and tramps from the life, which until then no one had attempted. In this respect he did what Turgenev and Grigorovich did in their day for the world of peasants.