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What can be handed on orally, the wealth of the epic, is of a different kind from what constitutes the stock in trade of the novel. The dissemination of the novel became possible only with the invention of printing. What distinguishes the novel from the story (and from the epic in the narrower sense) is its essential dependence on the book. The earliest symptom of a process whose end is the decline of storytelling is the rise of the novel at the beginning of modern times. It is, rather, only a concomitant symptom of the secular productive forces of history, a concomitant that has quite gradually removed narrative from the realm of living speech and at the same time is making it possible to see a new beauty in what is vanishing. And nothing would be more fatuous than to want to see in it merely a “symptom of decay,” let alone a “modern” symptom. This, however, is a process that has been going on for a long time. The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out. One reason for this phenomenon is obvious: experience has real life is wisdom. It is as if something that seemed inalienable to us, the securest among our possessions, were taken from us: the ability to exchange experiences. More and more often there is embarrassment all around when the wish to hear a story is expressed. Less and less frequently do we encounter people with the ability to tell a tale properly. It teaches us that the art of storytelling is coming to an end. This distance and this angle of vision are prescribed for us by an experience which we may have almost every day. Viewed from a certain distance, the great, simple outlines which define the storyteller stand out in him, or rather, they become visible in him, just as in a rock a human head or an animal’s body may appear to an observer at the proper distance and angle of vision. To present someone like Leskov as a storyteller does not mean bringing him closer to us but, rather, increasing our distance from him. He has already become something remote from us and something that is getting even more distant. Familiar though his name may be to us, the storyteller in his living immediacy is by no means a present force.