represented in this book by his own favourite plays A Merry Death and The Beautiful Despot. He is still a young man, being born on February 13,1879. He was educated at the aristocratic Imperial School of Law, in Petrograd, and afterwards studied music under Rimsky-Korsákov. The present translator had the pleasure of making his acquaintance at Petrograd last year and was given several volumes of his collected plays and parodies. Evréinov has not only an instinct for drama, but is professionally bound to the theatre, for, in addition to his plays, he is the author of several books on stage-craft. What this means in technique will be seen from A Merry Death, a masterpiece both of drama and of the theatre. It is the best Russian play since Woe from Wit, and, so European is it, its excellence could be reproduced and appreciated in any country. So far as the more recent works of Evréinov permit us to judge, he is unlikely to excel it in the future.
A word or two may be said of Laríssa Petróvna Kossátch (1872-1913), whose pseudonym is “Lésya Ukráinka”—“Lesya of the Ukraine.” The same influence that is visible in Chéhov and ripe in
