Excerpt from The Blind Musician: From the Russian of Korolenko The young Russian author, whose work we have the hour of introducing to English readers, is t altogether a stranger to those who are interested in Russian fiction. In the periodical reviews of current Russian literature published in the Athenaeum, the name of Vladimir Korolenko almost always holds a conspicuous place. Mr. C. E. Turner, English lecturer in the University of St. Petersbourg, in his excellent book upon modern Russian velists (a reprint of his six lectures in the London Institute), devotes a whole chapter to Korolenko, whom he rightly considers as the most gifted and popular among our living authors, Tolstoi, of course, excepted. The brief literary career of Korolenko has been indeed a series of brilliant successes. His first sketches were published about eight years ago, soon after his return from oriental Siberia, where he had spent a few years as a political exile. The best of these sketches were inspired by the country where he was an involuntary guest. They reveal a wonderful gift of artistic reproduction of what is called local colouring, both in nature and in people's lives. As to the individual characters, they are drawn cleverly and correctly, but, with few exceptions, they are rather sketchy, presenting only the outlines of living persons. Later on the author showed a keen psychological insight, sometimes even slipping into excess. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art techlogy to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.