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of the Steppe” is purely exceptional — and although he
does not go out of his way on account of low and vile
characters, or of incidents which no English novelist
would relate, yet he does not dwell upon the obscene,
as those authors who once for all have disregarded
conventionality are so often tempted to do. As an artist
he was a decided realist, but a modest realist.
His chief domain as a narrator is the poor, the weak,
the inconstant and untrustworthy, the superfluous and
the abandoned.
He does not, like Dostoyevski, describe the misfortune
which is externally palpable, nor the poverty, the
roughness, the corruption, the crime, nor, above all, the
misfortune, which can be seen at a distance. He describes
the misfortune which avoids publicity, and he is
especially the author for those who have submitted to their
fate. He has pictured the inner life of reticent sorrow,
— the still-life of the unfortunate, so to speak.
For instance read “A Correspondence.” It is a young
girl with whom we gradually become acquainted, who
has lived isolated, misunderstood, despised by stupid
associates in a little country village, and who is on the
point of becoming an old maid. She has already resigned
herself to it, deserted as she has been by her lover.
She has given up her demands on life, and is trying only
for peace and is on the way to success. Then begins —
from an impulse of communicativeness, of idleness, of
longing, of sympathy — a friend of her younger days
to write to her. At first she answers declining the
correspondence; after the receipt of other epistles she
allows permission for him to continue to be extorted
from her. He writes, and she replies, no longer briefly,
but in a long, eloquent letter. In this manner the
feeling of friendship grows up in her heart, and in no very
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