of intellect is no more entitled to represent the Russian people, than the fourth Duma is to represent the first. The Russian intellectuals may speak in the name of the people, but their word is really no better than a third-hand account. Even when there is no attempt at falsification, they always stand at a certain distance from the people. Whatever the great Russian realists have written concerning their own people is merely intuitive conjecture from a distance. A poet projects his own world into the people. The psychology of the great Russian writers of fiction is a _tendency_, an illusion based not on exact, but on intuitive knowledge of the people. Russian realism borders on the visionary, and on mysticism. Europe has hitherto failed to discern the actual foundations of this poetry in its relation to Russian life, and has simply allowed herself to be fascinated by the “keen psychology” of the writers. The result has been a false impression. The facts are really different—instead of _real truthfulness_ we find in the Russian writer a realistic tendency, a _real ethical resentment_; thence the increased “keenness” of his psychology, the critical touch in his imagination, which gives such a striking effect of verisimilitude. European critics have never detected the seam in the fabric of the Russian novel; they have accepted the masterpiece as the outcome of a single creative inspiration. Even though Russian realism comes nearer to life than that of any other literature, still it is more art than life. Proof of this is to be found in Gogol’s private correspondence. He frequently complained that nobody would send him “copy” from Russian life. He begs in vain for hints, anecdotes and descriptions; he has to “invent” his stories, and is ashamed of having to “deceive” his reader. In his immortal comedy, “The Revising Inspector,” Gogol satirizes his own “untruthfulness,” and in Hlestakoff, the great adventurer, who is mistaken by every one for the real revising inspector, he ridicules himself. For the sake of the people Gogol consents to play the “revising inspector!” But Gogol’s “untruthfulness” is simply creative genius. An eminent Tolstoi student, Osvianiko-Kulikovsky, has plainly asserted that even Tolstoi was not of the soul of the people but of the soul of the gentry. Tolstoi is a “_barin_” (landlord) and he thinks and feels only as a _barin_. Turgenyeff was blamed even during his lifetime for writing about Russia without knowing it; for he practically never lived in Russia. The inmost soul of the Russian people has, however, found an excellent representative in Dostoievski. “Do not judge the Russian people”—pleads Dostoievski—“by the atrocious deeds of which they have often been guilty, but by those great and holy matters to which they aspire in their depravity. And not all the people are depraved. There are saints among them, who shed their light upon all, to show them the way.”