imple vaudeville sketches. Once in a while we find a sad
note; less frequently, we find the sadness accentuated in order to
present a terrible drama. Such, then, are the contents of the first
two volumes which came from the pen of Tchekoff.

However, this melancholy little note, met from time to time,
gradually grew in intensity in the third volume, until later on it
lost all trace of the old carelessness, and developed, on the
contrary, into a profound sadness. Tchekoff unconsciously gave up
the "genre" of pleasant anecdote in order to concentrate all his
attention on facts. This practice made him sad. Russia was, at this
time, going through a period of prostration as a result of the last
Russo-Turkish war. This war, which, at the cost of enormous
sacrifices, ended in the liberation of the Bulgarian people,
awakened among the Russians a hope of obtaining their own liberty,
and provoked among the younger generation the most energetic efforts
to obtain this liberty, no matter what the cost might be. Alas, this
hope was frustrated! All efforts were in vain, a reaction followed,
and the year 1880 brought the reaction to its height. From then on
apathy followed in the steps of the great enthusiasm. All illusion
fled. A kind of disenchantment filled all minds. Those who had hoped
with such ardor, and had counted on their own strength, felt weak
and powerless. Some confined themselves to moaning incessantly. A
grey twilight enveloped Russian life and filled it with melancholy.
These are the dreary aspects that Tchekoff describes, and none has
excelled him in portraying the events of this hopeless reaction. His
stories and dramas give us a long procession of people who succumb
to the monotony, to the platitudes, to the desolation, of
existence.

It is in the following manner that one of his characters expresses
his ideas on the subject of this moral crisis:

"I was then not more than twenty-six years of age; nevertheless I
was conscious not only that life was senseless, but that it was
without any visible goal; that all was illusion and dupery; that, in
its consequences and even in its very essence, the life of the
exiled on the island of Sakhaline was very much the same as the life
that was led at Nice; that the difference between the brain of Kant
and the brain of a fly was very small; finally, that no one in this
world was either right or wrong."

This idea of the nothingness of life, with its extremes, monstrous
and