The reprisals that set in, the wholesale exiling of the youth to Siberia, the internment for life in the fortresses of Peter and Paul and in Schlüsselberg for participation in the Party of the Will of the People, and the general opinion that however reactionary Alexander II was he was still much more ready for reforms than his successor Alexander III, gave rise to a fundamental disillusionment. The sacrifices of the youth had been too much. They had led themselves to be hanged and tortured only to bring in an era of still greater darkness. The people were not ready for reforms, they did not wish them. They would not have understood what to do with liberties could they have had them. There was nothing to do but sit back on one's estate, exploit the peasants as did the grandfathers and say, "We are powerless and the peasants unworthy." This period was the more painful because it came fast upon one which was full of idealism and hope. The men who lived on in inertia, drinking tea and discussing vacuously the futility of life, had known a time when they had hoped and thought and planned otherwise. They had almost cynically to repudiate their former selves. The writer who brought out most acutely the great anguish of this period was Anton Chekhov. He is now being recognized as the greatest artist of his time, who followed naturally the trend of the years he lived in. His humor, at first gentle and sorrowful, became later coarse and gross as the darkness around him deepened. His characters are inert, some eaten up by unfulfilled desires, others incapable even of recalling the faint echo of a former hope. A "Chekhov Sorrow" became a well-known definite phrase in Russian life. It was before this Russia that Gorky made his appearance. Himself one of the people, he showed them again the face of the people. It had beauty and courage, it had qualities of strength long since forgotten. The effect was electrical. Gorky was hailed as one upon whom the cloak of Tolstoi was to fall, for better than Tolstoi, he did not appear as a leader of the people, but as one who disclosed the people _en masse_.