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Emilia Pardo Bazán, the author of the following critical survey ofRussian literature, is a Spanish woman of well-known literaryattainments as well as wealth and position. Her life has been spent inassociation with men of mark, both during frequent sojourns at Madridand at home in Galicia, "the Switzerland of Spain," from which provinceher father was a deputy to Cortes.
Books and libraries were almost her only pleasures in childhood, as shewas allowed few companions, and she says she could never apply herselfto music. By the time she was fourteen she had read widely in history,sciences, poetry, and fiction, excepting the works of the Frenchromanticists, Dumas, George Sand, and Victor Hugo, which were forbiddenfruit and were finally obtained and enjoyed as such. At sixteen shemarried and went to live in Madrid, where, amid the gayeties of thecapital, her love for literature suffered a long eclipse.
Her father was obliged, for political reasons, to leave the countryafter the abdication of Amadeus, and she accompanied him in a long andto her profitable period of wandering, during which she learned French,English, and Italian, in order to read the literatures of those tongues.She also plunged deep into German philosophy, at first out of curiosity,because it was then in vogue; but she confesses a debt of gratitude toit nevertheless.
While she was thus absorbed in foreign tongues and literatures, sheremained almost entirely ignorant of the new movement in her own land,led by Valera, Galdos, and Alarcon. The prostration which characterizedthe reign of Isabella II. had been followed by a rejuvenation born ofthe Revolution of 1868. When this new literature was at last brought toher notice, she read it with delighted surprise, and was immediatelystruck by something resembling the spirit of Cervantes, Hurtado, andother Spanish writers of old renown. Inspired by the possibility of thisheredity, she resolved to try novel-writing herself,—a thought whichhad never occurred to her when her idea of the novel had been bounded bythe romantic limitations of Victor Hugo and his suite. But if the novelmight consist of descriptions of places and customs familiar to us, andstudies of the people we see about us, then she would dare attempt it.As yet, however, no one talked of realism or naturalism in Spain; thetendency of Spanish writers was rather toward a restoration of elegantCastilian, and her own first novel followed this line, althoughevidently inspired by the breath of realism as far as she was then awareof it. The methods and objects of the French realists became fullymanifest to her shortly afterward; for, being in poor health, she wen