FISHERMEN, The. The Fishermen' (Rubaki), Dmitri Vasilyevitch GrigorOvitch, is a story of life among the peasants of northern Tula, where the broad river Oka flows through a level country to empty into the Volga at Nizhni Novgorod. These peasants get their living by fishing. GrigorOvitch, like most Rus sian writers, concerns himself with types of character. He was doubly an artist. His train ing as a painter and as the historian of art served him well in depicting the river land scape in every aspect. We see it in all the vary ing seasons of the year. Many of the pictures are veritable poems. Village life is also de scribed with humor and realism. This is es pecially notable when some of the peasants visit the annual market, where episodes of traffic and of drunkenness, occur. All the persons introduced are muzhiks; there is no introduc tion of *high life.* The plot is as simple as that of a Greek drama, but it touches the deepest springs of human life : honor and treachery, pure unselfish love and ignoble passion, joy and tragedy. The principal persons are found in the izba of the patriarchal old fisherman, Glyeb Savinitch, whose large family is increased at the beginning of the action by the adoption of a mischievous and surly little boy, Grishka, the illegitimate son of *Uncle Akim,p a distant relative of Glyeb's wife, Anna Savelyevna, a ne'er-do-well, boastful, idle, lazy and improvi dent, who comes to Glyeb's home to beg shelter and shortly afterward dies there, painfully and pathetically, leaving his •godson* for his rela tives to bring up. On the other side of the
river lives Uncle Kondrati with his grand daughter, the gentle and charming Dimya. Glyeb and Kondrati are interestingly con trasted: the one proud, powerful, moo violent-tempered (generally just and kindly, full of peasant wisdom often expressed in clever proverbs; the other calm, serene, reli gious and noble — the finest type of the muzhik. The story is a tragedy in humble life but a masterpiece of faithful delineation, touching the human heart. Grigorovitch, as few other modern writers, succeeds in truthfully contrast ing vice and depravity with the nobler virtues of unselfishness and pure love, the ugly traits of human nature with the finer qualities which often exist side by side in the same characters; but he is never pessimistic; in the end some element of good triumphs.