realism of his dialogue and the minute, but by no means dry, analysis
of the movements of his hero's subconscious Ego. In spite of the
enormous difference of style, methods, and aims Bely approaches in
many ways the effects and the achievements of Proust.

Remizov is very different. He is steeped in Russian popular and
legendary lore. His roots are deep down in the Russian soil. He is
the greatest living master of racy and idiomatic Russian. He has also
written prose that elbows poetry, and that was looked upon with
surprise and bewilderment until people realised that it was poetry.
But his importance in the history of the Russian Novel is of another
kind. It is firstly in his deliberate effort to "deliteralize"
Russian prose, to give it the accent, the intonation, and the syntax
of the _spoken_ language. He has fully achieved his ends; he has
created a prose which is entirely devoid of all bookishness and even
on the printed page gives the illusion of being heard, not seen.

Few have been able to follow him in this path; for in the present
state of linguistic chaos and decomposition few writers have the
necessary knowledge of Russian, the taste and the sense of measure,
to write anything like his pure and flexible Russian. In the hands of
others it degenerates into slang, or into some personal jargon
closely related to Double Dutch.

Remizov, however, has been more influential in another way, by his
method of treating Russian _life_. The most notable of Remizov's
"provincial" stories [Footnote: In the second edition it is called
"The Story of Ivan Semenovich Stratilatov." ] _The Unhushable
Tambourine _was written at one time with Bely's _The Silver Dove_, in
1909. At the time it met with even greater indifference: it was