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Rh handed masters in dealing with his peasants and in his frequent polemic writings on this subject. The mere fact that they preached pure Art, that they kept aloof from life's stern realities, made such preachers advocates of the existing order in the eyes of all those who felt the weight of governmental oppression. Thus the view, that the realistic school of writers stood for progress and light and the partisans of "pure Art" were allies of the forces of darkness and reaction, was only strengthened.

While these two currents of literary thought and ideals have to a certain degree existed side by side, they really carried on a ceaseless struggle for supremacy. But with each successive swing of the pendulum the ethical school, with its altruistic teachings of love for the "lesser brother," invariably gathered more and more force at the expense of the school of pure art. The victories of the former ever represent the culminating points in the history of Russian letters; the latter as unfailingly mark the gloomiest periods in the reigns of a succession of gloomy autocrats. There is a throbbing joy of life, a hopefulness and vigor throughout the length and breadth of Russian Literature, when the ethical cause is predominant; there is marked melancholy, pessimism almost bordering on despair, when "pure Art" sends forth its full bloom.

But with all this Russian Literature has mirrored every shade of the literary movements of Western Europe. For have we not seen that the Russian possesses to an extraordinary degree, the capacity for grasping new ideas immediately upon coming into contact with them, and also the power of adapting and adopting, appropriating them at once?

And thus it is that the Russians were pseudo-classicists in the middle of the eighteenth century, were Encyclopedists (as, for example, in Catherine II) with Voltaire and Diderot, wept tears of sentimentalism with Karamzin (1766-1826)