With Shchedrìn (Saltykòv) we are in presence of the greatest satirist the Slavonic race has produced. He is a man of our time, Russia having lost him only a few years ago. For about fifty years he was the moral leader of liberal Russia, having devoted his life to the awakening of the national conscience by all the ways and methods which his incomparable genius could suggest. He was the political chronicler of his time, reproducing in rough caricatures, which made the whole of reading Russia roar with laughter, the principal events which took place in the country. At the same time, in his more elaborate works, as the “Story of the Golovlevs,” and others, he equals Dostoyèvsky in the power of creating weird, gloomy, strikingly original figures, as well as in the subtle delineation of the whole man from the inner side. When the boldness of some idea or the virulence of some attack rendered it impossible for Shchedrìn (on account of the censorship) to speak plainly, he resorted to what he himself used to call the “slave’s language,” employing the Oriental form of the fable, the allegory, the fairy tale. The best of Shchedrìn’s works are not translated into English, and probably will never be. His unrivalled wit and humour are untranslatable, because they depend chiefly upon the marvellous skill in using the Russian language. This is not inferiority, but difference in the quality of the talent. Rudyard Kipling’s military stories, to quote an English example, are certainly very fine samples of genuine humour. But what would remain of them if stripped of their racy idiom? And how many second and third-rate authors are just as good (or as bad) in any decent translation? Our great satirist stands at the head of those authors who must be read in their own tongue. The translator has shown much discernment in choosing as samples of Shchedrìn’s art three minor works of his, in which the language is of lesser importance. One is a burlesque, “The Recollections of Onésime Chenapan,” which is an amusing caricature of the Russian “administrators.” The other two are fables—“The Self-Sacrificing Rabbit,” in which the satirist boldly ridicules nothing less than _the feeling of loyalty under a régime which consists of brutal violence erected into a system_, and “The Eagle as Mecænas,” a skit on the Tzar himself. The gloomy author of _Crime and Punishment_ once relieved his mind with a queer, semi-fantastic little story, “The Crocodile,” which amuses by its incongruities and contrasts. It has not been before translated, so far as I know, into any foreign language, and the English admirers of Dostoyèvsky will be the first to read it.