PRINCE WOLKONSKY'S LECTURE.

A large audience faced the storm last evening to hear the last lecture in the course by Prince Serge Wolkonsky on "Russian History and Literature." The lecture, dealing with the period since 1860, was of great interest.

The lecturer began by a consideration of the period known as "the sixties." The events of the time have been much crisicised, many saying that the great outbreak in the early 70's was but a moment in the evolution of a process of events which tended toward revolution. Servitude determined all conditions of the time, adsolutely hindering the country's development. It was an organic part of the nation's life, which it was almost impossible to extract. When in 1861 Alexander II proclaimed the abolition of servitude the whole country rose to show its fitness for freedom. The emancipated peasants received land, thus acquiring not only the right but the power of being free. Seldom has a reform exerted so destructive an influence on that which it supercedes.

During all this time, literature had been gradually breaking down the barriers between peasant and lord.

The lecturer now compared at length the work of the three great representatives of the Russian naturalistic school-Tourgenev, Dostoyevsky, and Tolstoy. Differing as novelists they also differed as thinkers. Tourgenev pictures evil wherever he sees it-among the peasants or their masters. He unveils humanity by putting the two social classes side by side. He is one of the most striking examples of the power of art, penetrating to the reader's heart by the power of simple beauty. He first gave the name of "nihilists" to those who acknowledged no authority in anything.

With Dostoyevsky the artist is screened by the thinker and the moralist. He was an active worker for the establishment of Christian principles of love and equality of men. His doctrine was embraced in the one sentence, "Every man is a sinner against every other man."

Starting from the same point of individual self-improvement, Tolstoy deprecates collectivity as injurious to self-improvement. The artist and the thinker cohabitate as rivals in his work. Tolstoy during his life has grown to his fullest fame. His "War and Peace" is accepted as a great work by all nations. The basis of his work is non-resistance to evil.

The lecturer, after showing the injurious effects of Tolstoy's teachings in all walks of life, closed with an earnest appeal for the establishment of universalism in literature and art.