About the book: year / "...At the end of the last century, Karamzin, speaking about Russian literature, noticed that our public most willingly reads novels and stories. 30 years later, Pushkin said with surprise that the public “is still sitting with novels and stories: they liked it!” 20 years have passed since Pushkin, and the same phenomenon is still noticed in our society. Fiction absorbs all other literature; the magazines in which our literature is now concentrated consider fine literature to be their main department; a magazine book without a story or novel is as impossible in our time as it used to be to compile an almanac without poems. <…> Isn’t the reason for this phenomenon in the very essence of the novel and its relation to the modern situation of society??…»