ABSTRACT
England and Russia were competitors for markets and influence in the Balkans, the Far East and Afghanistan; Russia was expanding to the East in the movement that led to the Russo-Japanese War; and her internal crises became increasingly frequent and lively, from the assassination of Alexander II in 1881 to Bloody Sunday and the abortive revolution of 1905. English criticism, seeking political significance in Russian fiction, was close to what had become, since Belinski, the dominant attitude of Russian critics. Both the English Constance Garnett and the American Isabel Hapgood completed translations of Turgenev's novels towards the close of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. Russian fiction did not come to an end in 1901, nor was the precise nature of the realism of the older novelists settled in the debate.
