Now, it would of course be absurd to condemn all modern Russian fiction, or to characterize all admirers of contemporary Russian novelists as hypocrites and sensualists. Americans and Englishmen who know almost by heart the great poems and stories of Pushkin, who know Lermontov as they know Byron, and Gogol as they know Dickens, who were brought up on the novels of Turgenieff, have every right in the world to seek for new delight among the outpourings of the presses of Petrograd and Moscow. But the sort of person who is feverishly enthusiastic over Gorky and Artzibashev has discovered Russian literature, in all probability, during the few years which have passed since his graduation from Harvard. His most serious offense is not that he prefers that which is evil to that which is good, and praises untrue and inartistic work because the worst part of his nature responds to its salacious appeal. His most serious offense is that he thinks that the Hall Caines and Marie Corellis of Russia really are representative writers, and that he insults a race of great romanticists and great realists by calling works that are thoroughly morbid and vile "very Russian." What is the remedy for this unfortunate condition? The ideal course to pursue would be, of course, to spank the serious-minded young men who think that the Russian novel is a cross between Nijinsky's dancing and a pogrom. They should be sentenced to a year in solitary confinement, during which they should be obliged to read daily a very thoroughly expurgated edition of all Artzibashev's works. This would convince them that it was not Artzibashev's "power of psychological analysis" that attracted them, and they would return to the world sadder and more honest men.