preconceived spite against it, but his sad
heart overflows with pity, and, if he approaches this life, it is
with the balm of love, in order to try to dress its terrible wounds.

For Korolenko, the sufferings of existence atone for its injustice;
he does not perceive the iniquities that surround him except through
the prism of sorrow.

* * * * *

From the very beginning of his literary career, in his first book,
"Episodes in the Life of a Seeker," Korolenko shows himself to be a
seeker after truth. With him, the understanding of life, so ardently
sought after, is never summed up in a single solution. He dreams of
it constantly; at times, he seems to have found it, but he loses
track of it again and starts all over.

This groping about resulted in a moral crisis in which he looked
forward to death with joy. Beset with the thought of suicide, he
often prowled around railroad platforms and looked at the
car-wheels.

"I went there and came back again," he writes, "depressed by my
realization of the stupidity of life. The snow was falling all
around me, and shaping itself into a frozen carpet, the telegraph
poles shivered as if they were cold through and through, and on the
other side of the road, on a slope, shone the sad little light of
the watchman's tower. There, in the darkness, lived a whole family.
Through the shadows the little red fire seemed to be as desolate as
the family. The children were scrofulous and suffered; the mother
was thin and sickly. To procreate and to bury! Such was the life of
the father, probably the most unfortunate of all, because the
household depended wholly upon him, and he saw no gleam of hope
anywhere. He bore this condition of things, because, in his
simplicity, he believed in a superior will, and thought that his
misery was inevitable. The resignation of this man, the terrible
bareness of his obscure existence, oppressed me. If I could bear the
sight of it, it was only because I hoped; I thought that we should
soon find the road which makes life happier, more agreeable to every
one. How, where, in what manner? What a mystery! But the future
beauty of life was in the search for it."

* * * * *

The observations that Korolenko was able to make were many and
diverse. By going all over Russia he gathered inexhaustible riches,
in the form of anecdotes and actual experiences. This can be easily
realized when we consider th