Page:Russian Novelists (1887).djvu/11

Rh been glad to make use of everything which would help me to carry out my design : of biographical details, personal recollections, digressions upon points of historical and political interest, without which the moral evolutions of a country so little known would be quite unintelligible. There is but one rule to be followed ; to use every means of illuminating the object you wish to exhibit, that it may be thoroughly understood in all its phases. To this end, I have used the method of comparison between the Russian authors and those of other countries more familiar to us, as the surest and most rapid one.

Some persons may express surprise that it is of her novelists that I demand the secret of Russia.

It is because poetry and romance, the modes of expression most natural to this people, are alone compatible with the exigencies of a press- censure which was formerly most severe, and is even now very suspicious. There is no medium for ideas save through the supple meshes of fic- tion ; so that the fiction which shields yet conveys these ideas assumes the importance of a doctrinal treatise.

Of these two leading forms of literature, the first, poetry, absorbed the early part of the present century; the other, the novel, has superseded poetry, and monopolized the attention of the whole nation for the last forty years.