But quieter, more peaceful times dawned, and with them men's tastes and habits of mind underwent a change.

They grew tired of scorning and hating reality, because it did not conform to their cherished dreams, and they began coolly to study it.

The titanic heroes, who had become tiresome and anti-pathetic to the last degree, made way for ordinary mortals in their everyday surroundings.

Lyrical exaltation was superseded by calm observation, or disintegrating analysis of the different elements of life; pathetic misery made way for cold irony, or jeeringly melancholy humor; and at last poetry was succeeded by prose, and the ruling poetical forms of the new epoch became the romance and the novel.

This change took place almost simultaneously in all the literatures of Europe.
We have seen that Pushkin, towards the end of his career, entered upon this new path, with his prose tales, "The Captain's Daughter," "Dubrovsky," and so forth, and throughout the '30's of the nineteenth century, the romance and novel came, more and more, to occupy the most prominent place in Russian literature.