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174 classes and the wealthy. At this period the dramatic form was predominant over his ideas of art. The Death of Ivan Ilyitch and The Kreutzer Sonata are both true dramas of the inner soul, of the soul turned upon itself and concentrated upon itself, and in The Kreutzer Sonata it is the hero of the drama himself who unfolds it by narration.

The Death of Ivan Ilyitch (1884-86) has impressed the French public as few Russian works have done. At the beginning of this study I mentioned that I had witnessed the sensation caused by this book among the middle-class readers in the French provinces, a class apparently indifferent to literature and art. I think the explanation lies in the fact that the book represents, with a painful realism, a type of the average, mediocre man; a conscientious functionary, without religion, without ideals, almost without thought; the man who is absorbed in his duties, in his mechanical life, until the hour of his death, when he sees with terror that he has not lived. Ivan Ilyitch is the representative type of the European bourgeoisie of 1880 which reads Zola, goes to hear Bernhardt, and, without holding any faith, is not even irreligious; for it does not take the trouble either to believe or to disbelieve; it simply never thinks of such matters.

In the violence of its attacks, alternately bitter and almost comic, upon the world in general, and marriage in particular, the Death of Ivan Ilyitch was the first of a new series of works; it was the fore-runner of the still more morose and unworldly Kreutzer Sonata and Resurrection. There is a