from their French teachers, those great masters of logic and simplicity. Unfortunately, even after the reforming labours of eighteenth-century grammarians, like Lomonosov, that giant among Russian pioneers, the Russian language remains the most complex of European languages, and the accentuation of its nouns and the flexions and aspects of its verbs are the despair of the bewildered student. It is also unfortunate that, largely under the influence of bad German novels, the Russian writers should favour the ponderous periodical style, and that they too frequently express in an involved participial clause what a French writer would express in a noun clause. I firmly believe that Russian writers would enormously improve if in ninety cases out of a hundred they followed the French analytical way rather than the synthetical German way. At the same time it must be admitted that even though many of the grammatical forms are an embarras de richesses and might be sacrificed to advantage, the majority contribute to the substantial wealth of the Russian speech, and enable it to express the subtlest shades of meaning, and to range over the whole gamut of human emotion. One preposition or prefix like po or za will enable
