ABSTRACT
The realistic novel (a term that must be made to include shorter and less definite narrative forms as well as the full-sized novel) dominated Russian literature (roughly) from 1845 to 1905, almost to the exclusion of other forms of imaginative writing. To most foreign readers it is the most interesting thing in the whole language. It is Russia’s principal contribution to European literature, if we take that term as denoting, not the sum total of the national literatures of Europe, but the international literature belonging in an equal degree to all European mankind.
