[Footnote A: Notwithstanding the unencouraging opinion expressed by
Mr. Ralston in this preface, of the probable fate of "Fathers and
Children," and "Smoke," with the English public, both have been
translated in America and have met with very fair success. Of course,
even more may be hoped for the author's other works.]

His first prose work, the "Notes of a Sportsman" (_Zapiski
Okhotnika_), a collection of sketches of country life, made a deep and
lasting impression upon the minds of the educated classes in Russia,
so vigorous were its attacks upon the vices of that system of slavery
which was then prevalent. Those attacks had all the more weight,
inasmuch as the book was by no means exclusively devoted to them. It
dealt with many other subjects connected with provincial life; and
the humor and the pathos and the picturesqueness with which they were
treated would of themselves have been sufficient to commend it to the
very favorable attention of his countrymen. But the sad pictures he
drew in it, occasionally and almost as it were accidentally, of the
wretched position occupied by the great masses of the people, then
groaning under the weight of that yoke which has since been removed,
stirred the heart of Russian society with a thrill of generous horror
and sympathy; and the effect thus produced was all the more permanent
inasmuch as it was attained by thoroughly legitimate means. Far
from exaggerating the ills of which he wrote, or describing them in
sensational and declamatory language, he treated them in a style
that sometimes seemed almost cold in its reticence and freedom from
passion. The various sketches of which the volume was composed
appeared at intervals in a Russian magazine, called the _Contemporary
(Sovremennik)_, about three-and-twenty years ago, and were read in it
with avidity; but when the first edition of the collected work was