.. In that form of imaginative literature, which in our day is
the most popular and the most possible, the Russians at the present
moment seem to me to hold the field."
With the strict censorship imposed on Russian writers, many of them
who might perhaps have contented themselves with expressing their
opinions in essays, were driven to conceal their meaning under the
guise of satire or allegory; which gave rise to a peculiar genre of
literature, a sort of editorial or essay done into fiction, in which
the satirist Saltykov, a contemporary of Turgenev and Dostoyevsky, who
wrote under the pseudonym of Shchedrin, achieved the greatest success
and popularity.
It was not however, until the concluding quarter of the last century
that writers like Korolenko and Garshin arose, who devoted themselves
chiefly to the cultivation of the short story. With Anton Chekhov the
short story assumed a position of importance alongside the larger
works of the great Russian masters. Gorky and Andreyev made the short
story do the same service for the active revolutionary period in the
last decade of the nineteenth century down to its temporary defeat in
1906 that Turgenev rendered in his series of larger novels for the
period of preparation.
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