of the Beast," but the reader is infallibly beguiled out of the everyday atmosphere into the mirage or phantasy or trance which the author, who is a sort of Prospero, wishes.
Apart from this magic, Sologub possesses and exhibits a pleasant sense of humour. His witty fables, of which only a few are interspersed in these pages, are famous in Russia. In politics he is a Liberal, and is capable of biting satire. Like Biely and Andreef and Kuprin, and many another Russian writer, he was infected by despair after the Russo-Japanese war and the bloody revolutionary era. The literature of 1906, 1907, 1908 was marked by hysteria, and several of Sologub's tales of that time are incoherent through grief. But as the years go on he is quickly convalescent. As Russia righted herself he recovered, and in the time before the great war of 1914 he is found in halcyon mood. One would hardly dream that public events and the political well-being of his nation could affect the author of such stories as these, and yet there is always the reflection of the Russia of the hour in the story of the hour. Such respon-
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