ed and enjoyed by the public.

Alexei Feofilaktovitch Pisemsky (best known for his "Thousand Souls" and
his "Troubled Sea," romances of a depressing sort) contributed to the
stage a play called "A Bitter Fate" (among others), wherein the Russian
peasant appeared for the first time in natural guise without
idealization or any decoration whatever.

Count Alexei Konstantinovitch Tolstoy (1817-1875) wrote a famous trilogy
of historical plays: "The Death of Ivan the Terrible" (1866), "Tzar
Feodor Ivanovitch" (1868), and "Tzar Boris" (1870). The above are the
dates of their publication. They appeared on the stage, the first in
1876, the other two in 1899, though they had been privately acted at the
Hermitage Theater, in the Winter Palace, long before that date. They are
fine reading plays, offering a profound study of history, but the epic
element preponderates over the dramatic element, and the characters set
forth their sentiments in extremely long monologues and conversations.
There have been many other dramatic writers, but none of great
distinction.

* * * * *

Count A. K. Tolstoy stood at the head of the school of purely artistic
poets who claimed that they alone were the faithful preservers of the
Pushkin tradition. But in this they were mistaken. Pushkin drew his
subjects from life; they shut themselves up in aesthetic contemplation
of the beautiful forms of classical art of ancient and modern times, and
isolated themselves from life in general. The result was, that they
composed poetry of an abstract, artistically dainty, elegantly
rhetorical sort, whose chief defect lay in its lack of individuality,
and the utter absence of all colors, sounds, and motives by which
Russian nationality and life are conveyed. The poetry of this school
contains no sharply cut features of spiritual physiognomy. All of them
flow together into a featureless mass of elegantly stereotyped forms and
sounds.

Count A. K. Tolstoy, who enjoyed all the advantages of education and
travel abroad (where he made acquaintance with Goethe), began to
scribble verses at the age of six, he says in his autobiography. Born in
1817, he became Master of the Hounds at the imperial court in 1857, and
died in 1875. He made his literary debut in 1842 with prose tales, and
only in 1855 did he publish his lyric and epic verses in various
newspapers. His best poetical efforts, beautiful as they are in external
form, are character