Russian literature is gradually made accessible to the general student by German and French translations, and we shall soon begin to learn more of the mysterious despotism that towers like a fateful cloud along the eastern horizon of Europe, in its influence upon social and artistic life. The publisher Brockhaus of Leipsic has recently issued a collection in three volumes of the Russian novelists. Yet, whether from the want of tact in the selection or from the absence of characteristic qualities in the tales themselves, the authors are weakest in their delineation of popular life and manners, in this resembling fine society in Russia, which ignores Russianism, and believes in Parisian manners, language, and life, every thing but Parisian politics. Among the authors whose works are quoted we note Alexander Pushkin, the pride of Russian literature, born in 1799, and died in a duel in 1837. Helena Hahn, born in 1815, who, married at sixteen to a soldier, travelled through a large part of Russia, and died in 1832. Her novels were first published after her death, but seem to be not of the highest merit. Alexander Herzen, born in 1812, has zealously studied Hegel, and written a series of humorous tales, the best of which is called Taras Bulwa. Since 1847 he has been a wanderer, pursued as a democrat, and now proposes to visit the United States.
The Emperor of Austria has appointed Aaron Wolfgang Messeley, a Jew, Professor of Criminal Law at the University of Prague. M. Messeley had long filled the chair of the Hebrew Language and Literature in the same University. The numbers of Jews now attached as professors to the different universities and educational establishments in the Austrian states is seventeen; of whom fifteen were named by the late Emperor, and two by the present.
Alexander Dumas, who, as a simple story writer is perhaps deserving of the highest place in the temple of letters—whose Three Guardsmen, with its several continuations, making some twenty volumes, is the most entertaining, and in certain characteristics the best sustained novel written in our days,—announces in Paris a new tale, Un Drame de '93, and he occupies the feuilleton of the Presse every week with another, Ange Pitou, of which the scene and time are also France during the first revolution.
Madame Charles Reybaud, authoress of The Cadet de Calobriéres, has just published another story, Faustine, wherein provincial life in France is daguerreotyped.
Among the announcements in Paris we notice one of the tenth volume of Thiers's Histoire du Consulat. The eleventh volume is also said to be nearly ready.