Five of these articles first appeared, translated into Russian, in the Messager de l'Europe, a St. Petersburg review. The two others, entitled "The Novel" and "Criticism," are but the gathering together of articles selected from a large number published in Le Bien Public and Le Voltaire.
Allow me to publicly express my gratitude to the great nation which welcomed me so warmly, and adopted me, at a time when not a journal in Paris would accept what I wrote and everyone was my enemy in my literary battle. Russia, in one of my hours of pain and discouragement, revived my faith in myself, renewed my strength, and gave me a public, and that the most critical and impassioned of publics. Her criticism of my writings made me what I am to-day. I cannot speak of her without emotion, and I shall keep her in eternal remembrance.
They are therefore polemics, manifestoes, if you will, written in the first flush of the idea, without any rhetorical subtilities. As they were to be translated into another tongue, I paid little attention to their literary form. My first intention was to rewrite them before publishing them in France.
