Afterwards, when I had waded through some twenty volumes of the gigantic work of Solovyoff--or Solovief, as the name is sometimes unphonetically written--which is simply a vast collection of valuable but undigested material, I was much less severe on the picturesque descriptions and ornate style of his illustrious predecessor.

The first work of fiction which I read was a collection of tales by Grigorovitch, which had been given to me by the author on my departure from St.Petersburg.

These tales, descriptive of rural life in Russia, had been written, as the author afterwards admitted to me, under the influence of Dickens.

Many of the little tricks and affectations which became painfully obtrusive in Dickens's later works I had no difficulty in recognising under their Russian garb.

In spite of these I found the book very pleasant reading, and received from it some new notions--to be afterwards verified, of course--about Russian peasant life.
One of these tales made a deep impression upon me, and I still remember the chief incidents.