ABSTRACT
Twenty years ago1 there was no difference of opinion outside Russia as to who was the greatest of Russian writers—Tolstóy dominated Russian literature in a way that no writer had dominated a national literature in the eyes of the world since the death of Goethe, or even, if we think of the enormous extra-literary prestige of Tolstóy, since the days of Voltaire. Since then the wheel of fashion, or the laws of growth of the occidental mind, has displaced Tolstóy from his place of ascendancy and substituted for his the idols of Dostoyévsky and, in these last years (strangest of occidental whims), of Chékhov. It is left to the future to show whether the wheel will turn again, or whether the advanced elite of the Western world has definitely reached a stage of mental senility that can be satisfied only by the autumnal genius of Chékhov.
