exemplified by "War and Peace" and "Anna
Karenin."

The reform movement of the '60's of the nineteenth century ended in a
reaction which took possession of society as a whole during the '70's.
Apathy, dejection, disenchantment superseded the previous exultation and
enthusiastic impulse to push forward in all directions. Dull discontent
and irritation reigned in all classes of society and in all parties.
Some were discontented with the reforms, regarding them as premature,
and even ruinous; others, on the contrary, deemed them insufficient,
curtailed, only half-satisfactory to the needs of the country, and
merely exasperating to the public demands.

These conditions created a special sort of literary school, which made
its appearance in the middle of the '70's, and attained its complete
development in the middle of the '80's. We have seen that the same sort
of thing had taken place with every previous change in the public
sentiment. The first thing which impresses one in this school is the
resurrection of artistic feeling, a passion for beauty of imagery and
forms, a careful and extremely elegant polish imparted to literary
productions in technique. None of the authoritative and influential
critics preached the cult of pure art. Yet Garshin, the most promising
of the young authors of the day, who was the very last person to be
suspected of that cult, finished his works with the utmost care, so that
in elegance of form and language they offer an example of faultless
perfection. There can be no doubt that this renaissance of the artistic
element of poetry, of beauty, was closely connected with the subsidence
of the flood-tide of public excitement and agitation, which up to that
time had carried writers along with it into its whirlpools, and granted
them neither the time nor the desire to polish and adorn their works,
and revel in beauty of forms.

Vsevolod Mikhailovitch Garshin, the son of a petty landed proprietor in
the south of Russia, was born in 1855. Despite his repeated attacks of
profound melancholia, which sometimes passed into actual insanity, and
despite the brevity of his career (he flung himself down stairs in a fit
of this sort and died, in 1889), he made a distinct and brilliant mark
in Russian literature.

Garshin's view of people in general was thus expressed: "All the people
whom I have known," he says, "are divided (along with other divisions of
which, of course, there are many: the clever men and t