swamped with translations, Polish, German, Scandinavian, English,
French and Spanish. Knut Hamsun, H. G. Wells, and Jack London were
certainly more popular than any living Russian novelist, except
perhaps the Russian Miss Dell, Mme. Verbitsky. In writers like Jack
London and H. G. Wells the reader found what he missed in the Russian
novelists--a good story thrillingly told. For no reader, be he ever
so Russian, will indefinitely put up with a diet of "problems" and
imitation poetry.

While all these things were going on on the surface of things and
sharing between themselves the whole of the book-market, a secret
undercurrent was burrowing out its bed, scarcely noticed at first but
which turned out to be the main prolongation of the Russian novel.
The principal characteristic of this undercurrent was the revival of
realism and of that untranslatable Russian thing "byt," [Footnote:
"Byt" is the life of a definite community at a definite time in its
individual, as opposed to universally human, features.] but a revival
under new forms and in a new spirit. The pioneers of this movement
were Andrey Bely and Remizov. There was little in common between the
two men, except that both were possessed with a startlingly original
genius, and both directed it towards the utilization of Russian "byt"
for new artistic ends.

Andrey Bely was, and is, a poet rather than a novelist. His prose
from the very beginning exhibits in its extreme form the Symbolist
tendency towards wiping away the difference between poetry and prose:
in his later novels his prose becomes distinctly metrical, it is
prose after all only because it cannot be devided into _lines_; it
can be devided into _feet_ very easily. But, though such prose is
essentially a hybrid and illegitimate form, Bely has achieved with it