“Marriage,” although bearing the author’s heading, “an utterly incredible story,” and viewed by him as a mere joke, is recognised by all Russia as one of Gogol’s truest and finest works. It contains two of the best conceived and most delicately drawn characters of our great character-maker, that of the hero, the old bachelor Podkolyòssin, an amusing type of irresolution and pusillanimity, and of his friend Kochkaryòv, the meddlesome busybody, who, just after he has abused the professional matchmaker Fèkla for having married him to a fool, becomes fired with an irresistible longing to confer upon his bosom friend Podkolyòssin the blessing of an alliance with another fool of exactly the same type. As a comedy of customs “Marriage” reproduces a patriarchal life so remote from the modern English that some explanations are necessary. Among the uneducated part of the Russian middle-class, as well as among the peasantry, marriages are arranged by the parents. The young people being considered too ignorant to be consulted upon a matter of such importance. In the villages, among the peasantry, where everybody is known by everybody else, no special intermediaries are needed to arrange these matches. But it is different with the middle-class living in large cities. Here a class of professional matchmakers and go-betweens exists. Naturally enough, it lends itself very much to ridicule, and two samples of it appear in the present volume—one in Gogol, the other in Ostròvsky’s comedy. Gogol, who was born in 1810 and died in 1852, is the oldest of our great prose writers. To him we can trace the origin of the Russian realistic novel as well as drama. Ostròvsky, who is his successor in the dramatic art, is our contemporary. He was born in 1824, and died four years ago. To him the Russians owe their theatre: he left us thirty-seven dramas and comedies, varying in merit and popularity, but all keeping their place upon the stage. “Incompatibility of Temper”—one of the two of his comedies that are given in the present volume—is a sample of that pure and deep humour which we admire in Gogol. Serafìma, the heroine, with her extraordinary stupidity, sentimentality, apparent whimsicalness, and practical pigheadedness, is as living and striking a creation of Russian humour as the best of Gogol’s types. But in the next comedy the sunny, sympathetic humour changes into the harsh laughter of the satirist. The “Domestic Picture,” the second of Ostròvsky’s dramas, is anything but a picture of Russian domestic life. It is a bitter and merciless satire, exposing the commercial dishonesty, the result of ignorance, which prevailed in the bulk of our middle-class two generations ago, and the shocking immorality nestling secretly in those families where despotism has destroyed all natural ties of affection and uprooted all sense of honour.