le having a
mortal fear of his father, still loves him. As to certain pages,
like those which describe the strange inner life of the Tsarina
Marfa Matveyevna, "living by the light of candles, in an old house
savouring of the oil of night-lamps, the dust and the putrification
of centuries," these pages are a veritable tour de force if only
because of the plasticity and richness of the author's vocabulary.

Finally, what tragic horror there is in the supreme struggle where
the emperor, the assassin of his son, sees his isolation and feels
his weakness, "like a large deer gnawed at by flies and lice until
the blood runs!"

* * * * *

Besides his novels Merezhkovsky has published several essays, on
Pushkin, Maykov, Korolenko, Calderon, the French neo-romanticists,
Ibsen and others.... The most important of all are: "The Causes of
the Decadence of Modern Russian Literature" and "Tolstoy and
Dostoyevsky." He reveals here a fine and penetrating power of
observation, which, however, is often obscured because of his
obsession by Nietzschean ideas. Moreover, he does not hide his
antipathy to the people whose literary tastes and ideas differ from
his. From this characteristic comes strange exaggerations and a
somewhat limited appreciation of men and events. An example of
this, for instance, is the impression that he gives in his study of
the causes of the decadence of modern Russian literature, the
subject of which imposes upon the author the double task of
looking up the causes of this decadence and also proving that it
exists. He has not succeeded. In fact, it appears that this idea of
decadence exists only in the minds of the author and of a small
circle of writers who have the same ideas about the mission of
literature. Merezhkovsky is absolutely right in all that he says
about the fact that Russian writers live solitary, deprived of that
precious excitation which is felt when one is in contact with
original and different temperaments; but if you add to this, as he
has done, the statement that Russia does not possess a literature
worthy of the name, you go too far. Without being a great scholar,
it is easy to perceive that our contemporary Russian authors are
legitimate sons of Turgenev, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, and grandsons
of Gogol, who himself is closely related to Pushkin. A democratic
and humanitarian realism--widely separated from the Nietzscheism of
Merezhkovsky--strongly characteriz