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 PREFACE.

In offering this book to the constantly increas- ing class of persons interested in Russian litera- ture, I owe them a little explanation in regard to the unavoidable omissions in these essays, as well as to their object and aim. The region we are approaching is a vast, almost unexplored one ; we can only venture upon some of its highways, selecting certain provinces, while we neglect others.

This volume does not claim to give a complete history of Russian literature, or a didactic treatise upon it. Such a work does not yet exist in Russia, and would be premature even in France.

My aim is quite a different one. To do justice to both the dead and the living, in a history of the literature of only the past hundred years, I should but accumulate a quantity of names foreign to our ears, and a list of works which have never been translated. The entire political and social history of the three preceding reigns should be written, to properly explain the last. It appears to me better to proceed as a natu-