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 criminal exiles. A complete edition of his works was published in 1903, and in the next year he died quietly at Badenweiler in the Black Forest.

Chéhov is not a great writer; he is really a great journalist, and his work has no permanent importance. A French critic has compared his work with the cinematograph, he himself called it “sweet lemonade.” It was not vodka—there lies its significance. He was an embryo European, peculiarly of France, of the France he had come to know in his profession and his reading. Now that he had led Russian literature out of its purely Russian groove, the natural step was for it to become more and more European, without losing its national impulse. The decadence of such modern writers as Andréyev, Górki, and Sólogub lies in their refusal to recognise this fact; they continue to write in a narrow style, dwarfed even in that by the genius of their forerunners, uninspired by the renaissance of European solidarity that the war has revealed, the spirit that Von Vízin had and Griboyédov.

The first modern Russian author to work in the recovered tradition is Nicholas Evréinov, who is