in their places.  Like all genuine St. Petersburg tchinovniks (officials), he has great faith in the miraculous power of Imperial ukazes and Ministerial circulars, and believes that national progress consists in multiplying these documents, and centralising the Administration, so as to give them more effect.  As a supplementary means of progress he highly approves of aesthetic culture, and he can speak with some eloquence of the humanising influence of the fine arts.  For his own part he is well acquainted with French and English classics, and particularly admires Macaulay, whom he declares to have been not only a great writer, but also a great statesman.  Among writers of fiction he gives the palm to George Eliot, and speaks of the novelists of his own country, and, indeed, of Russian literature as a whole, in the most disparaging terms.

A very different estimate of Russian literature is held by Alexander Ivan’itch N——­, formerly arbiter in peasant affairs, and afterwards justice of the peace.  Discussions on this subject often take place between the two.  The admirer of Macaulay declares that Russia has, properly speaking, no literature whatever, and that the works which bear the names of Russian authors are nothing but a feeble echo of the literature of Western Europe.  “Imitators,” he is wont to say, “skilful imitators, we have produced in abundance.  But where is there a man of original genius?  What is our famous poet Zhukofski?  A translator.  What is Pushkin?  A clever pupil of the romantic school.  What is Lermontoff?  A feeble imitator of Byron.  What is Gogol?”

At this point Alexander Ivan’itch invariable intervenes.  He is ready to sacrifice all the pseudo-classic and romantic poetry, and, in fact, the whole of Russian literature anterior to about the year 1840, but he will not allow anything disrespectful to be said of Gogol, who about that time founded the Russian realistic school.  “Gogol,” he holds, “was a great and original genius.  Gogol not only created a new kind of literature; he at the same time transformed the reading public, and inaugurated a new era in the intellectual development of the nation.  By his humorous, satirical sketches he swept away the metaphysical dreaming and foolish romantic affectation then in fashion, and taught men to see their country as it was, in all its hideous ugliness.  With his help the young generation perceived the rottenness of the Administration, and the meanness, stupidity, dishonesty, and worthlessness of the landed proprietors, whom he made the special butt of his ridicule.  The recognition of defects produced a desire for reform.  From laughing at the proprietors there was but one step to despising them, and when we learned to despise the proprietors we naturally came to sympathise with the serfs.  Thus the Emancipation was prepared by the literature; and when the great question had to be solved, it was the literature that discovered a satisfactory solution.”