INTRODUCTIONS BY
J. BERG ESENWEIN

Editor of Lippincott’s Magazine

The Home Correspondence School
Springfield, Massachusetts
1913

Copyright 1912 and 1913—J. B. Lippincott Company
Copyright 1913—The Home Correspondence School

CONTENTS - VOLUME III

PAGE
General Introduction:
The Russian Short-Story		[5]
Pushkin and the New Era[13]
Story: The Snow-Storm[31]
Gogol, the First Russian Realist[53]
Story: The Cloak[69]
Turgenev the Emancipator[125]
Story: The District Doctor[139]
Tolstoi, Artist and Preacher[157]
Story: A Long Exile[175]

THE RUSSIAN SHORT-STORY

In introducing the volumes of this series which deal with the work of French fictionists I commented upon the real distinction existing between the French short-story and the short-story in French, asserting that the former is a precise term because the greater number of worthy short-stories in French really exhibit the typical French spirit and are therefore French.

The Russian short-story is even more pronouncedly national in theme, in tone, and in treatment than is its French contemporary; indeed, Muscovite literature is the most markedly national of any in Europe. This would not be so significant a statement were modern Russian literature—by which I mean all such literature which really counts—more than a century old; but this ancient, remote, and self-sufficient people really lived for so long a time apart from the great highways of Continental thought that they were not nationally conscious of those titanic upheaving and levelling passions whose fitful and at times appalling force shook France, England, and even Poland to the very heart and forced their thinkers to express the spirit of the revolutionary era in undying prose.

Instead, Russian writers of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries occupied their pens with imitations of foreign—chiefly French—literature, or wrote minute local descriptions which were important not so much for what they were as for what they pointed to—a new national consciousness.