No other literature has understood women and described them as vividly as the Russian. Take for instance Turgenev’s young girls at the time of their physical and spiritual awakening, think of the wavering indecision of their lonely inner life, filled with wishes of which they are hardly conscious, while as yet untouched by experience; think of the vegetative, half-indifferent sensuousness of his widows, think of Garschin’s inspired description of the demi-monde, of Dostoievsky’s Sonias and Gruschenkas and other doubtful social phenomena, in the description of whom he is as successful as he is the reverse in his gentlewomen. The new feature in these writers is their astonishing depth of psychology, their instinctive grasp of the side of woman’s nature which is not turned towards man, and their intuitive comprehension of her as a feminine being dumb and unveiled in their sight. French literature knows nothing of it. In France a young girl’s life begins on her first meeting with a man, and the charm of her womanhood is only revealed with her first love-affair in marriage. But that is the stupidity of authorship modelled in accordance with the conventional rules and acquired blindness of a school of literature. In Russia there is, strictly speaking, no school, either in literature or anywhere else, there is no so-called “good school” for anything at all, and accordingly there is no tradition, no taste cultivated by morality, nothing fixed, no fashion, no high road. The Russian writer, with his gentle erotic nature and sensitive yearning soul, can wander whither he will. He has the sharp eyes of a young race, the unshrinking gaze which has not been blunted by generations of culture, and which is quick to realise all that it has seen. The young Russian girl is not only “a girl,” she is a woman. She has not undergone the hypocritical convent education of the French girl, she knows nothing of the German girl’s bourgeois conventions, and she has more temperament and more natural spontaneity than either. These are two of the reasons why in French literature a woman only becomes an individual when she is loved, and why in the German literature of the last century, even in that of the newest realistic school, she is not an individual at all but only a being who belongs to a human species, and these are also the reasons why in Scandinavian literature she is endowed with a half timid, half sorrowful individuality. Woman as woman, unconditional and complete in the essence of her being, in the relative perfection of her nature before she comes into contact with man, has never yet been described. To do so is the task allotted to a future literature starting from other presumptions and working under other aspects.