The Russian dailies give amazing material for the student of sociology. The impartial chronicling of daily events tells us a dreadful story of a people that have lost every sense of moral sensitiveness and value of life. Facts of wildest debauchery and corruption, murder and suicide, defloration and parricide, to the accompaniment of governmental executions, hanging and shooting, fill up column after column of the periodical press. A Russian journalist remarks: And this is our every-day life. This occurs every day, every hour. It is not any more a sensation or a crying extraordinary occasion that awakens general attention and astonishment. It is--daily happenings. It is the general tone of our life. Oftentimes one does not notice such items of news--so trivial have they become. "Ah, another bloody drama! How tedious, by God!" And the "citizen" lays aside the paper with a dull yawn. Such is life in that strange country, and consequently such is its literature, life's mirror, its product and interpretation. III The definition of Russian literature as Heroic was perfectly true until a few years ago. The literature, like the life itself, had been a continuous heroism. The harder the oppressions from above, the more resolute was the fighting spirit below; the wilder the reaction that raged over the throbbing country, the loftier were the ideals of the struggling people; the more acute the sufferings of the gloomy present, the brighter and the more attractive appeared the perspectives of the future. Ever since the first revolutionary outbreak in 1825, the so-called Insurrection of the Decembrists, the Russian populace has had one great ideal, one ardent all-embracing aim--the overthrow of the autocracy, the impersonification of evil, injustice, and tyranny. This goal has been the sense of life, the justification of man's existence, the holy spirit elevating and purifying the miserable subjects of the Czar, the solace for the eternal humiliation, the compensation for the unique martyrdom of that unfortunate nation. A great, an inestimable rôle has been played by Russian literature in the education of the public. Though restricted by draconic rules of the bigoted state censorship, it succeeded in speaking to the public in an Aesopic tongue, training the readers in the gentle art of understanding between the lines. It preached idealism, self-sacrifice, unbounded devotion and love to their suffering compatriots, and unlimited deadly hatred for the common foe--the Tyrant.