ABSTRACT
The novel, which had at first disguised itself as a faithful narrative of facts known to the author, still continued in Scott's hands to insist on its authenticity. A far greater novelist than Constant, whose masterpieces are as economically constructed, though many times the length of his brief and single tale, is Henri Beyle, who wrote under the pseudonym of Stendhal. To most novelists of the late nineteenth century, whatever their temperaments, it seemed important to reflect some rather sordid corner of nature in them. The Russian novelists can be classified neither as entirely realist nor as naturalists. The novel was the natural form of expression of the Russian writer. His interest from the beginning was with detail, with character, with landscape. The prime problem in Russia throughout the nineteenth century was that of East versus West, of Slavophil versus Westernizer.
