Beaumont's long introduction provides a useful context for the letters, but suffers from being overly ambitious, and hence is somewhat shallow. Because of the volume's narrow focus, we learn less about Flaubert and Turgenev as writers than as menand as old, depressed, and neurotic men at that. Turgenev, particularly, suffers from such treatment. For research collections. Joyce S. Toomre, Russian Research Ctr., Harvard Univ.

    As contemporaries of Flaubert and Zola, they achieved a reputation as exponents of realism in the novel, but their lasting fame rests on their Journal and on their series of monographs on French eighteenth-century painters. In this volume, six of their most attractive essays are presented, dealing with Watteau, Boucher, Chardin, La Tour, Greuze and Fragonard.