novelists has undoubtedly produced men whose works show traces of superior, unperishable talent, emulating, sometimes, those of the great masters.
Among these modern authors, none deserves closer attention, or is more worth careful study, than Vsevolod Garshin, whom adverse fate alone prevented from reaching the summit of art. He died in 1888, at the age of thirty-two, killed, not by the brutal force of Russian despotism, but by the moral suffering resulting from the conditions which this despotism has created. None of our great masters created, at Garshin's age, anything better than his work, and none can stand as so true and painfully effective a representative of the spirit of our troubled time.
Garshin wrote nothing but prose. But he was far more a poet than a
