o English.
Vladimir Soloviev stands in a niche of his own, isolated from the
crowd by his own originality, his brilliance, and his prematurity; he
was _intempestivus_.

To the same epoch belong four other important writers, each occupying
a place apart from the current stream of literary or political
influences: one because he was a satirist, one because he wrote for
the stage, and the two others because one impartially, and the other
bitterly, dared to criticize the Radicals.

MICHAEL SALTYKOV (1826-89), who wrote under the name of Shchedrin,
holds a unique place in Russian literature, not only because he is a
writer of genius, but because he is one of the world's great
satirists. Unlike Russian satirists before him, Krylov, Gogol, and
Griboyedov, good-humoured irony or sharp rapier thrusts of wit do not
suffice him; he has in himself the _saeva indignatio_, and he
expresses it with all the concentrated spite that he can muster, which
is all the more deadly from being used with perfect control. His work
is bulky, and fills eleven thick volumes; some of it is quite out of
date and at the present day almost unintelligible; but all that deals
with the fundamental essentials of the Russian character, and not with
the passing episodes of the day, has the freshness of immortality. At
the outset of his career, he was banished to Vyatka, where he remained
from 1848-56, an exile, which gave him a rich store of priceless
material. His experiences appeared in his _Sketches of Provincial
Life_ in 1886-7.

He describes the good old times and the officials of the good old
times, with diabolic malice and with an unequalled eye for the
ironical, the comic, the topsy-turvy, and the true; and while he is as
observant as Gogol, he is as bitter as Swift. He puts his characters
on the stage and makes them relate their experiences; thus we hear how
the collector of the dues manages to combine the maximum amount of
robbery with the minimum amount of inconvenience. In his pictures of
prison life, the prisoners tell their own stories, sometimes with
unaffected frankness, sometimes with startling cynicism, and sometimes
the story is obscured by a whole heap of lies. The prisoners are of
different classes; one is an ex-official who states that he was a
statistician who got into trouble over his figures; wishing to levy
dues on a peasant's property, he had demanded the number, not of
their bee-hives, but of their bees, and wrote in his list: