nsitive to the breeze; its strings are
few, and tuned to one key; nevertheless some of the strains it has
sobbed have the stamp of permanence as well as that of ethereal magic.

The poets that come after Nadson belong to the present day; there are
many, and they increase in number every year. The so-called "decadent"
school were influenced by Shelley, Verlaine, and the French
symbolists; but there is nothing which is decadent in the ordinary
sense of the word in their verse. Their influence may not be lasting,
but they are factors in Russian literature, and some of them, SOLOGUB,
BRUSOV, BALMONT, and IVANOV, have produced work which any school would
be glad to claim. This is also true of ALEXANDER BLOCH, one of the
most original as well as one of the most exquisite of living Russian
poets.

CONCLUSION

With the death of Turgenev and Dostoyevsky, the great epoch of Russian
literature came to an end. A period of literary as well as of
political stagnation began, which lasted until the Russo-Japanese War.
This was followed by the revolutionary movement, which, in its turn,
produced a literary as well as a political chaos, the effect of which
and of the manifold reactions it brought about are still being felt.
It was only natural, if one considers the extent and the quality of
the productions of the preceding epoch, that the soil of literary
Russia should require a rest.

As it is, one can count the writers of prominence which the epoch of
stagnation produced on one's fingers--CHEKHOV, GARSHIN, KOROLENKO, and
at the end of the period MAXIME GORKY, and apart from them, in a
by-path of his own, MEREZHKOVSKY. Of these Chekhov and Gorky tower
above the others. Chekhov enlarged the range of Russian literature by
painting the middle-class and the _Intelligentsia_, and brought back
to Russian literature the note of humour; and Gorky broke altogether
fresh ground by painting the vagabond, the artisan, the tramp, the
thief, the flotsam and jetsam of the big town and the highway, and by
painting in a new manner.

Gorky's work came like that of Mr. Rudyard Kipling to England, as a
revelation. Not only did his subject matter open the doors on
dominions undreamed of, but his attitude towards life and that of his
heroes towards life seemed to be different from that of all Russian
novelists before his advent; and yet the difference between him and
his forerunners is not so great as it appears at first sight. It is
true that