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Rh connected with the liberation of the peasantry. In the late forties we have Turgenev and Grigorovič. Uspenskii, Zlatovratskii, and a number of novelists, must also be mentioned, men who studied the life of various regions in Russia, a country enormously variegated alike ethnographically and socially (Levitov, Jakuskin, Mel'nikov, Rěšetnikov, Pomjalovskii, and many others). All of those just named were "poets with a purpose," for the widespread distresses of the day forced upon thinking men an endeavour to overcome traditional evils and a desire to criticise proposals for reform. But besides the writers of this trend, there were a few men of note who inclined rather to cultivate art for art's sake, and among them I may name Aleksěi Tolstoi and Apollon Maikov.

After the death of Nicholas, the censorship, political and religious, became milder and more liberal. A. Nikitenko, author and censor, who had had personal experience of the bonds of serfdom (he had been liberated by his lord, Count Šeremetev, upon the recommendation of Žukovskii and others after he had already become known to the public}, in his Diary, a well known work, indicated the accession of Alexander II on February 18,1855, as the landmark of a-new epoch. Now Nikitenko was well acquainted with the Russian censorship. It cannot be said that the government showed any undue haste to prove itself liberal. Preventive censorship upon large books was not abolished in the capital until 1855, nor until after the press had made special representations to the ministry for home affairs. But this much, at last resulted from the preparatory work, during the first ten years of the new reign, for the liberation of the serfs and for the subsequent carrying out of that reform, that the ensuing reaction, whilst it could contest endeavours towards liberty, could no longer suppress these so effectively as had been possible under Nicholas.

Owing to the comparative freedom of the press and of literature, the various philosophical and historical trends, the various conceptions of Russia and of the tasks that lay before her, could develop more freely and could secure fuller expression under Alexander II. Ideas were now printed which during the reign of Nicholas had been discussed only in private.

During the reign of Alexander II and during that of his