Page:Stories from Garshin.djvu/17

4 reaches the summit of her poetical growth; with Gogol, Turgenev, Tolstoi, Dostoevsky and Goncharov, the summit of her fiction. The generation of the sixties marks its lowest ebb. Among the novelists of that epoch there is not a single one whose works will live.

With the eighties another rising tide is clearly noticeable. It is still at its beginning, and one cannot help thinking that the terrible political crisis, through which the country is passing, has much to do with checking its full manifestations. When the flower of a generation is ruthlessly decimated, the best, the most ardent spirits, finding an early grave in the mines of Siberia, or in the gloomy subterranean cells of the fortresses, there is little scope for the development of national genius. Yet the last generation of Russian