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p Gl. I. Uspensky began to write a long time ago. The twenty"fifth anniversary of his literary activity was celebrated at the •«nd of last year.  [43•*  Throughout this time he has, on the whole, .been completely faithful to his chosen trend. But since Narodism itself has changed in certain important respects, it is not surprising that the character of our author’s works has not remained •unchanged either. One can discern three periods in his activity.

p In his early works Gl. Uspensky mainly described the life of the people and, in part, the life of petty officials. He portrayed the iower classes of society, describing what he saw without trying 44 to explain it with the help of any theories and almost without taking an interest in any definite social theory. To this period belong The Ways of Rasteryaeva Street, The Capital’s Poor, Winter Evening, The Booth, The Cab-Driver, Ruin and other sketches which now constitute the first few volumes of his works. In them we find not only peasants, but also urban craftsmen, petty officials, the lower clergy and similar poor souls condemned to perpetual worry about their daily bread. He describes all these povertystricken people, this world of the "insulted and injured”, with great humour, skill and the most profound, heartfelt sympathy for human grief and suffering. Artistically these are, without a doubt, his finest works.

p But "times changed”, and with them the nature of our Narodnik movement also changed. The attention of the “intelligentsia”" became concentrated on the peasantry, which it saw as the estatecalled upon by history to renew and reshape all our social relations. Everywhere one heard talk of "popular character" and "popular ideals”, and both the “character” and the “ideals” were painted in the most glowing colours. Inspired by the general enthusiasm, G. Uspensky also went "to the people"—with the most peaceful literary aims, of course—and made the peasant the main character in his works. But, as a highly observant and highly intelligent man, he soon saw that our raznochinets’ view of the “people” did not correspond to reality by a long chalk. Apropos of this he expressed many grave doubts which make him the object of bitterattacks by orthodox Narodniks. He believed, for example, that the old peasant way of life idealised by the Narodniks was disintegrating rapidly due to the intrusion of a new force—money. "The man who is not dull-witted, whose mind has not been ealem away by need, whom chance or something else has forced to reflect on his position, the man who has the slightest understanding of the tragi-comic aspects of peasant life,” he says, describing peasant life in Novgorod Gubernia, "cannot help seeing his deliverancein a thick wad of money alone, in nothing but money, and will stop at nothing in order to get it.” Describing a rich village in Samara Gubernia, which possessed much arable land and an abundance of the most “remarkable” fertile soil, he exclaims in. bewilderment: "And just imagine: amid such plenty not a day passes without you encountering a phenomenon, scene or conversation that instantly destroys all your fantasies, that contradicts all the ideas and views on village life you have acquired from reading,—in a word, that makes it completely impossible for you to understand how in such conditions that which you are seeing with your very eyes can come to pass.” From here it was but a short step to the conclusion—a shameful one for an orthodox Narodnik—that not everything in the village communeis good, that one cannot explain all the unattractive aspects of 45 popular life by poverty alone and that "at the heart of village life there are intellectual imperfections worthy of attention”. Our author saw, for example, that the rich communes of Samara Gubernia can "put a hard-working, healthy man in a completely helpless position, bring him to the point where he ... goes hungry •with hungry children and says: ’The main reason, brother, is that we have no food—see!’" He saw that "such a new public institution as the rural loan society is not at all untrue to its banking spirit, the spirit of an iustitution that makes no claim to distribute banking bounty in a more or less communal way. By giving more to the man who has plenty and less to the one •who has little, and by placing no trust at all in the man who has nothing, the rural bank carries on its operations in the village with the same invariability as in the town, where, as we know, there is no commune and each man fends for himself....” And, finally, GL Uspensky saw that the kulaks were the product of the internal relations of the commune, not merely of external influences on it, and eventually reached the conclusion that the time could soon come when "the village, i.e., all that is good in it, will pine away, drift off, and what remains in it, having lost the appetite for peasant toil, will be merely helpless labour material in the hands of those who give any miserly wage”. Gl. Uspensky summoned the "new people" to the village, saying that it needed "new views on things and new, well-developed, educated people”, so that in the richest areas and the most prosperous communes "there shall be no over-crowding and amid the possible prosperity so close at hand no terrible poverty that knows not where to lay its head”. At that time he thought he was presenting our intelligentsia with a problem which, although not in easy one, was at least soluble.  [45•* 

_p Experience, however, was preparing a new disappointment for him. The longer he lived in the village, the more convinced he became that it was quite impossible to cultivate in the peasants "new views on things”, i.e., a realisation of the "full value of communal, collective labour for the common good”. At best the propagation of such views made the hearers "yawn dreadfully”. And occasionally, as we shall see below, the matter took a quite unexpected turn. In a series of practical arguments the peasants sought to convince Gi. Uspensky that his "new views" were inapplicable to village life. In general the negative attitude of the tillage" to the author’s propaganda was so great and so constant that he frequently vowed "not to talk to them about their peasant ways, because in most cases such conversations are completely futile and nothing practical or sensible ever comes of them". 46 It goes without saying that such a state of affairs grieved our author deeply, until a certain chance and "completely trivial circumstance" made his thoughts take a new turn. Thanks to this fortunate circumstance he developed a new view on peasant lifer his theoretical Wanderjahre  [46•*  ended, and he entered what seemed to him to be a safe harhour. It was then that the third and final period of his activity began.

What was the discovery that Gl. I. Uspensky made?