When Peter the Great built St. Petersburg he said he was opening a window into Europe. Gogol, Turgenief, Tolstoy, and Dostoievsky opened the greatest windows that we have even yet into Russia. The Russia that they described is buried, though perhaps it is not really dead. It may yet stretch its enormous bulk and cast away its foul and bloody grave-clothes.

At all events, the Russia of those four masters has disappeared behind the Red Dark. Their work is not the less interesting, and would not be, even if the disappearance should be final. It would remain a portentous monument four-square ; Gogol’s side the most uncouth, but not the least striking; Turgenief’s the most ornamental and most adorned, but not the most definite—indeed, the least national and the least powerful; Tolstoy’s the most eulogized, perhaps the most renowned, but not the greatest or the strongest; Dostoievsky’s the most passionately truthful, sincere, and pathetic, if also the most terrible. Of these four architects of the great monument, Turgenief was the least Russian : he had lived in the light of common day outside, and he wrote from memory ; into his memories shone gleams of a western sun. His pen was half-civilized, and that gain was a loss to him. One meets in his books characters that one might meet in a French novel—though it would be one of the finest and best of the French novels. He had ideas of beauty less Russian than western, and his absence tempered his pictures ; he desired that they should please, and a certain haze of gentleness softens their definition. They are incomparably less massive, less prepotent, than Gogol’s or Dostoievsky’s, and are weakened by their graciousness. There was nothing gracious about Gogol’s pictures ; he painted brutally and did not shrink from their brutality, or dream of making it please. The truth he saw was vastly ugly, and he was only concerned to show it vast and true. He did not write of civilized persons and did not himself pose as a civilized writer. He stripped himself and his characters to the shirt, and gave the latter no pose and no quarter.