Novel

Russia.—In Russia alone, among the countries of central and eastern Europe, the novel has developed with a radical originality. Until the second quarter of the 19th century the prose fiction of Russia was confined to imitators of Sir Walter Scott, but about the year 1834 Gogol (18o9-52) began to revolt against the his torico-romantic school and to produce stories in which an almost savage realism was curiously blended with the Slavonic dreaminess and melancholy. Since then the Russian novel has consistently been the novel of resignation and pity, but wholly divorced from sentimentality. Gogol was succeeded by Gontcharov, Tourgeniev, Dostoievski, Pissemski (182o-81) and Tolstoi, forming the most consistent and, doubtless, the most powerful school of novelists which Europe saw in the 19th century. The influence of these writers on the rest of the world was immense, and even in Eng land, where it was least acutely felt, it was significant.

Oriental.

In a primitive form the novel has long been culti vated in Asia. It was introduced into China, but whence is un known, in the 13th century, and Le Kuan-chung was the first Chinese novelist. The productions of this writer and of his fol lowers are tales of bloody warfare, or record the adventures of travellers. The novel called The Twice-Flowering Plum-Trees, be

longing to the 16th (or 17th) century, is a typical example of the moral Chinese novel, written with a virtuous purpose. Prof. Giles holds that the novel of China reached its highest point of development in The Dream of the Red Chamber, an anonymous story of the end of the 17th century; this is a panorama of Chinese social life, "worked out with a completeness worthy of Fielding." Prose stories began to be met with in the literature of Japan early in the loth century. But the inventor of the Japanese novel was a woman of genius, Murasaki no Shikibu, whose Genji Monogatari has been compared to the writings of Richardson ; it was finished in 1004 and may, therefore, be considered the oldest novel in the world. This book, which is one of the great classics of Japan, was widely imitated. After the classic period novel-writing was long neglected in Japan, but the humours of 17th century life were successfully translated into popular fiction by Saikaku (1641-93), and later by the collaborators Jisho and Kiseki. (E. G.)