the platform, for under his autocratic Government the Press was gagged, the Church had sold her birthright for a mess of pottage, and no Duma existed.
Nothing is more sad or more tragic, more monotonous, and at the same time more touching and more glorious, than the life-story of Russian writers of an earlier generation. Nearly all these lives resemble one another. What a lamentable list of martyrs! Radischef, one of the first who dared to expose the horrors of serfdom, exiled to Siberia by Catherine the Great and forced into committing suicide! Pushkin and Lermontov killed in a duel! Griboiedov assassinated! Bielinski, the greatest of critics, Soloviov, the greatest of philosophers, and Chekhov, the most celebrated of story writers, carried off prematurely by a pitiless climate! Herzen, Saltikov, Tchernitchevski, and Kropotkin condemned to exile! Dostoevsky, sentenced to the mines—damnatus ad metalla—and spending the best of his years in "The House of the Dead." Plescheeff, Pisarev, Maxim Gorky, put in prison! All suspected, hunted, and condemned under a hostile Government to a life of sickness and misery.
On this list of martyrs, in this struggle for
