Maurice Baring's Landmarks in Russian Literature is a vivid, sympathetic guide to the spirit behind Russia's greatest writers. Moving from national character to literary achievement, it asks why Russian books seem at once harsh and tender, fatalistic and deeply humane, and why their power lies so often in contradiction. Baring opens by arguing that Russian literature can only be understood through the Russian temperament: a people he sees as open, flexible, emotionally perceptive, and less constrained by hypocrisy or rigid convention than Western societies. He contrasts Russian attitudes toward morality, punishment, and public conduct with English assumptions, stressing a broad compassion that resists cruelty even in a harsh political system. At the same time, he links this softness to real weaknesses in discipline, administration, and efficiency. From there, he turns to realism, defining it not as mere factual detail but as a large, living fidelity to reality. The book then focuses on landmark authors such as Gogol, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov, with Dostoevsky emerging as a figure of extraordinary national importance. Baring portrays his funeral as a public act of mourning and his life as one of poverty, suffering, modesty, passion, and immense moral and artistic force. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.