Page:Korolenko - Makar's Dream and Other Stories.djvu/18

x subject, the radiant conciseness of the author's style, and the lyric beauty of the story's end which illuminates with deep significance every detail that has gone before. Poor Makar, most lonely dweller in the Siberian forest, leading a life of incredible labour and hardship, finally dies, and for his sins is condemned at the Judgment of the Great Toyon, or Chief, to suffer in the life hereafter sorrows and toil more grievous than any he has known on earth. Here is the type of "the insulted and the injured" beloved of Dostoievsky and Tolstoi, but with one supreme difference: Makar does not suffer misfortune in passive dejection, he protests. He protests indignantly against the injustice of the judgment of the Great Toyon. Life for him has been desperately hard; it is unjust to judge him by the standards set for the righteous whom the Toyon loves, "whose faces are bathed in perfume and whose garments are sewn by other hands than their own." This protest, combined with a warm love for all humanity, was to become the keynote of Korolenko's writings.

His next story, "In Bad Company," appeared in the same year, and added still more to the young author's popularity. It is a general favourite in Russia to this day. Though its style is slightly tainted with a flowery Polish exuberance, the descriptions of the old feudal ruins are full of poetry, the children are drawn with sympathy and insight, and the vagabond Turkevich, in his tragi-comic rôle