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 "Q^^i<.^.
 
 Impressions of Russia 
 
 BY 
 
 DR. GEORG BRANDES 
 
 Author of "Eminent Authors of the Nineteenth Century' 
 
 TRANSLATED FROM THE DANISH 
 
 SAMUEL C. EASTMAN 
 
 NEW YORK 
 THOMAS Y. CROWELL & CO. 
 
 13 Astor Place
 
 Copyright, 1SS9, 
 
 BY 
 
 T. y. Ckowell & Co. 
 
 C. J. PETERS & SON, 
 
 Typographers and Electrotypers, 
 
 146 High Strcet, Boston.
 
 32 
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 This book was published in October, 1888, while the 
 translator was in Copenhagen. The great interest taken 
 at the present time in the literature of Russia and in 
 everything which relates to that great country makes 
 all that aids in giving a correct impression of its 
 political and social condition specially acceptable. Dr. 
 Brandes is a shrewd observer of what he sees, and 
 has an established reputation as an acute literary critic. 
 During his lecturing tours he came in contact with the 
 leading men of St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Warsaw. 
 The brighter aspects of the Russian problem are in- 
 corporated in this volume, while his work on Poland 
 contains the more sombre picture of the oppression to 
 which that country has been subjected. 
 
 The translator desires to express his obligations to 
 Professor Rasmus B. Anderson, late United States 
 Minister to Denmark, for his advice and assistance, as 
 well as to the author, who is himself thoroughly con- 
 versant with the English language and literature. 
 
 S. C. E. 
 CoNCOBD, N.H., May, 1889. 
 
 m
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 The Russian Empire. Extent. Natural conditions. Charac- 
 teristics of Russia 1 
 
 n. 
 
 Country and cities. St. Petersburg and Moscow. Homoge- 
 neity of nature. Difference of the seasons 5 
 
 III. 
 
 The character of the people. Have the Russian people origi- 
 nality? What it consists of in ordinary matters, in the social, 
 communal, and intellectual domain. The popular disposition 
 and popular ideal. The Black Earth 17 
 
 IV. 
 
 Life of the Russian people. No popular education. Peasants 
 and workmen. Superstition and ignorance. Submissiveness. 
 
 The Russian intelligentia. "Nigilists" of both sexes. 
 Contrast between tlie standpoint of the intelligent youth and the 
 common people 85 
 
 V. 
 
 Literary and artistic festivals. The official world. Ministers. 
 Censors. Governors. Ultra-conservative youth ... 68 
 
 VI. 
 
 The elite. Intellectual aristocracy in Russia and Poland. The 
 fundamental interests of Russia are modern. Contact wltii the 
 official circle. Instability and capriciousness. Family dramas. 
 
 Russian types of aristocracy. Two currents in Russian 
 intellectual life: the European and Slavophilist. The Russian 
 dilemma 80
 
 VI CONTENTS. 
 
 VII. 
 
 Feelings in regard to prospects of war. Longing for defeat. 
 Antecedents of the present condition. Court circles. Social 
 influence of Herzen and Katkof. The abolition of serfdom. 
 The significance of the suppression of tlie Polish insurrection. 
 Fundamental, political, and religious re-action. Terrorists and 
 attempts at assassination. Foreign and domestic policies. 108 
 
 VIII. 
 
 The Russian press. Newspapers and periodicals. Contemporary 
 men of talent, older and younger. Original men in science and 
 literature. The Russian public and its receptiveness . . 136 
 
 IX. 
 
 Art. Russian characteristic and quality of imitation in archi- 
 tecture and the fine arts. History of the art of building and of 
 religious pictures. Development of the art of painting from 
 t^ie time of Catherine to the present time: Brylof, Ivanof, 
 Kramskoi, and Riepin. Sculpture: Antopolski. Industrial 
 art. Relation between the course of development of art and 
 literature 156 
 
 LITERATUKE. 
 
 Herodotus and Ovid concerning the country and its climate. 
 Herodotus on the customs and myths of the Scythians. Resem- 
 blance between a Scythian myth and one related in the hilini. 
 Kola-Xais and Mikula. Ovid's account of the Black Sea coast 
 and its inhabitants. Chronicle of Nestor. Parallel between 
 the accounts of Nestor and the Icelandic sagas. Scandinavians 
 and Russians. Slavic mythology. The bllini. Parallel be- 
 tween the contents of these and the old Norse myths and tra- 
 ditions. The song of Igor. Its characteristics, and extracts 
 from it 177 
 
 II. 
 
 The Russian national literature. The popular ballads of Little 
 Russia and Great Russia. Their characteristics. Russian 
 love. Lomonosof, the founder of the modern literature. 
 How far he is a typical Russian. Derzhavin and classicism. 
 Influence of Holberg on the liussian theatre. Zhukovski and 
 romanticism 204
 
 CONTENTS, vii 
 
 in. 
 
 Pushkin. Emancipation of poetry, His life and poetry. 
 Pushkin and Byron. Lermontof. His life and character. 
 His poetry and Pushkin's 228 
 
 IV. 
 
 The national characteristic. The Little Russians, Gogol and 
 Shevtchenko. Gogol's satire and genius. His ruin. The 
 history of Shevtchenko's sufferings and his poetry. The re- 
 formers Herzen and Tchernuislievski. Herzen and Byelinski. 
 Herzen creates a public sentiment. Imprisonment and sen- 
 tence of Tchernuislievski. His fate and ideas. The typical 
 Kussian in his principal work 244 
 
 Turgenief, the first Russian author who becomes cosmopolitan. 
 His pessimism. He is an artist and philosopher. His efforts 
 for the liberation of the serfs. Characteristics both of him and 
 of his novels 271 
 
 VI. 
 
 Dostoyevski. His optimism. His complex character. His life 
 of Christian emotion. His debut. Byelinski and Dostoyevski. 
 His arrest and sentence. The house of correction in Siberia. 
 His novels. His labors as a Slavophilist journalist . . 301 
 
 VII. 
 
 Tolstoi. The strength of his nature and fancy. The epic char- 
 acter of his imagination. His realism and power of divination. 
 His historical portraits. Their defects. His fatalism. His 
 description of how men die. His ideal of a return to nature. 
 His pessimism and the French. His Christian socialism, so 
 typically Russian. His life and teaching. His labors for the 
 elevation and education of the people. His portraits. What 
 they teach. Kramskoi's portrait and Riepin's painting. 
 Tolstoi as Prince of the Ploughshare. Black Earth . . . 837
 
 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 The cause of my trip to Russia in 1887 was an invi- 
 tation by the Russia Authors' Association in St. Peters- 
 burg to deliver a course of lectures in French. They 
 proposed to make all the arrangements, if I would give 
 one-fourth of the receipts to their poor-fund. 
 
 While I was in St. Petersburg, I received a similar 
 invitation from Count Kapnist, the curator of the uni- 
 versity in Moscow, who also asked for the same portion 
 of the receipts for the benefit of the poor studeuts. 
 On my way to St. Petersburg I also visited Helsingfors. 
 After my lectures in Moscow, I spent some time in a 
 villa in Central Russia, twenty hours' journey by rail 
 south of Moscow. From there I went to Smolensk, and 
 from Smolensk to Warsaw. 
 
 Thus in three months I became acquainted with widely 
 separated parts of the country, and some of the most 
 important of this great empire. I had the opportunity 
 of observing both city and country life. I saw Russia 
 ])oth in winter and summer garb. The peculiar condi- 
 tions under which I travelled brought me in connection 
 with several hundred people of different races and of 
 different classes in society ; I met residents of Great 
 and Little Russia, Finns and Swedes, Armenians and 
 Poles, of both sexes, and was brought into close relations 
 with fashionable and common people, conservatives and 
 
 ix
 
 X INTRODUCTION. 
 
 liberals, lawyers and doctors, authors and artists, princes 
 and professors, journalists and peasants, officials and 
 menials. 
 
 Although I am giving my impressions, I do not for a 
 moment forget how imperfect must be my description of 
 the Eussian Empire in^ its entirety. I am not unmind- 
 ful of how little of what I did see I was able to under- 
 stand fully, nor of how inconsiderable a portion of a 
 country like Russia and of its inhabitants was placed 
 before me. But naturally I believe in my capacity for 
 observation and in the soundness of my judgments. 
 
 G. B.
 
 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 I. 
 
 Alexander von Humboldt, in order to give a forci- 
 ble illustration of the immense extent of the Russian 
 Empire, once compared it to the moon. If you look at 
 the moon when it is full, you see in the hemisphere of 
 the satellite which is before you a smaller territory than 
 that of Russia. About fifty thousand square miles are 
 still wanting. 
 
 No other country has so large an extent of territory 
 in one division. It is one-sixth part of the area of the 
 land of our globe, and, although sparsely inhabited, has 
 a population of about ninety-seven million souls, of 
 whom sixty-seven millions are of Russian lineage. 
 
 So far as inanimate nature is concerned, the situation 
 of the Russian Empire corresponds to its immense size. 
 Boundless plains extend from the German frontier far 
 into Central Asia, and from the extreme north to the 
 Black Sea. In one of its remote quarters are the moun- 
 tains of Caucasus, which rise, from a level lower than that 
 of the ocean, to a height far above the highest of the Euro- 
 pean Alps. In the northwest, it has the largest lakes of 
 Europe, the Ladoga and the Onega, and in the south, 
 the Caspian Sea, the largest in the world. Finally, its 
 rivers are as vast as its plains, its mountains, and its 
 lakes. The largest of them, the Volga, is the longest 
 and widest river in Europe. Although it does not dis- 
 charge so large a volume of water as might be expected, 
 
 1
 
 2 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 and as the Danube does, for example, yet that is on 
 account of the flatness of the country and the scantiness 
 of the rainfall. Just as whole streams in Southern Rus- 
 sia are swallowed up by the earth and evaporated as they 
 flow,* so the immense flood of the Volga, pouring into the 
 basin of the Caspian Sea, has not sufficed in a hundred 
 years to raise the water level. 
 
 The great steppes, which have been compared to the 
 ocean, have none of the ever varying aspects of the sea. 
 Unchanging uniformity is their characteristic. The 
 greatest river, which is as broad as a sound, and in com- 
 parison with which the Rhine is short, lacks the impetu- 
 osity and turmoil of less imposing rivers. A certain 
 mighty sluggishness is peculiar to its flow. This slug- 
 gishness as well as this uniformity is Russian. 
 
 In this empire, where everything is immense, there is 
 nothing in the natural conditions which is mild or tem- 
 perate. This great tract of land is like a body without 
 limbs. It has no indentations of any consequence ; is 
 not cut up into half-island formations or divided into 
 islands, like the whole of Northern, Western, and South- 
 ern Europe. It has a continental climate : that is, long, 
 severe winters and burning summers. The ocean, which 
 always tempers the cold and heat, is remote ; and the in- 
 fluence of the Gulf Stream, always softening, is not felt 
 here. 
 
 Just as this immense continent has no indentations, 
 so is its uniformity unbroken by either mountains or 
 valleys. This land of forests, black mould, and steppes 
 is one great plain. This is the reason why the cold 
 blasts from the Arctic Ocean sweep down over the whole 
 empire without meeting any obstruction, and why the 
 moisture is wanting which the Atlantic Ocean and the 
 Baltic and Mediterranean Seas give to Europe. With
 
 NATURAL CONDITIONS. 3 
 
 the exception of tlie Crimea and Caucasus, no part of 
 this broad land has a southern climate. As some one 
 has expressed it, Russia has a summer but no south. 
 
 It is quite true that there are very great extremes in 
 this homogeneous climate. The average summer temper- 
 ature on the northern coasts of Russia (37 Fahr.) is 
 lower than the winter temperature in Sevastopol. But 
 January in Odessa has the same temperature as January 
 in Christiania; and although Moscow is on the same 
 degree of latitude as Copenhagen and Edinburgh, the 
 average winter temperature is 10 Fahr. in the Russian 
 . city, 33 in the Danish, and 38 in the Scotch. 
 
 Yet there is hardly any real difference between the 
 natural conditions of European Russia and Siberia ex- 
 cept the greater severity. 
 
 From that region, in the north, where only the rein- 
 deer can exist, to that country, in the south, which pro- 
 duces the grape and Indian corn, there is in European 
 Russia a gradual transition ; yet. to the Western-European 
 neither the vegetable nor the animal life presents any- 
 thing unfamiliar or extraordinary. Both the plants and 
 animals that are common with us are found in the larger 
 part of the empire. Of wild beasts there are found 
 some bears in all the forests, while both in the forests 
 and on the grassy plains and some of the steppes there 
 are wolves in great numbers. The number of wolves in 
 European Russia is estimated to be about 175,000. These 
 wolves destroy annually 180,000 head of cattle, 560,000 
 sheep, 100,000 dogs, besides 150 human beings. Each 
 wolf is estimated to consume annually the value of about 
 80 rubles. 
 
 Except this one wild beast, however, there is no dan- 
 gerous or uncommon animal. While the inorganic world 
 in this land is on a grand scale, the vegetable and animal
 
 4 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 products are the reverse. The trees, even in the forests, 
 are not tall, and the whole animal world has no striking 
 feature. 
 
 The decidedly essential feature which characterizes 
 Russia is uniformity notwithstanding the immensity of 
 everything. Although the country is enormously large, 
 it is monotonous. Russia is a land not only of far-reach- 
 ing plains, long and broad rivers, uniform climate, but 
 also of regular geological formation. This immense 
 country also constitutes one organic unit, since the wood- 
 land cannot do without the grain-land, the grain-land 
 without the steppes, nor the steppes without the wood- 
 land. The steppes need the trees, and the woodland 
 needs the cattle. And so also the country near the 
 coast feels the want of the interior, and the interior of 
 the coast. As Count Moltke has said, in his "Letters 
 from Russia," " No part can do without the other : the 
 forests of the north cannot dispense with the grain-pro- 
 ducing south, nor can the industrious interior spare 
 either of the other parts." The vision that this great 
 empire will be broken up into a number of small king- 
 doms will therefore hardly be realized. What nature 
 has united geographically, man cannot separate; and 
 what it has separated, man cannot unite. The geogra- 
 phy of the country, which has prevented the union of 
 the three Scandinavian nations into one, keeps this sixth 
 part of the earth together.^ 
 
 1 A. Leroy-Beaulieu : "The Empire of the Tsars and theRussias," 
 vol. 1, bk. 1. Elisee Reclus: "New Universal Geography," vol. 5.
 
 n. 
 
 Russia is an agricultural country. There are compar- 
 atively few cities. The provincial towns all resemble 
 one another. When you have seen one or two, you know 
 them all. Such a provincial town has a public park, a 
 cathedral, a governor's palace, and a hospital. So much 
 is essential ; the remainder depends on the better or 
 worse condition of the inhabitants. Still, there is one 
 and a very important thing you are sure to find a 
 prison, and in a country town like Lomja, which has a 
 population of twenty-five thousand, there is one with 
 six hundred inmates. 
 
 Life in such a Russian country town, on a clear sum- 
 mer day, however little it may be praised by native 
 authors, sometimes appears very attractive. The gay 
 costumes, the red shirts of the men and the embroidered 
 jackets of the women, shine brightly in the sun. Of those 
 which I have seen, Briansk, a manufacturing town on 
 the river Diesna, was a type of the Russian monotony. 
 On the other hand, Smolensk ^ is delightfully situ- 
 ated on both banks of the Dnieper. The larger part of 
 the town is on the left bank, which has a steep descent 
 to the river, so that the numerous domes and spires of 
 the churches, seen from the opposite side, appear tower- 
 ing over the landscape in strong relief. The general 
 situation, however, on account of the flatness of the land, 
 is not attractive, and the town, therefore, is only interest- 
 
 ^ Pronounced Smahlyensk, with the accent on the last syllable. 
 5
 
 6 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 ing to the traveller as a commercial and manufacturing 
 town or for the historical associations, like all the towns 
 which Napoleon's winter campaign has made renowned. 
 The intellectual life in these provincial towns presents a 
 sad picture : it is cards and brandy, brandy and cards. 
 
 With the exception of Finland, Poland, and the prov- 
 inces on the Baltic, each of which has its own character, 
 all the intellectual life in Russia is concentrated in the 
 two capitals, St. Petersburg and Moscow. 
 
 At the very moment when the traveller at the frontier 
 takes the Russian railway train, there are three things 
 which meet him like messages from a strange world : 
 the language, which, with its rich and soft melody, has 
 not the least resemblance to any of the Western-European 
 tongues ; the alphabet, of which some of the characters 
 are new to us and others have a different meaning than 
 in ours (as, for instance, H is used for N) ; and finally a 
 computation of time, which tears you away from your 
 customary almanac by rolling the time back for twelve 
 days, and thereby burns the bridge to the civilization 
 of Western and Southern Europe. Would that it were 
 only in these twelve days that Russia was behind the 
 rest of Europe ! 
 
 St. Petersburg is generally the first place visited by 
 the traveller. St. Petersburg is, as said by Peter the 
 Great in his old comparison, the window which the cre- 
 ator of modern Russia built towards the west. It must 
 be conceded that for by far the largest part of the year 
 the view through the window is obscured by frost flow- 
 ers. What Russia most needed in that time was an open 
 port. Archangel, in the north, was almost continuously 
 closed by ice. Kronstadt was added, but that also is 
 shut up for half the year. Since then the empire has 
 gained new harbors, such as Vladivostok, in the far east,
 
 ST. PETERSBURG. 7 
 
 but not one of them is free from ice. Only from the 
 ports on the Black Sea and the Sea of Azof is navigation 
 almost always free, but these do not afford Russia free 
 approach to the outside world, since vessels can always 
 be stopped at the Dardanelles, so long as Constantinople 
 is in the possession of the Turk. This accounts for the 
 constant and ever increasing desire of Russia to possess 
 Constantinople. 
 
 By the founding of St. Petersburg the Tsar desired 
 to bring his country nearer to the west. The city, as has 
 been said, was at once a symbol of his determination 
 and the means for its execution. Although at the same 
 time he allowed a canal to be constructed between the 
 Neva and the Volga, he strove to force the wealth of the 
 land from the east and south up against the current, 
 and to open an outlet for it to the west. 
 
 St. Petersburg is a city intersected by an enormous 
 number of canals and streams ; it is built in a swamp 
 and surrounded by a desert. It is an artificial city, with- 
 out any country naturally tributary, and it derives the 
 most of its suppoi-t from officials and soldiers, although 
 its trade and manufactures are of late more important. 
 It is an unhealthy city, in which, as in the old capital of 
 the empire also, the number of deaths is so much larger 
 than the number of births that the population, suffering 
 a loss of one or two thousand a year, would die out, were 
 it not for a constant immigration. It is a half-educated 
 city, in which, at the present time, three hundred thou- 
 sand of the nine hundred thousand inhabitants cannot 
 read or write. Finally, it is a beautiful city, in grand 
 style, with half European and half barbarian splendor. 
 
 For the foundation of this city in the five years from 
 1712 to 1716, Peter the Great caused more than one hun- 
 dred and fifty thousand workmen to be brought into the
 
 8 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 Neva swamp, where the most of them died of fever, con- 
 tagious diseases, or hunger. To compel the masons to 
 seek employment in this place only, he prohibited the 
 erection of stone houses in the whole empire, under a 
 penalty of confiscation of property and banishment to 
 Siberia, and also commanded every nobleman who owned 
 more than thirty peasant families to build a house in 
 this new capital, the situation and size of which were 
 exactly determined as the conditions of the individuals 
 brought them under one or another class of household- 
 ers. Perhaps in remembrance of what he owed to Hol- 
 land, he gave to the city, when it was built, his name in 
 its Dutch form, Piterburg. 
 
 It has developed into a city of luxury, where the 
 number of servants in proportion to the number of the 
 inhabitants exceeds that of any other city in Europe. In 
 1870 the number of families in Berlin which had three 
 domestics was two per cent of the whole number, in St. 
 Petersburg it was twelve per cent ; and for that year the 
 percentage of families in Berlin having eleven domestics 
 was not given, but the number of such families in St. 
 Petersburg was one per cent. 
 
 Driving from the railway station into St. Petersburg, 
 you constantly expect to see the Neva before you St. 
 Petersburg and the Neva being so closely connected in 
 our minds. But no ! this is only a canal, and that only the 
 river Fontanka, which empties into the Neva. Finally, 
 the mighty stream lies before you, broad as an arm of 
 the sea, ice-bound and covered with snow, between the 
 tall quays and the islands, on one of which towers the 
 fortress of Petro-Pavlovsk, with its gilded spire glis- 
 tening in the sun. Then a world of reddish yellow 
 palaces is disclosed, which, like all the Kussian govern- 
 ment buildings, awaken surprise by their wonderful
 
 ST. PETERSBURG. 9 
 
 color, being partly suggestive of a prison hue and partly 
 of a flesh tint. 
 
 Before the Winter Palace the stranger is startled by 
 the sight of a strange, ugly iron shed, which disfigures 
 the beautiful square. This shed, however, gives a cor- 
 rect impression of the climate of the country. It is as 
 necessary as the palace, even more necessary. In the 
 middle of it there is a huge caldron, which in winter 
 nights is filled with glowing coals so that the coachmen 
 and servants, while waiting for their masters in the pal- 
 ace, may not freeze to death. 
 
 Here on the left bank of the Neva are also the huge, 
 gay-colored buildings of the Admiralty, and St. Isaac's 
 Church, built wholly of granite and marble. And here 
 also the stranger first comes in contact with the pro- 
 pensity of the Russian to work out his results by the aid 
 of the strength and the richness of the material, rather 
 than by the beauty of the design. In the interior, the 
 floor and walls are covered with polished marble of 
 different kinds : there are columns of lapis-lazuli, sixteen 
 or seventeen feet high, and of malachite, thirty feet 
 high, with gilded bases and capitals ; but there are no 
 forms that impress themselves on your memory. Great 
 art first meets the eye when it dwells on Falconet's bold 
 memorial Peter the Great, where the Tsar is seen gallop- 
 ing up a block of Finnish granite on a rearing horse per- 
 haps the best equestrian statue of modern times. There 
 are also along the Neva a large number of fine buildings 
 in the Italian and Prench style, transplanted here. There 
 are also very numerous chapels and shrines, before 
 which every passer-by crosses himself again and again, 
 in case he does not stop and say his prayers. On the 
 Neva and on the quays there is a constant succession of 
 sleighs. These sleighs, public or private, have only a
 
 10 . IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 single seat, for two persons, generally a gentleman and 
 a lady, and the man and woman sit in such a manner 
 that he always has his arm about her waist, probably 
 to prevent her being thrown out. 
 
 Everybody drives, even the servants who are sent 
 about the city. The distances are so great that, as a 
 rule, it is necessary, and there are twenty-five thousand 
 public coachmen at command. People bargain about 
 the price of every trip; and in the outset, when the 
 stranger imperfectly understands Eussian, nothing is 
 more common than this conversation: "What do you 
 ask ? " " Fifteen kopecks." " Not at all ! I will not 
 give more than twenty-five." 
 
 We drive from here to the Nevski Prospekt, on a day 
 in early spring, with pure, clear air and sun. The driver 
 is a Russian peasant. During the summer he cultivates 
 his land, but in the winter he earns his bread as izvosh- 
 chik. He sits there, with his face covered with beard, 
 under a low-crowned hat, in a long and loose coat, which 
 from the waist down is shaped like a wide, puckered shirt 
 or a loose dressing-gown, and extends quite down to the 
 feet. He Avears an embroidered scarf about the waist. 
 Strange to say, in the museum at the Hermitage, among 
 the antiquities found in the earth at Kertsh, in the 
 Crimea, on the ornaments like bracelets, are to be found 
 figures of bearded Scythians, who in physiognomy, as 
 well as in dress, remind one of these peasant coachmen. 
 The type seems to have prevailed ever since. 
 
 It is a genuine scene of a great city, this Nevski Pros- 
 pekt in the sparkling sunlight, with three and four rows 
 of carriages side by side, in an endless procession. Ele- 
 gant men and women are in the carriages. On the side- 
 walks are the less wealthy people, the women wrapped up 
 like mummies for fear of the cold, although the worst
 
 STREET LIFE. 11 
 
 of it is over, and apparently wholly unable to dress 
 becomingly. The impression made by most of them is 
 trivial and insignificant, but the appearance of some who 
 have striven to be noticed for their dress arrests the 
 attention. I recall such a one in a glaring costume of 
 light green velvet, shining like a scarabaeus, and another 
 in a bright yellow velvet dress with embroidery down 
 the back. Some of the coachmen look like genuine bar- 
 barians, being dressed in red and gold ; those of the 
 foreign ministers have a triangle in gold embroidery on 
 the back and the colors of the country on the front of 
 the hat. Our coachman and all coachmen cross them- 
 selves on the forehead, the mouth, and the breast before 
 every shrine and before every one of the numerous chap- 
 els from whose burning lamp a light is thrown into the 
 street. Most of this comes from habit. There is far 
 less piety than there would seem to be from all the cross- 
 ing and bowing, in the open streets, to which the stranger 
 is a witness. While they are making the sign of the 
 cross with the right hand, they are scratching themselves 
 on the back with the left. 
 
 Some of the men have extremely expressive counte- 
 nances. Almost all the women have chlorosis. The 
 climate compels them to sit too much indoors. The 
 water is undrinkable and the food bad. The poorer peo- 
 ple live on barley bread, cabbage soup, and porridge in 
 this land whose temperature demands more nutritious 
 food than in England. And the national drinks tea, 
 kvas, and vodka (brandy) have not the nutriment of 
 Germany's lighter or England's stronger ales. In St. 
 Petersburg anaemia is met everywhere. 
 
 Life in the princi])al streets is quite modern. But in 
 the middle of the Nevski, near the Kazan Church, behind 
 the memorial of Catherine the Second, you look into the
 
 12 impr:Sssions of Russia. 
 
 Gostinny Dvor, bazaars with arcades, stall against stall, 
 a spectacle which is anything but modern. You catch a 
 glimpse of old Russia in the bearded peasant (muzhik) 
 with his bast shoes, and his patched caftan or sheepskin, 
 and then you see the priests in brown robes, reaching 
 to their feet, a black cap over their long hair, and with 
 an embroidered belt to which the beard almost reaches. 
 They trade with the merchant, who stands there in an- 
 tique Russian fur cap, while his wife, with real pearls 
 about her neck, stands by and listens. 
 
 Nevertheless, if you really wish to see old Russia you 
 must go to Moscow. It is easily done ; for, though St. 
 Petersburg and Moscow are two separate worlds, it is 
 arranged by the modern means of conveyance that by 
 leaving the first in the afternoon the other is reached 
 the next morning. The two capitals are united by the 
 only really express train in Russia. 
 
 On the more elevated land in the interior, surrounded 
 by a wall which here and there rises into towers with 
 green roofs, lies a city which, in its different quarters, 
 alternately possesses the characteristics of a great capi- 
 tal, a provincial city, and a country town. Here there 
 are fine streets, with tall houses and passages, as in Paris, 
 and there interminable ranges of low houses with spa- 
 cious gardens. You can drive from this line quarter 
 into one which is almost wholly without pavements. In 
 some places, it is like the country in this city of eight 
 hundred thousand inhabitants and four hundred churches. 
 There is open ground enough, but hardly any place 
 where people can walk, no promenades except in the 
 outskirts. Yet everything is laid out on a broad scale ; 
 everything has the stamp of repose, just as in St. Peters- 
 burg everything seems to be planned for keen and imme- 
 diate enjoyment.
 
 THE KREMLIN. 13 
 
 Here the traveller would think he was on the highway 
 into Asia. Strange sights are to be seen : a Tatar wed- 
 ding-party in modern carriages ; dark countenances, under 
 turbans, in elegant European landaus. That was the 
 sight whi^h first met me in Moscow. Everything is to 
 be seen here which we are accustomed to imagine as gay 
 in the streets of a city : Persians with their tall sheep- 
 skin caps, Turks with their fezes, and pagan Kalmucks ; 
 it is perhaps as unusual a variety as the sight of Turks 
 and Persians in the streets of Venice. 
 
 The stranger's first visit is to the Kremlin. Here he 
 stands on the navel of Russia. This is a holy place for 
 Russian patriotism. Here is the central point of the 
 empire ; here the Tsar is crowned. Ascending the high- 
 est tower, Ivan Veliky, you can see an immense city on 
 every side, with gilded and green cupolas and roofs. 
 Here stood Napoleon with his marshals in 1812 and saw 
 the commencement of the conflagration of the city. Here 
 stood Madame de Stael and uttered the well-known words, 
 " Rome of the Tatars ! " which depicts in a masterly 
 manner the impression made by the fountain-head of the 
 church of a barbaric race. But the old French proverb, 
 " Scratch a Russian and you will find a Tatar," contains 
 a truth, though with so many limitations that it will be 
 wrong nine times in ten. The harsh rule of the Mongo- 
 lian for two hundred and sixty years (1220-1480) in fact 
 put Russia far back and had its baneful influence on the 
 Russian character ; but it did not succeed in changing the 
 race, even if it made the blood less pure. The Russian 
 flesh and blood is concealed under many Tatarean 
 princely titles ; under many customs originating with 
 the Mongolians, the Slavic temperament has held its own 
 incorrupted. That appeared when Peter the Great un- 
 dertook to scratch the Asiatic and found a European
 
 14 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 under the foreign crust. Even if Kief is more entitled 
 to honor from the Russians than Moscow, on account of 
 its greater antiquity, and even if it is, like Jerusalem, the 
 holy city, still, Moscow is always, for the inhabitants 
 of Greater Eussia, the mother city, Moskva mdtushka. 
 
 The vivid colors of these roofs, the bright gilding of 
 the cupolas of the churches, all this, which in a milder 
 climate would be in bad taste, has its foundation in the 
 climatic and historical relations, and most of all in the 
 length and kind of the winters. If you conceive a win- 
 ter where the snow for two hundred days together covers 
 everything, woods and fields, roads and streets and roofs 
 of the houses, with its monotonous sheet, you can under- 
 stand that some splendor is needed in the air to enliven 
 the world when the sun does shine for a day. 
 
 Winter is the characteristic season in Eussia. Even 
 if the wind is cold, still it is not by far so strong as in 
 Denmark, so that a greater degree of cold can be endured 
 than here. Winter stamps the whole life and character 
 of the people. 
 
 The peasant is obliged to live immured in his hut, 
 with the walls and windows carefully closed to the cold. 
 He lives in bad air, by the light of a blazing pine knot, 
 close to the great stove, on the top of which the whole 
 family sleep at night. He sleeps with his clothes on, 
 including his sheepskin. He does not undress the whole 
 week through, except when, on Saturday, he takes his 
 Eussian bath. But with his sheepskin he puts on his 
 vermin again. 
 
 With the higher classes the long winter has this re- 
 sult, that night is turned into day. Social life in St. 
 Petersburg is even in a higher degree than in Warsaw a 
 night life. Even the most of the sleighing parties take 
 place in the night. In the'* silent quiet, the three horses
 
 DIFFERENCE OF THE SEASONS. 15 
 
 abreast with the light sleighs whistle over the snow and 
 ice fields. It is the combination of the silence of death 
 and the furious speed which amuses and satisfies the 
 Russian disposition. 
 
 In a southerly land like Italy vegetation is somewhat 
 uniform during the whole year. The laurels and the olive 
 trees are always green. In Russia, summer and winter 
 present two entirely different countries and aspects of 
 life. For a typical impression of winter the life in Si- 
 beria in that season may be taken as described by Koro- 
 lenko, the poet of Little Russia, who returned from an 
 involuntary residence of several years in the department 
 of Yakutsk. He lived in a little house thatched with 
 deerskin. In such a dwelling, at the approach of winter, 
 blocks of ice are substituted for the windows, which 
 are replaced by panes of glass only when melted in the 
 spring. There is never a single day of thaw in winter. 
 It begins by barely freezing and gradually falling to fifty 
 to sixty degrees below zero. In order to breathe, they 
 wrap themselves up in a sort of boa or respirator of fur, 
 made of squirrel's tails. The sun breaks through the 
 icy panes in strange and beautiful rainbow hues. 
 
 But the approach of spring awakes a new existence. 
 The fluid element, which had vanished, returns. The 
 real spring is detestable. But this disagreeable spring 
 thaw lasts only a short time, and is hardly considered in 
 Russia as one of the seasons. Still nothing can give the 
 Western-European a conception of the effect on the 
 mind and senses of this sudden plunge into summer. 
 
 It had been necessary to wear furs in Moscow ; the 
 days were raw and the nights cold ; it snowed and froze 
 until the streets, during the last of my stay (until the 
 middle of May), changed to a chaos of mud. Then one day 
 I was taken by an acquaintance to the Kursk Railway
 
 16 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 station, and we journeyed for a day and night towards the 
 south. When we arose the next morning at five o'clock 
 summer was upon us. There was the country-house 
 surrounded with trees newly clad with foliage. There 
 was a fragrance from these poplars and birches as intox- 
 icatingly strong as the perfume of the plants in a conser- 
 vatory, and far more fresh. There was no grass, only 
 moss, but over the moss a never ending carpet of 
 extremely fragrant lilies of the valley. The dense, fresh, 
 primeval forest extended along the two rivers Diesna and 
 Bolva ; and the nightingales sang in rich chorus, as I had 
 never before heard them. This was no accident, for this 
 is the country of nightingales above all others. It is 
 said that in the vicinity of Kursk and Orel (pro- 
 nounced Arydl) the nightingale is to be found in the 
 greatest numbers and sings the best of all places on the 
 earth. 
 
 To sum up the characteristics, this is a land where 
 everything is extravagant and nothing temperate. In 
 the next place, just as the conditions are extraordinary, 
 immense, so the uniformity is great, and as the natural 
 uniformity is great, so is the variety produced by the 
 seasons great. All is laid out on a large scale, cities and 
 provincial towns. There is room to spare everywhere, 
 as in the United States.
 
 rn. 
 
 If the stranger has now looked about at all in this 
 land, he will necessarily be inclined to reflect on the 
 condition of the people who inhabit it, and will strive to 
 reach clear conclusions as to the fundamental elements 
 of their character. 
 
 The truth has been expressed in many different ways, 
 especially in earlier times, that the Russians have in- 
 vented very little, have contributed nothing, so to speak, 
 to the development of civilization, but have only appro- 
 priated the culture of others. They are, it is said, a 
 people of imitation, a people without originality. 
 
 It cannot be denied that of all the larger European 
 nations this is the one which has borrowed the most of 
 foreign culture, and whose native culture strikes one 
 least. It shows itself in something external, as in this, 
 that, while a travelling Englishman may be detected at 
 the distance of a hundred paces, you must look well 
 to recognize a Russian on his travels. It is, moreover, 
 scarcely any extravagant exaggeration to say, as in the 
 first part of the " Main Currents," that a square yard of 
 the Roman Forum has more history than the whole Rus- 
 sian Empire. 
 
 And yet the observation is very superficial which 
 characterizes the Russian people with the word exotic. 
 The traveller in Russia who asks himself the question, 
 What is there here original ? will not fail to find an 
 answer when he directs his mind from the trivial and 
 
 17
 
 18 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 unimportant to the most fundamental qualities which 
 he can trace. 
 
 He is, very likely, first struck by the way in which the 
 horses are harnessed to the carriages. In no other place 
 is this done as here ; in no other country are three horses 
 used with one carriage in so stylish a manner. It is no 
 slight or common sense of beauty which prompted this. 
 In the next place, there is a very striking originality in all 
 kinds of manual labor. This is seen in the patterns of 
 embroidery (also well known here from the Russian em- 
 broidered handkerchiefs), in the harmony of bright colors 
 which characterize all Russian ornamentation and deco- 
 ration, from the ancient manuscripts down to the beauti- 
 ful enamel in gold and silver of this present day, and, 
 finally, in the style of architecture, which, although it is 
 a composite of Byzantine and Mongolian, Hindoo and 
 Persian, Gothic and Renaissance, still has obtained a 
 marked national character as the embodiment of the 
 Russian-Greek Church. 
 
 In the next place, this people have an original concep- 
 tion in their civil relations, the so-called jni?', a munici- 
 pality whose bond of union is home rule and common 
 ownership of the soil. 
 
 Russia is primarily and in its very essence a patriar- 
 chal state, a state where the father has the authority 
 and the children are in a condition of equality with one 
 another. As a result of a development ordained by fate, 
 Russia has become a bureaucratic state, where official 
 power has destroyed all spontaneous and natural growth 
 in the relations of public life. Nevertheless, the family, 
 the municipality, and the state in Russia are three organ- 
 isms, constructed on entirely homogeneous principles, but 
 moving in different spheres. The great Russian family 
 is not restricted to parents and children; it includes
 
 COMMON OWNERSHIP OF LAND. 19 
 
 several generations and many families. Married sons, 
 brothers of the father or of the mother, have down to a 
 very recent period constantly worked in the same house 
 or on the same farm, yielding obedience to the authority 
 of the eldest, and with property in common. This family 
 relation is now being broken up, because in it (as in the 
 state) the paternal authority has been inflated till it has 
 become unnatural and oppressive. 
 
 In the mean time, the municipality is only the larger 
 family, as the state is only the union of all the munici- 
 palities into one great family, whose father is the Tsar. 
 The Russian family has two decided characteristics : the 
 unlimited authority of the father, and the undivided 
 possession by the children. The Russian state, absolute 
 monarchy, has developed the first ; the Russian municipal- 
 ity, mir, the second. In fact, these two characteristics 
 the power of the Tsar and the ownership of land in com- 
 mon are the two fundamental principles which distin- 
 guish the Russian people from all others. It is very 
 true that many other countries, Denmark among the 
 rest, have long known a similar common ownership of 
 property ; but elsewhere it has been abolished with the 
 abolition of serfdom, or with the emancipation from 
 villanage ; here, on the contrary, it still survives. While 
 the common family (or the organization which may be 
 termed a family partnership) is undergoing dissolution 
 since the emancipation of the serfs, the municipal joint 
 property has not only held its own since then, but it has 
 even increased at the expense of private property. In 
 the department of Moscow, since 1861, of 74,480 farms 
 only nineteen have abandoned the joint proprietorship ; 
 and at the present time, in the whole of Greater Russia, 
 of all the peasant farm lands 90-98 per cent are owned 
 in common. Even in AVliite and Little Russia common 
 ownership has made inroads.
 
 20 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 It is natural that the Russians, underneath the social- 
 istic agitations of our time, should see in their mir the 
 healthy germ of better social relations. They generally 
 regard themselves in this particular as the pioneer or 
 prototype for Europe. 
 
 Intellectual originality among the Russians is, natu- 
 rally, much less easily grasped, but it is not on that 
 account the less indisputable; Intellectually, the Rus- 
 sians impress the stranger by their realism, their practical, 
 positive taste for the real, which has made them a great 
 people and has won so many victories in the battle of 
 life. It seems to be this quality which has given the in- 
 habitant of Great Russia superiority over all the other 
 races of the empire. While the Little-Russian possibly 
 surpasses the Great-Russian in continued action, through 
 his vivacity and delicacy, his sensibility and disposition, 
 he lacks the sound common sense of the other. This taste 
 for realism has shown itself to be the strong point of the 
 Great-Russian. It is this among other things which 
 explains how it is that, where a realistic tendency in 
 modern times has prevailed in French literature, and 
 books of this intellectual character have been brought to 
 Russia, they have been received there as the representa- 
 tives of something old and well known. A long time 
 before, the Russian authors had solved the problem of 
 the novel in a like manner. At the time when France 
 was becoming the most infatuated with Romanticism, 
 the whole Russian novel literature had already begun to 
 produce the description of actual life, and Art had begun 
 to follow on the track of Poetry. 
 
 The result of this realism is that the Great-Russian 
 despises the Little-Russian as sentimental and effeminate, 
 and looks down upon the Pole as on a being weak and 
 unreliable, or, on a higher plane, romantic and fantastic.
 
 RUSSIAN MYSTICISM AND FRANKNESS. 21 
 
 There is also the strongly developed realistic tendency 
 which has deprived the Russian of all metaphysical 
 qualities, and led him, as a rule, to take interest in only 
 two groups of sciences the physical and social. 
 
 The form of government in Russia is not now of the 
 kind to give free scope for any sort of originality. And 
 while independent thought in political affairs is not 
 allowed any outlet, and is almost equally debarred from 
 full and free expression in literature on account of the 
 censor, there is no obstacle to singularity, individual pe- 
 culiarity, and absurdity, which not infrequently becomes 
 merged into mysticism, a Slavic peculiarity, but one which 
 with the Russians is wonderfully united to realism. 
 Gogol comes to us a representative of the past, and 
 Tolstoi of the present time. It is this mysticism which 
 is outwardly shown in the numerous sects which are 
 found in Russia. The membership of the sects amounts 
 to fourteen or fifteen millions, divided among some fifty 
 or sixty different moral and religious systems. 
 
 The trait, however, which struck me personally more 
 strongly than any other, and one which I met with in the 
 most developed and also, so far as I could judge, the most 
 typical individuals, was what they themselves called une 
 large franchise, a broad and proud frankness. No- 
 where else are men and women occupying the most 
 advanced places in culture heard expressing themselves 
 so openly and without reserve. They not only give 
 utterance to their ideas and thoughts without hesitation, 
 but they not infrequently expose traits of their own 
 lives, traits which they must see may be judged differ- 
 ently, without any fear of losing anything in the opinion 
 of others. Behind this transparency, which especially 
 surprises us in the women, there lies : " Such am I ; I 
 appear as I am too broadly and largely constituted to
 
 22 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 be reserved and prudent, and too sure of my position in 
 life not to be dependent on my own judgment." The 
 meaning of this in social intercourse is : " This is what I 
 am. Tell me what you are. What is the profit of this 
 reserve ! Life is short, time is scantily measured out ; if 
 we are to get anything out of our intercourse, we must 
 explain what we are to each other." And behind this 
 frankness lies the emotion which works most strangely 
 of all on one who comes from the north, a horror and 
 hatred of hypocrisy, and a pride which shows itself in 
 carelessness so unlike English stiffness, French pru- 
 dence, German class pride, Danish nonsense. 
 
 The basis of this is the broadly constituted nature, 
 without frivolity, without narrowness, without bitterness 
 the true basis of originality in Russia. 
 
 And this, which is thus opened to inspection when this 
 natural disposition is examined, this is a peculiarity which 
 is unique among the national peculiarities of Europe. 
 
 The fundamental inclination, which numerous experi- 
 ences disclose to the stranger, is : the inclination to have 
 their swing. It is not simply the inclination to extremes. 
 But it is this : when a Russian has got hold of a thought, 
 a fundamental idea, a principle, a purpose, without re- 
 gard to its origin, whether it originated with himself 
 or was borrowed from European culture, he does not rest 
 until he has followed it out to the last results. There- 
 fore the Russians are the most arbitrary oppressors in 
 the world and the most reckless liberators, blindly ortho- 
 dox, following sectarian religions to self-destruction, 
 free-thinking to Nihilism, sedition to attempts at murder 
 and dynamite assaults. If they believe in the idea of 
 authority, they bow down till the forehead touches the 
 earth before it (chelobitie) ; if they hate the idea of 
 authority, that hate forces percussion bombs into their
 
 CAPACITY OF APPROPRIATION. 23 
 
 hands. They are radicals in everything, in faith and 
 infidelity, in love and hate, in submission and rebellion. 
 
 Finally, there is one more fundamental trait of the 
 Eussians, one which seems most vigorously to combat 
 the idea of originality : the inclination to imitation, the 
 power of echoing, of reflecting after the Russian spirit, 
 the capacity to accommodate themselves to the strange 
 and to adapt the strange to themselves. It is first and 
 foremost a capacity to understand and then a disposition 
 to appropriate. 
 
 It has been claimed that the Germans possess a simi- 
 lar quality of seizing upon everything foreign, and by 
 translation or penetrating comprehension making it their 
 own. They have this quality in the highest degree. 
 But it is of a different kind with them. Herder's highly 
 endowed, but ponderous and slow people understand 
 ponderously and slowly national intellects : they grasped 
 Greece, Calderon, and Shakespeare before any of the other 
 European nations ; but they are not able, on that account, 
 to become so thoroughly imbued with the genius of the 
 foreign race as to reproduce it and act in its spirit. The 
 French, who did not appreciate the Greeks, came far 
 nearer to them in their works than the Germans, who 
 did comprehend them. The Russians, above all others, 
 have the talent of grasping the manner of thought and 
 range of ideas of other races, of imitating them and of 
 dealing with them as their own intellectual property. 
 The cultivated Russian understands and always has 
 understood the living, the new, the newest in foreign 
 countries, and does not wait till it becomes cheap because 
 it is old, or has gained currency by the approbation of 
 the stranger's countrymen. The Russian catches the 
 new thought on the wing. Their culture makes a mod- 
 ern race, with the keenest scent for everything modern.
 
 24 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 It has been often the case in our own time that authors 
 who have met with obstacles or aversion in their own 
 country have found their first sanctuary in the Russian 
 newspapers or from the Russian public. Who knows if 
 in this respect Russia will not in the future play a role 
 similar to that of Holland during the Renaissance, when 
 it furnished a place of refuge to those authors who were 
 persecuted at home ? An omen of this is the hero-wor- 
 ship which exists in full bloom in Russia after having 
 been almost wholly lost in the rest of Europe. 
 
 This remarkable capacity for assimilation is also met 
 with, in matters of artistic handicraft, among the peas- 
 ants. The peasant readily takes to any kind of work. 
 He can imitate anything he sees. He knows ten trades. 
 If a traveller somewhere in the country loses a cap with 
 a peculiar kind of embroidery, ten years later the whole 
 region is reproducing it. Another traveller forgets in a 
 corner a piece of chased copper or enamelled silver, 
 and this waif gives rise to a new industry. Some of the 
 most celebrated producers of industrial art are self-made 
 men from the peasant class, men who have groped their 
 way to the position they now occupy. Maslianikof, 
 who as master potter has reached the post of superin- 
 tendent of the imperial porcelain-factory, was formerly a 
 peasant, and he has worked his way up, without any 
 training in the works, by his own individual exertions 
 and conjectures ; and Ovtchinnikof, the celebrated gold- 
 smith of Moscow, whose transparent enamel was so much 
 admired at the exhibition in Copenhagen, was also born 
 a peasant, and is indebted to nothing but his natural 
 talents. He has succeeded, among other things, in re- 
 producing the old Byzantine art of using cloisonne- 
 enamel to represent the human countenance, and in 
 getting on the track of one of the secrets of the Japanese
 
 FUNDAMENTAL TRAITS. 25 
 
 in the use of a fine red enamel with inlaid foliage of 
 silver, where the shadows of the leaves are brought out 
 by a device in the process of firing. 
 
 In this popular intelligence, exactly the opposite of 
 the English, the capacity for fructification, intellectual 
 suppleness, is the predominating talent. 
 
 It can easily be understood how a national character 
 of this kind should be developed in this land above 
 all others. We see before us an enormously large but 
 scantily populated country, very backward in education, 
 and which it is necessary at once to reclaim by new 
 settlements and to elevate by European culture, a land 
 with broad, unoccupied territory, as in the United States, 
 and at the same time governed in much the same manner 
 as Turkey. 
 
 It is a great winter-land, and the first effect of the cold 
 is to produce inertia. That is possibly the cause of the 
 national inclination to indolence, which has obtained its 
 typical expression in Gonchardfs novel "Obldmof," 
 famous both in and out of Kussia, and a monumental 
 picture of Russian sluggishness. Obldmof is a character 
 so slack, so tired, so indolent, so disinclined to activity, 
 that he loses his dignity, his self-respect, his sweetheart 
 and his fortune, from pure, insurmountable indiffer- 
 ence. 
 
 The want of sufficiently nutritious food makes the 
 blood thin, the requirements for protection against the 
 cold make the temperament nervous. Passivity becomes 
 a fundamental trait, which is sharply and clearly mani- 
 fested in the popular amusements. While the Spaniard 
 takes his pleasures in bull-fights, either as participant or 
 spectator ; while the Englishman boxes and rows, the 
 Frenchman fights, the Pole dances, the Russian finds no 
 happiness in any kind of sport. His delight is to hear
 
 26 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 a hand-organ or harmonica play, to swing and to ride on 
 the gravitating railway of which he is the inventor. 
 
 In every Russian traktlr, where the common or better 
 class of p^ple assemble to enjoy the national food and 
 to drink tea, there is found a great automatic organ, 
 sometimes reaching to the ceiling ; and the coming guest 
 orders the waltz to suit his taste, never tired of hearing 
 a favorite melody. The swing, with its rocking ease, is 
 an indispensable accompaniment of every Eussian festiv- 
 ity. But the gravitating railway, with its passive voyage 
 into the unknown, is the most characteristic amusement 
 for the Russian temperament. Without any exertion, 
 without moving a limb, the participant has the complete 
 sensation of having his full swing. 
 
 Passivity shows itself, in public and private life, in 
 the submission to the powers that be. But, at the same 
 time, sluggishness has its strength in passive resistance. 
 Absolutism not only cows, but it hardens. This stolidity 
 becomes the popular ideal. It is not the one who takes 
 the lead, the daring, the defiant, who is admired; 
 but the one who, without complaint, knows how to en- 
 dure, to suffer, and to die. This characteristic may be 
 seen more at large in Dostoyevski's "Recollections of 
 a Dead House in Siberia," in which, according to the 
 popular view, he who endures the lash and the knout 
 without asking for mercy is the object of veneration, 
 such as, among other nations, is bestowed on the hero or 
 conqueror for dealing blows. 
 
 This explains the fact that, although the Russians are 
 a brave people, and a remarkably steadfast people in 
 war, they are the most peaceful and unwarlike nation iu 
 the world. The Russian officers have little class feeling. 
 They never, like the Prussians, form a military caste, 
 distinct from the people. They have no morgtie, no
 
 INDIFFERENCE TO DEATH. 27 
 
 cruel haughtiness. While the German officer, even when 
 his education is the best, feels himself to be a sort of 
 priest, a military sacerdos, the Russian officer, even 
 when he is rude, is, according to his own conception, a 
 mortal like others. 
 
 In the next place, it seems as if the hard contest with 
 the harsh climate, which at the same time has made the 
 people hardy and inactive, has given them the apparently 
 contradictory qualities, good nature and gruffness. 
 
 The popular temper seems to be at once unfeeling and 
 kindly. There is a Russian indifference to their own 
 sufferings, and a Russian sympathy for the sufferings 
 of others, to which this indifference contributes. 
 
 The Russian peasant often shows himself indifferent 
 to death. He generally has no special fear of death, and 
 he is indifferent as to inflicting death on others, espe- 
 cially if it is a question of children or old people. Hor- 
 rible murders are thus sometimes perpetrated among the 
 peasants, without passion or malice. Compare, for ex- 
 ample, the child-murder in Tolstoi's instructive drama, 
 " The Power of Darkness." 
 
 Still more striking is the trait, which is here stated 
 from a verbal account, given by a Russian general. 
 
 The following incident took place in the time of the 
 Crimean War : A severely wounded soldier was dragging 
 himself along with difficulty, and in great pain, after his 
 battalion. His wound was so severe that there seemed 
 to be no hope of his recovery. His comrades then said 
 to him, with the deepest sympathy : " You are suffering 
 too much, you will soon die. Do you want us to end 
 your pain ? Shall we bury you ? " "I wish you 
 would," answered the unhappy soldier. So they set to 
 work and dug a grave. He laid himself down in it, and 
 the others buried him alive out of pity.
 
 28 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 When tlie general, who did not hear of it till it was 
 all over, afterwards said to the soldiers : " He must 
 have suffered terribly," they answered : " Oh, no ! 
 {Nitchevo /) we stamped the earth down hard with our 
 feet." 
 
 This mingling of gentleness and ferocity is remarkable. 
 It is typical of the Russian common people. What is 
 otherwise inexplicable becomes clear when we see the 
 utter darkness of the ignorance in which the soul of the 
 poor Russian peasant vegetates. 
 
 In all probability, also, the strife with the natural con- 
 ditions has developed the practical qualities with the 
 Great-Russian, the taste for that which is available 
 and useful in handiwork. In this aspect, it is sugges- 
 tive that the most celebrated and most typical Russian, 
 Peter the Great, when he wanted to reform his country, 
 felt himself drawn to the mechanical inventions above 
 eve'rything else. Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, in his charac- 
 teristics of that monarch, has pertinently made prominent 
 that, on his journeys, he did not visit the universities, but 
 the workshops and the dock-yards ; that he brought back 
 to Russia anatomy, surgery, the art of the apothecary, 
 mechanics, ship-building, engineering, as well as a whole 
 army of workmen and master mechanics, but that there 
 were no learned men or thinkers in his train. With his 
 own hands he essayed the whole range of manual labor : 
 entered the army as a drummer, served in the navy as a 
 pilot, knew how to build boats, forge iron, and engrave. 
 In the armory in the palace of the Kremlin, in Moscow, 
 there is shown a horseshoe which he hammered out on 
 the anvil, and a bowl which he modelled. The genial 
 muzhik shines out through this ruler as through so 
 many a gifted Russian nobleman. 
 
 As the severity of the climate is the cause of certain
 
 ORIGIN OF THE MIR. 29 
 
 national qualities, already spoken of, so it seems to be 
 the connecting link between the extraordinary uniformity 
 of nature and the melancholy which is so characteristic of 
 the Russian disposition. The Russian is melancholy, 
 yet not splenetic in solitude, like the Englishman, It is 
 a melancholy pervading the community. It is this which 
 easily glides into sectarian mysticism. 
 
 The union of the natural and historical conditions has 
 produced the Russian mir. Call to mind one or another 
 small country town, settled by Russian immigrants, in 
 the vicinity of one of the remote cities in the north, on 
 the Volga, only a century or two ago. Before it extend 
 the boundless steppes, from which hordes of wild Ta- 
 tars, the so-called Nogai, are constantly threatening; 
 the forests round about are full of wild beasts and of 
 subjugated Tatar tribes, the so-called Cheremissians, 
 who are constantly rising in rebellion. An impassable 
 swamp separates the country town from the castle of the 
 Tsar, which in time of danger is the only place of refuge 
 of the inhabitants. In winter, the swamp is frozen over ; 
 the cold reaches the neighborhood of 60 Fahr., and 
 the blasts from Siberia pile up mountains of snow, 
 which almost bury the whole town. Is it not evident 
 that in such circumstances there is no use for the saying, 
 " My house is my castle " ? Such an idea would be 
 madness. Here, it is not only unsuited to the sur- 
 roundings, but impossible, to live alone, each family and 
 each farm by itself. Each one daily needs the help of 
 his neighbors for protection against the Tatars, for de- 
 fence against the wild beasts, for the clearing of the 
 woodland, and for breaking up the soil. The first and 
 most important thing is to take care not to starve to 
 death, and to preserve their own lives and the lives of 
 those dearest to them. Bread can nowhere be bought,
 
 80 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 and to keep the road open to the castle requires the 
 united aid of all.^ 
 
 When every country town was composed, as a rule, of 
 only a few farms, it was of the greatest importance to 
 have as strong a league as possible between these towns. 
 Atid thus it came about that all the thoughts of the 
 peasant were concentrated on giving to this league, 
 the mil', his world, his true fatherland, as perfect an 
 internal structure as possible. Necessity taught him 
 to unite with his equals, and to manage his own affairs 
 in union with them. 
 
 Eussia, as is well known, has been a constantly grow- 
 ing empire since the time of Peter the Great. Since 
 then, it has annexed annually, on an average, a territory 
 as large as Denmark. While its western boundaries in 
 our time cannot be extended or are even insecure, for 
 in a great war neither the Baltic provinces nor Poland 
 could be depended on, its Asiatic boundary is elastic, 
 and is constantly moving towards the east and south. 
 The significant condition of things is here manifested, 
 that such an immense empire is continually growing 
 larger, and, impossible as it may seem, all the new races 
 are immediately assimilated : the Russian race still main- 
 tains its supremacy and moves on everywhere, however 
 far the boundaries are extended. 
 
 It seems as if the natural conditions of empire had 
 been a controlling force in this direction. The broad 
 endless plains have from an early time awakened a 
 migratory passion among the peasants. They never 
 emigrate to North America, like the peasants of other 
 countries ; they go to new places in the Russian Empire. 
 The Russian peasant has always been given to roving. 
 He has been accustomed to make a day's journey to 
 1 Tikhomirof : La Russic politique et sociale, p. 100.
 
 INCLINATION TO ROAM. 31 
 
 fairs, and to pass weeks and months in a pilgrimage to 
 Kief; nay, even to this day the Eussian peasants in 
 crowds make pilgrimages to Jerusalem. For this reason 
 they are exceedingly well fitted for colonizing a new 
 country. Although they are bound to Kussia, they do 
 not feel at all bound to their homesteads. Nature is, so 
 to speak, uniform, wherever they go. They can wander 
 for weeks together over the steppes without seeing any 
 special change. They can build new houses (izbas) for 
 themselves in a few days anywhere. For, from a fear 
 of fire, which in Russia, on account of the droughts and 
 the construction of the houses, is more frequent than in 
 other countries, the peasant never ornaments his izbci 
 The new house contains everything which was contained 
 in the old. He misses nothing in it. The new soil 
 which he is cultivating brings forth just as good a har- 
 vest as the old. And by his emigration he has satisfied 
 his desire for adventure, for new experiences, and for 
 seeing new faces. 
 
 There is this peculiarity about the steppes, that they 
 continually invite one to go on and on. Level as the 
 sea never is, it evokes limitless reveries, passion for 
 wandering about, thirst for novelty, and the inclination 
 to let every idea be pursued to its never-reached end. 
 
 The uniformity of the country gives to the Russian 
 the roaming propensity, the contrasts of the climate 
 make a certain pliability necessary in the face of the 
 great and sudden changes, which may be the basis of 
 the Russian flexibility in intellectual matters, and is 
 perhaps connected with the spasmodic in Russian man- 
 ners and mode of life. 
 
 It is the suppleness in the Russian's nature which 
 makes him so susceptible to foreign impressions. The 
 intellectual transition to the Russian talent for imitar
 
 32 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 tion, and the ability to appropriate everything which is 
 foreign, flows from this flexibility. Looking at it in this 
 connection (that is, from the standpoint of its cause) 
 this quality of comprehension and assimilation, it seems 
 to me, has its character of originality. Looking at it 
 abstractly, the lack of originality becomes the founda- 
 tion of a new originality in the culture of Europe. 
 
 It is quite certain that this Russia has always been 
 the pupil of the whole world. It is quite certain that 
 this Russian people is indebted to each and all the na- 
 tions of Europe. The foundations of its empire we're 
 laid by Scandinavian chiefs ; almost all the names of the 
 Varings are Norse, and so are the " Russian " names of 
 the Dnieper Falls preserved by Constantine Porphyrogen- 
 etes ; even the name Bus is in all probability a Norse word, 
 even if other explanations are not absolutely excluded.^ 
 Modern Russian civilization exhibits strong proofs of the 
 Byzantine and Tatar influences. The Russians as a na- 
 tion have been to school to the Poles, then to the Ger- 
 mans and Dutch, and then to the French. Finally, they 
 have received impulses from the whole of West-Europe, 
 and their belles-lettres have been influenced by the whole 
 of civilized Europe. All this cannot be denied, and it is 
 equally true that when we stand in St. Petersburg and 
 look at this Winter Palace, built from designs by the 
 Italian Rastrelli, and the beautiful equestrian statue, 
 the work of the Frenchman Falconet, or when, in Mos- 
 cow, you gaze upon the walls and towers of the Kremlin, 
 built by Lombardian and Venetian architects, or when, 
 finally, in front even of Vasili Blazhemnoi, the model 
 of all time-honored Byzantine Muscovite churches, we 
 
 1 See William Thomsen : " The Relations between Ancient Russia 
 and Scandinavia, and the Origin of the Russian State." Compare 
 Elise'e Beclus, cited before, tome v. 301.
 
 THE BROADLY CONSTITUTED NATURE. 33 
 
 learn that it also, with its domes, which are like bulbs 
 and pine-apples, dentated and peeled fruits and buds, with 
 its towers in all forms and hues, was built by Italian 
 artists of the Renaissance, then we unquestionably 
 wonder what the Russians themselves have done. But 
 it will also be noted that the Russians have compelled 
 the foreigner to work in their spirit or adopt and develop 
 the peculiar Russian style. 
 
 At the present time, the unlimited capacity of receiv- 
 ing that which is foreign means scarcely anything else 
 than the intensified ability to fructify. It is this which, 
 among other things, becomes ardor, enthusiasm, deifica- 
 tion of genius, hero-worship. 
 
 All springs from the broadly constituted nature (shird- 
 kaya natuva). The Russians have an expression, Cherno- 
 ziom the black earth, mould. They mean by it the 
 broad and deep belt of fertile soil, humus, which extends 
 from Podolia to Kazan and even across Ural into Sibe- 
 ria. The wonderful fertility of this soil is ascribed to 
 the slow decay of the grass of the steppes, which has 
 been going on for centuries. 
 
 The richest and broadest Russian natures remind us 
 of this belt of rich soil. Even the circumstance that the 
 Russian nature has been lying fallow for hundreds of 
 years increases its wealth. 
 
 You occasionally meet a man or woman who exactly 
 embodies this Russian soil a nature which is open, 
 rich, luxurious, receptive, warm without glow or heat, 
 but which gives the impression of inexhaustible exuber- 
 ance. 
 
 A foreigner who had delivered a course of lectures in 
 the Polytechnic Museum in Moscow, where the univer- 
 sity for women founded by Professor Guerrier and his 
 colleague was situated until it was recently closed,
 
 34 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 related the following little trait of Muscovite enthusiasm : 
 " At the time when the university for women was in exist- 
 ence, I went, one forenoon, into the hall where I had 
 lectured the evening before. I was going to have some 
 changes made in the arrangement of the chairs. I was 
 sitting alone in the hall, and waiting, when a door was 
 half opened and a young girl looked in and withdrew 
 smiling. A few moments later a hundred young girls 
 came quickly in through the door, all in black woollen 
 dresses, formed a circle around me, and began to clap 
 their hands. Then one of them, the daughter of a cele- 
 brated deceased poet, said a few words to me, and they 
 clapped again. I believe it is the pleasantest impression 
 of my journey." 
 
 Every one who knows how to see will discover similar 
 little traits of surprising warmth and simplicity, during a 
 trip in Kussia. It is, possibly, this receptiveness, this 
 prodigality of nature, this inexhaustible richness of the 
 material life, which makes the greatest attraction of 
 Russia, and which betokens its future more decided 
 originality. 
 
 Black land, fertile land, new land, grain-land, that 
 is its constitution. The broadly constituted, open, rich, 
 warm nature, that is Russia's. And when you are turn- 
 ing over these qualities : the unlimited extended, that 
 which fills the mind with melancholy and hope, the im- 
 penetrable, darkly mysterious, the womb of new realities 
 and new mysticism, all these which are Russia's, then 
 it strikes one that they suit the future almost as well, 
 and the question presses itself upon us whether, when 
 we are striving to penetrate the secrets of this land, we 
 are not gazing into the very future of Europe.
 
 IV. 
 
 As may be imagined, the foreigner has little chance to 
 see the real Russian people in motion in the open air. 
 All public life, meetings, conferences, unions, are forbid- 
 den nay, impossible. 
 
 Still the traveller who is in Russia at the right season 
 can get a distinct impression of the character of the masses. 
 
 In St. Petersburg, Easter is the gayest season for the 
 common people. In the largest open place, the Field of 
 Mars, where the soldiers are drilled at Easter, four or 
 five large theatres of unpainted wood are erected, side 
 by side, and in these theatres plays are acted, with short 
 intervals between, from morning till night. In the vicin- 
 ity of the buildings there was a large, permanent market, 
 and, especially on holidays, a great crush of spectators 
 and purchasers. The whole goes under the name bala- 
 gani. 
 
 The principal amusement of the poorer people, who 
 have not the means of paying the cheap admission fee to 
 the theatres, is this : On the open balcony which encir- 
 cles the theatre walks from side to side a youth, dressed 
 like an old man, with an enormous wig of long white 
 hair and a long white beard, who, sitting down, with 
 his legs hanging from the scaffolding, collects a crowd. 
 He is called Starik (the old man). What he says is the 
 most childish and harmless nonsense, " If I had plenty 
 of money I would eat this and that for breakfast, so and 
 so much for dinner," etc. [absurd quantities], and they 
 
 35
 
 36 IMPRESSIONS OF BUSSIA. 
 
 .laugh. Or, "You, down there, don't forget to take off 
 your boots when you go to bed at night," and more 
 nonsense of equal value. He speaks just as we do to 
 children of six or seven years, when we want to make 
 them laugh. 
 
 We go inside and see a real play. At the best theatre, 
 Stivorof is given, a national play m three acts. It is now 
 two o'clock in the afternoon, and the piece has already 
 been played four times since nine o'clock in the morn- 
 ing. It takes about an hour. The auditorium is as 
 simple as possible a shed; the seats are unplaned, 
 wooden benches, like those used at the Passion play in 
 the Tyrol. The audience is made up of very simple 
 people : servants, peasant men and women from the 
 vicinity; petty tradesmen and their wives, from the 
 suburbs. They wait in silence, Kussian silence, till 
 the curtain rises. 
 
 Suvdrof is the popular national hero of Kussia. A 
 short distance from the theatre stands a bad academical 
 statue of him, in ancient Roman costume, with bare legs, 
 which resembles almost anything, only not at all, exter- 
 nally, a careless Russian general. Thus the actor, hoarse 
 as he is, has more of the real Suvorof than the statue. 
 This great man was, in reality, a genuine Russian eccen- 
 tricity, undoubtedly the only genius among the generals 
 of Russia. Wliile Kutiizof, the loiterer, whom Tolstoi, 
 from philosophic-religious reasons, has glorified and 
 idealized in " War and Peace," was a nullity, who appro- 
 priated Barclay de Tolly's plan of the campaign, and for 
 whom circumstances conquered, Suvdrof was a real mili- 
 tary genius, irresistible even at the head of only a mere 
 handful of men. His crossing the Alps from Italy to 
 Switzerland was undertaken under greater difficulties 
 than either that of Hannibal or of Bonaparte.
 
 A POPULAR DRAMA. 37 
 
 Very significantly he is represented in the play ex- 
 clusively from national patriarchal aspects. He is glori- 
 fied in the Russian spirit on account of his fatherly 
 disposition, and not for his courage or his victories. 
 And suggestive enough in regard to the Russian taste 
 - in this piece about a war hero there is no burning 
 of powder, no shooting. No, the common man here sees 
 with surprise and pride Suvorof clad in an old, worn- 
 out uniform, like a common soldier, even carrying his 
 baggage in a bag on his back, living with the soldier, 
 and eating as he does the same food, a father to all. 
 
 There is a well known anecdote of Suvorof, that when 
 he awoke in the morning and he was generally the 
 first he used to crow like a cock to awaken his asso- 
 ciates. As General Cock-a-doodle-do he has been fa- 
 mous throughout the whole of Russia. In the play this 
 characteristic is abused to such a degree that the hero 
 shouts his Cock-a-doodle-do thirty times, or speaks of its 
 use on earlier occasions. And the screech is every time 
 followed by the exultation of the audience. So also 
 are the scenes in which he declares to the common 
 soldier that he is as good as a general when he does his 
 duty, and offers him his hand, a scene where he sends 
 away the decorated bearer of a flag of truce, who is 
 astonished at the sight of his simple barracks, scenes 
 where he comforts and assists his subordinates, jokes 
 with them, and exacts the same things from himself as 
 from them. When a play like this is compared with 
 the national plays of other countries, about the military 
 heroes of general reputation, it strikes one that invari- 
 ably, in the latter, dash is the quality which is illumi- 
 nated with Bengal lights, while in the former it is patri- 
 archal simplicity, the paternal relation of the leader of 
 the army to the soldier, that is emphasized.
 
 38 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 The same patriarchal trait appeared in another sight 
 of the Easter festival, in the open streets. Young girls 
 of the upper classes of the Imperial Girls' School were 
 driven in a long procession through the streets in the 
 imperial carriages. The pleasure for them was only 
 that of being allowed to take a drive in a stylish court 
 carriage, with coachman and footman in the imperial liv- 
 ery ; for there was nothing special to be seen. 
 
 The theory of this is that the Tsar stands in a sort of 
 higher paternal relation to all these children. When he 
 once a year visits one of these schools, to which only 
 the children of the nobility are admitted, it is a cus- 
 tom that, as a sign of his favor, he drops his pocket- 
 handkerchief, and the girls all scramble for it, and it is 
 torn in pieces, so that each one can get a fragment. He 
 takes the most brilliant girl to the table, and tastes of 
 the food of the institution. It is valued as the highest 
 distinction when he gives one of the girls his plate with 
 what is left upon it. It is the custom and usage for her 
 to swallow it with delight shown in all her features. 
 Great was the stupefaction of Alexander the Second 
 when a young girl, a Pole, from whose own mouth I 
 had the story, whom the Tsar had taken to the table, 
 as the most distinguished scholar of the institute, and to 
 whom he shoved what was left of roast meat and pota- 
 toes, nodded to a servant, and calmly gave him the 
 Tsar's plate to take away. 
 
 The Tsar has always stood in the position of their com- 
 mon father to the people of the lower ranks, although 
 the foundations of this feeling have of late been some- 
 what shaken. At the same time, as the present govern- 
 ment in Russia has placed itself upon a war footing 
 towards the advanced classes of the people by the very 
 act of putting the greatest impediments in the way of
 
 MUSIC OF THE PEOPLE. 39 
 
 the passion for learning and travel, so it has foolishly- 
 decided to forbid the holding the celebration of the 
 twenty-fifth anniversary of the abolition of serfdom. 
 The now emancipated serfs consequently think it proper 
 to infer that those who are in the highest places repent 
 of what was done. 
 
 In the cities, the Russian common people are found in 
 the genuine Russian tea-houses, where they have the 
 melodies ground out for them in the organs, and enjoy 
 the pleasure of having music at tea. There also the 
 workman or the peasant is generally to be seen on his 
 Friday, or when he has got a little too much in his head, 
 with his harmonica in his hand, that instrument which 
 demands so little skill and has superseded the balalaika 
 of earlier times. I shall never forget a slightly intoxi- 
 cated young workman in Smolensk, who was reeling 
 along happy in the middle of the street, working away 
 on his accordion while the inhabitants from all the street 
 doors accompanied his wanderings with looks and smiles. 
 Seeing him suggested the role the accordion plays in 
 Tolstoi's "Power of Darkness." We cannot help com- 
 paring mentally the gay tramp of young men through 
 the streets of Rome, keeping step to the melody of the 
 guitar, or the artistic four-part songs of the Germans. 
 Here is delight in music which is elementary and only 
 half developed. Gentl'eness and naivete in this popular 
 pleasure are united with rudeness and stupid melancholy. 
 
 In the vicinity of Moscow, on the first of May (Russian 
 style) there was an opportunity of seeing a celebrated 
 national festival, which annually takes place in Sakol- 
 niki Park. It is a wood of tall spruces, traversed by 
 many broad carriage-roads. From the grand avenue 
 radiate seven principal roads, which are mutually united 
 by cross-roads. There are also smaller roads and paths,
 
 40 IMPBESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 which lead to numerous villas in the Russian Swiss 
 style. 
 
 Even the promenade on the first of May, which was 
 meant as a sort of Corso, and for which it was necessary 
 to engage your carriage days before if you would have 
 a s\iitable conveyance, by a genuine Russian arrangement 
 lost its whole Corso character. All of these numerous 
 roads, for the whole distance from the city, were guarded 
 by Cossacks and gensdarmes on horseback, who were 
 stationed by the side of the road, about twenty yards 
 apart, so that there should be no riot, and for the sake of 
 good order it was decided at the last moment that the 
 lines of carriages should not cross each other in the 
 park, notwithstanding the fact that there was room 
 enough. Thus, instead of being able to enjoy the usually 
 varied scenes of a Corso, there was nothing to be seen 
 except the back of the driver, the tails of the horses, 
 and your lady's face, if you were fortunate enough to 
 have one with you. 
 
 In the park, on the great lawns, the common people 
 were collected in great swarms. But neither song nor 
 music was to be heard, nor a single shout or noise of 
 any kind. The people amused themselves in perfect 
 silence. Here were gravitating railways, which afford 
 a pleasure very much like that of the toboggan slide at 
 night : the combination of silence and furious speed 
 which answers for the enthusiastic phase of the national 
 character, and to the Russian favorite word, which is the 
 peculiar characteristic device of the passionate Russian 
 woman, Avos, "Fire away," the French vor/ue la yalh'e. 
 In the next place, the second, also characteristic popular 
 anuisement, which corresponds with the lymphatic tem- 
 perament of the nation, was supplied to the common 
 people in constantly used swings of all kinds. At the
 
 MUSEUMS AND MEMORIALS. 41 
 
 same time the humor with which we in Denmark amuse 
 ourselves in the parks on a spring day, was wanting. The 
 lines between the different classes of society, also, are 
 nowhere with us, outside of the metropolis, so sharply 
 drawn as here. 
 
 While in cities like London, Paris, and Berlin the 
 museums and other places of education are constantly 
 filled by the common people, seeking instruction suited 
 to their capacity, and for whom, even when they possess 
 only the most moderate abilities, the use of such places 
 has been made easy, nothing whatever corresponding to 
 it is to be found in Russia. The Hermitage in St. Peters- 
 burg, with its large and valuable collection of objects of 
 art, is commonly inaccessible and little visited. The 
 museums in Moscow are also rarely open, and have even 
 less of an instructive character. Not even the memorials 
 in the large cities have any educational qualities. They 
 glorify the Tsar and the generals or national heroes, and 
 are designed only to aid in the deification of the Tsar and 
 national self-esteem. In this respect they are behind 
 Berlin, where, since the establishment of the kingdom, 
 no small number of statues have been erected which 
 represent neither kings nor warriors. The re-action in 
 Russia even at the present moment is so great that even 
 the possession of a statuette of Falconet's Peter the 
 Great is taken as a sign of disloyalty rather than the 
 opposite : Peter was a man of the West, a European. 
 
 Besides the emperors and generals in bronze, only one 
 single statue is to be found in St. Petersburg. It is a 
 very unpretending and modest memorial of the fabulist 
 Krylof, in the imperial summer park, the playground for 
 children. It is placed just as that of Hans Christian 
 Andersen is in the Rosenburg Park, only the Russian 
 statue is better, and the various reliefs on the base, which
 
 42 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 represent the whole animal world crowded together, are 
 more amusing, though on the other hand, less artistic 
 than the Danish. In Moscow there is a large group of 
 the two liberators from the yoke of the Poles, the 
 butcher Minin and Prince Pozharsky, whose celebrity 
 dates from 1612, and to whom also a memorial is erected 
 in Novgorod. There is besides this a modern statue of 
 Pushkin, which is not remarkably good. Smolensk is the 
 birthplace of the musical composer Glinka, and there is 
 found a statue of him, a square-built little man, not par- 
 ticularly suitable for the plastic art. Nevertheless, they 
 had the original idea of putting slender cross-lines in the 
 iron railing which is around the memorial, to represent 
 the musical staff, and thus encircle the composer with 
 his best known melodies. 
 
 While other European states do something, even if not 
 all they might, for the instruction of the people, the 
 government here dislikes popular education, and puts in- 
 numerable obstacles in the way, nay, even does what it 
 can to oppose it. As has already been said, the cities do 
 not afford nearly as many opportunities for the instruc- 
 tion and cultivation of the common people as the cities 
 of other countries. As in the country the fight against 
 knowledge can be carried on with much greater emphasis, 
 a still more appalling ignorance is the result, in spite of 
 the excellent natural capacities of the people. 
 
 It may be said without exaggeration that there is now, 
 as in the time of the Tsar Nicholas, a constant exertion 
 on the part of the rulers to make real knowledge impos- 
 sible and to destroy all individual and independent will. 
 
 Three kinds of books are published in Russia : First, 
 the forbidden, that is, nearly all valuable literature, 
 except when with ineffable art and resignation it is 
 shaped so as exactly to suit the demands of the Russian
 
 OBSTACLES TO EDUCATION. 43 
 
 censor; second, the allowed innocent belles-lettres and 
 purely technical works, yet with this limitation that 
 in the German Conversations-lexicons of Myers and 
 Brockhaus all the articles about Eussia and all the biog- 
 raphies of Russians are blackened over on account of the 
 spirit in which they are written, though they necessarily 
 contain almost nothing but known facts. The anxiety 
 even extends to foreign lands. In a French book which 
 was sent to me from Russia last year, the censor had 
 cut out a leaf, on which, as the context showed, was 
 something not unfavorable, but not absolutely favorable, 
 to the deceased Tsaritsa. Third, the last category of 
 books consists of those recommended for use in educa- 
 tional establishments and schools for the common peo- 
 ple. An idea can easily be formed as to what these are. 
 
 The solicitude lest the popular standard of knowledge 
 should be raised is so great that obstacles are put in the 
 way of elementary instruction of the youngest chil- 
 dren. When, a few years since, a lady of high rank, of 
 whom nothing whatever of a revolutionary character 
 was known, the daughter of a well-known minister, who 
 under Alexander II. had carried through a legal reform, 
 a princess of great wealth, who could not possibly be 
 mistaken as having any wish to excite the peasants to 
 unlawful trespasses on foreign soil, wished to found an 
 orphan asylum in the country where she lived, she 
 sought permission for two years in vain and then re- 
 ceived a refusal. Leave must be asked in such cases, 
 and this kind of petition is not granted as a rule. 
 
 Thus it is no wonder that the condition of the peas- 
 ants in most respects makes an impression of profound 
 ignorance and of an Asiatic spirit of submission. 
 
 The lady of rank, on her estate, is greeted by every 
 peasant or workman, by every young or old woman of
 
 44 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 the lower classes, who would ask assistance of any kind, 
 by falling flat on the face at her feet. Not only every 
 one who would beg, but every man or woman who would 
 ask a favor, falls on the knee before her and touches the 
 forehead to the dirt of the road. No remonstrances can 
 make them give up this custom. Significantly enough, 
 the striking of the forehead (to the earth) is even at the 
 present time the name of petitions to the Tsar (chelo- 
 bitnaya). 
 
 The superstition is as great as the ignorance. 
 
 In turbulent times it not infrequently assumes a 
 formidable character. When, in the time of the Tsar 
 Nicholas, the cholera broke out in St. Petersburg, the 
 common people ascribed such a mysterious origin to the 
 epidemic that they attacked in a frenzy some boys who 
 had been seen pouring the cholera into the Neva, and in 
 one of the market-squares they rose in a great revolt 
 against the police, because they had not arrested two 
 persons who had brought cholera powder into a liouse 
 to spread the contagion. It was on this occasion that 
 Nicholas, who was just driving past in his sleigh, and 
 witnessed the tumult, quelled it at once by raising his 
 arm in anger, and calling in a loud tone : '' On your knees.'' 
 This is the scene which is portrayed in relief on the base 
 of the memorial to him. 
 
 The superstition of the people still continues. In a 
 manufacturing region in middle Russia, where I was 
 staying, the lightning struck several times, or some other 
 misfortune happened, on Trinity Sunday. To avert the 
 wrath of Heaven, this year, the workmen asked the monks 
 in a cloister some miles away to lend them the miracle- 
 working image of " the Blessed Virgin with three hands," 
 which in that district is regarded as endowed with holy, 
 supernatural power, and this picture was brought to the
 
 POPULAR SUPERSTITION. 45 
 
 country town, with great pomp, in a special railway car, 
 accompanied by the singing of the priests and the swing- 
 ing of censers. The people collected at the station in 
 such numbers that those who were on the front part of 
 the platform were compelled to take refuge in the rail- 
 way carriage, to escape being crushed. The picture was 
 brought into the church, where a Te Deum was sung. 
 The day passed without either storm or accident, and 
 there was not a workman who had a doubt as to the 
 supernatural cause thereof. 
 
 Another illustration of the spiritual point of view of 
 the peasants and priests is the following from the same 
 time. Not far from the little town Biezhitsa the huge 
 head of a mammoth was found. A young princess, whose 
 country-seat was in the vicinity, bought this head of the 
 peasants. Some one or other who wanted to play a trick 
 on the public or the clergy wrote to the local newspaper 
 of the department that the peasants, after the head was 
 dug up, had brought a priest, who had read the prayers 
 for the dead over it and then buried it again. Could 
 one believe it ! On this account the whole clergy of 
 that region were excited, and just because what had been 
 stated in the article was untrue and nothing had hap- 
 pened. What if it had been a human head, and they had 
 neglected to read the prayers for the dead ! The con- 
 sistory in St. Petersburg sent a mandate to the most 
 distinguished prelate, required an examination into what 
 had happened, and commanded that the clergy of the 
 district should take the measure of the head that had 
 been found (literally " inasmuch as it is of anthropo- 
 logical interest " ). The day after a whole procession of 
 priests arrived at the country place and held a great 
 council as to how they ought to act to show that this 
 was a mammoth and not an antediluvian man, as they
 
 46 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 expressed it, until the private tutor, a Panslavist natural- 
 ist, who was able to inspire confidence, fortified by his 
 diploma, measured the head and gave the formal decla- 
 ration that this head had never rested on the body of a 
 prehistoric Christian, but on a mammoth. The subject 
 is well fitted for a Russian farce, only it would never be 
 printed or acted. 
 
 The workmen in this district lived in barracks. One 
 hundred and fifty workmen slept in a narrow room. 
 Bunks were built up on the walls, so that they lay and 
 slept as in berths on board a ship, except that these 
 bunks or benches were so wide that the workmen lay 
 with their heads against the walls and their feet towards 
 the middle of the floor. There was no other furniture in 
 the room, nothing whatever, no pillows, no carpet, no 
 chair, no table. The furnishing was exactly like a dog- 
 kennel. This unfortunate condition depends on the fact 
 that there are everywhere found contractors who keep 
 hundreds of workmen in the vicinity of the large manu- 
 factories, to let them out as soon as there is need of them. 
 The food they get is a porridge which is scarcely cooked. 
 The rest is uneatable bread and undrinkable kvas with a 
 few pieces of cucumber in it. 
 
 A female physician gave the following account of a 
 visit to one of these barracks : A woman was expecting 
 her confinement in a little room where eight persons 
 were lying about her. When I was called, I was obliged 
 to shove them aside in order to deliver the woman. They 
 saw what was coming, shrugged their shoulders a little, 
 and went to sleep. 
 
 The poorest workmen in this manufactory, where 
 mandrels are made, earn 17 cents a day, the more skil- 
 ful 27 cents, and the best workmen 43 cents. 
 
 This is the human material which the young men and
 
 THE PEOPLE TO BE EDUCATED. 47 
 
 women, who strive to make the great populace share in 
 the advanced ideas of the age, must educate and rely 
 upon. It is plain that the education will take time, and 
 the aid they are now able to find is of no account. 
 
 Two short dialogues of Turgenief are given below, 
 which, on account of the censor, were omitted from the 
 " Poems in Prose," entitled " The workman and the 
 man with the white hands." 
 
 In the first, the workmen wonder at the stranger, and 
 reject his claim of being one of them, while they point 
 to their own working hands, which smell of filth and tar, 
 and to his delicate white hands : " What do they smell 
 of ? " " Smell, yourselves." " It is strange ! We 
 should say they smell of iron." "Yes, of iron. For 
 six whole years I have worn handcuffs on them." 
 " Why ? " " Because I thought of your happiness. I 
 wanted to make you poor fellows free, I rebelled against 
 your oppressors ; on that account I was put in prison." 
 " Prison ! " " Yes." " Why were you rebellious ? " 
 
 In the second dialogue, which occurred two years 
 later, the same workman speaks to another about the 
 young gentleman who once talked with them : " He is to 
 be hanged to-day ; the order has come." " Has he been 
 rebelling again ? " " Yes again." " Well, Dmitri, 
 don't you believe we could get a piece of the rope he is 
 hanged by? They say it brings good luck to the 
 house." " Yes. Piotr, let us try." 
 
 This, then, is the human material which the young men 
 and women who " go out among the people " try to edu- 
 cate and elevate. They do it with an untiring, heroic 
 zeal, which is beyond all praise and without parallel in 
 any land. They leave relatives and friends, expose them- 
 selves to cold and hunger, hatred and derision, scorn and 
 insult; they brave imprisonment, sickness and death,
 
 48 IMPBESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 with no other reward than that their own conscience 
 gives them. No honor of any kind awaits them ; their 
 work is hidden, their offering is unrecognized. Their 
 outer life is a series of struggles and sufferings. 
 
 They constitute the outwardly active element of the 
 Eussian intelligentia, a world by itself, with its own 
 moral qualities, precarious at times, but always of 
 more value than the mercantile compound, which in 
 other parts of Europe goes under the name of moral, a 
 pure young world, with the fiery faith of youth, and the 
 passive character of Russian heroism, constant even in 
 torture. The faith in their historic mission, and the con- 
 sciousness of their spiritual power, sustains them. 
 
 Tikhomirof, who has been one of the leading spirits 
 in revolutionary agitations, and who now lives an exile 
 in Paris, greatly deploring the attempts at assassination 
 which alone have made possible the re-action now pre- 
 vailing in Russia, is always fully trustworthy when he 
 portrays single traits, though not always when he gener- 
 alizes. He speaks of a young prisoner who was con- 
 stantly refractory and asking for unheard-of favors, such 
 as permission for the prisoners confined in cells to talk 
 and walk together. " It is necessary to protest," he con- 
 tinually repeated. " But what can you accomplish ? " 
 said his comrade. " You forget that you are under lock 
 and key. How are you going to find the power of compel- 
 ling the authorities ? " " The power ! How ? In my- 
 self, in you. . . . I am myself the i^xcer ! " " My dear 
 friend, that power the others can crush in a minute ! " 
 " Crush it ! let us see first ! let them try ! " * 
 
 Without doubt, in a classical sense the fundamental 
 trait of invincibility is the strength of the party of agi- 
 tation in Russia. 
 
 1 Tikhomirof ; La Kussie politique et sociak, p. 280.
 
 NIHILISTS. 49 
 
 A conception of the stoicism of Russian prisoners can 
 be gained by reading, in Dostoyevski's "Recollections 
 of a Dead House," the number of lashes they endure 
 without a complaint or a groan. In later times, there 
 have been repeated instances of the resolution with 
 which political prisoners have sought death to avoid dis- 
 closing their accomplices. One has killed himself by the 
 aid of petroleum, and another has cut his throat with a 
 fragment of glass, all access to weapons having been 
 denied them. 
 
 Out of Russia, an already extended list of revolutionary 
 spirits in this land has attracted the attention and kept 
 curiosity on the alert. We call them Nihilists, of which 
 the Russian pronunciation is neegilist, which, however, is 
 now obsolete. Confined to the terroristic group in Europe 
 the number of these persons is certainly very small. 
 Perhaps, as is thought in Russia, there are five hundred 
 in all, who busy themselves, even if reluctantly, with 
 thoughts of resorting to bombs and murderous weapons 
 to inspire terror. But it is not exactly this group that is 
 meant when we speak of that nihilistic force in society 
 which extends everywhere, into all circles, and finds sup- 
 port and strongholds at widely spread points. It is 
 indeed not very different from what elsewhere in Europe 
 is regarded as culture, advanced culture : the profound 
 scepticism in regard to our existing institutions in their 
 present form, what we call royal prerogative, church, 
 marriage, property. 
 
 The nigilists even do not call themselves by this old 
 name, to which currency was given by Turgenief, in 
 " Fathers and Sons." It dates from the time when Rus- 
 sia by the death of the Tsar Nicholas had been liberated 
 from the system of compulsion intensified to the highest 
 degree under an absolute monarchy, and when not only
 
 50 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 the liberation of the serfs was in the air, but thought, 
 which for a generation had been paralyzed, at once felt 
 itself free, unhampered, and unrestrained, and speech, 
 which so long had been the serf of the government, was 
 made free, or by a sort of inward necessity assumed free- 
 dom. At that time, everything which had the ring of a 
 human voice was pure criticism, negation, revolt against 
 all ancient authority. With the wrath and enthusiasm 
 of youth, their inexperience ran away with them. The 
 young men showed their democratic proclivities by not 
 combing their long locks, not washing their hands, and 
 going about fantastically dressed; the young women 
 asserted their independence by wearing their hair short, 
 a plain dress, and using the blunt speech of the peasant. 
 Hatred of the old traditions of society, its hypocrisy and 
 its old customs, went so far that everything which had 
 hitherto been held sacred was despised on account of 
 the respect it enjoyed. 
 
 Yet this period was of short duration. Niekrasof (in the 
 " Cabinet of Reading ") makes a son answer his father's 
 complaints in the following manner : " Nihilist is a stu- 
 pid word. But if you understand by it a man of liberal 
 ideas, who does not intend to live at the expense of others, 
 but works, seeks for the truth, is striving not to live a 
 useless life, looks every scoundrel straight in the eye, 
 nay, sometimes gives him a thrashing, in that sense I 
 do not see anything bad in it, and in that sense am I a 
 nihilist." 
 
 At the present time, the discontented youth, in their 
 own language, call themselves Nyelegalni, that is, 
 outlaws. To obtain a correct idea of them, you must, at 
 the outset, forget the old Bazarof (in "Fathers and 
 Sons "), who was at one time a true conception, but is 
 so no longer, as well as the young people in " Virgin
 
 DISCONTENTED YOUTH. 51 
 
 Soil," who are foreign creations, and were never a true 
 representation, but particularly Dostoyevski's " The Pos- 
 sessed," an ultra-reactionary caricature of a tendency in 
 which he participated in his youth, but to which by the 
 lapse of time he had taken an aversion. And it must be 
 remembered that no other sketches of this youth can be 
 found, in books which are published in Russia, than 
 such as are intended to pass the censor. And it would 
 be easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle 
 than for a sympathetic sketch of the outlaw elements of 
 society to go through the Russian censorship. 
 
 A plainly clad, very intelligent young girl came to 
 a country town in the department of Orel, who sup- 
 ported herself by the modest and unartistic employment 
 of painting portraits of the dead from photographs. 
 While very young, with some other young girls she had 
 gone among the people in the country to teach the peas- 
 ants to read and their wives to sew ; she wished for once 
 and all to live with them. The authorities arrested these 
 young girls, separated them, and sent them all by the ad- 
 ministrative process to different remote towns, despatch- 
 ing this one to a very small town in the department of 
 Vologda. There she made the acquaintance of Viera 
 Sassulitch, who was also exiled, and they lived there 
 together for several years. In this way she became in- 
 fected with revolutionary ideas. She was especially on 
 her guard with the families of rank and wealth in the 
 vicinity. But she met a lady to whom, after further 
 acquaintance had inspired her with confidence, she said : 
 " I see you are human ; I class you as one of us." 
 
 The most of these young girls are plain, rather unat- 
 tractive, hardly ever sensual. They are wholly entranced 
 by their ideas. Several ladies who were present as 
 spectators at the celebrated political trial which goes by
 
 52 imphessions of Russia. 
 
 the name of the Trial of 193 report that all the women 
 who were' implicated in it looked like pale nuns, thin, 
 very serious, care-worn; only one of them was at all 
 pretty. 
 
 The construction which obtains in the Eussian intelli- 
 gentia of the freedom which can be found in the inter- 
 course between men and women is directly the opposite 
 of the French and Polish. Kowhere is the relation 
 between the two sexes judged with more liberality, and 
 in the cases where nature has broken over the boundaries 
 of law with greater toleration. No one in the more cul- 
 tivated circles of Russia finds it strange if a man and a 
 woman seek one another's company by themselves. No 
 one on that account immediately believes that there is 
 any bond of love between them ; least of all, are the sexes 
 regarded here (as in France) as on every opportunity 
 attracted to each other from brutish impulses. The 
 Russian mother is generally not afraid to leave her 
 daughter alone with a young man. Perhaps the indiifer- 
 ence for qu^en dira-t-on is nowhere greater than in good 
 society here. 
 
 When Bourbaki's army, in 1870, was forced to cross the 
 boundaries into Switzerland, and the soldiers were obliged, 
 after forced marches, to pass the night in the open streets, 
 in a pouring rain, no house, where there were only women, 
 would open its doors to them. Only two young Russian 
 women, who were studying in Switzerland, gave up to 
 some soldiers the only room they had, and passed the 
 whole night in their company rather than let them sleep 
 in the street, entirely unconcerned what stupid and 
 cruel popular judgment would be given to this step. 
 Also nothing is more common than tlie bond of friend- 
 ship between young students of both sexes, where com- 
 mon interests, common ideals and plans for the future,
 
 FREE LOVE. 53 
 
 form that connecting link which in other countries is due 
 only to the attraction of love. Here the latter, natur- 
 ally, may be an element, but just as often it is wanting. 
 The intellectual curiosity and the youthful zeal for 
 reform are greater than elsewhere. 
 
 It must, however, be understood that these young wo- 
 men would like to live a full human life. Anatole Leroy- 
 Beaulieu, who, plainly, has obtained the far larger part 
 of the material for his valuable book about Kussia from 
 a small circle composed of those who were formerly 
 liberal but are now strongly conservative, has described 
 the nihilist women as living in a distinct kingdom of 
 disorganization, where " the free-love " principle has in- 
 troduced a "manner of life customary among monkeys," 
 and he speaks with a surprised recognition of the fact 
 that in these brutish circles there are, nevertheless, now 
 and then found vestals, who actually abstain from using 
 the freedom which they support in principle. 
 
 Tikhomirof (1886) cites against him that the free love, 
 only not interpreted as it is understood by the European 
 populace, has long ago been the recognized principle of 
 the whole Russian intelligentia a principle which is 
 not even discussed any more, just as we no longer dis- 
 cuss religious freedom or the freedom of the press. It 
 can be said that since Tchernuishevski wrote his prin- 
 cipal work, " What is to be done ? " (1863), nay, sub- 
 stantially, since Alexander Herzen wrote his romance, 
 " Who is to blame ? " (1847), this problem is regarded 
 as substantially (so far as morals are concerned) solved. 
 Love is not understood in Russia, as in other countries, 
 as mere sensualism. And there is found within the 
 Russian intelligentia a tioie worship of love, as of a 
 holy thing, lawful in itself. 
 
 The respect for the formal legal bond between man and
 
 54 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 woman is comparatively weak ; the view of the marriage 
 relation as a means of support is unpopular ; sympathy 
 in the case where repentance at leisure has followed the 
 marriage in haste often has a humorous coloring here. 
 It not infrequently happens that, when, for one cause or 
 another, a greater incongruity of temper than usual has 
 been found to exist, the husband and wife give each 
 other complete liberty and continue their common life 
 as good friends. The young girl has here, perhaps even 
 more frequently than elsewhere, her ideal of life; she 
 does not wish to live a useless life. It would not be 
 possible for her to surrender herself coldly and brutally 
 like the very unreal nihilist in the play, by a Danish 
 author, " The Lodger " which is otherwise very admirable. 
 She would also be ashamed of entering into a matrimonial 
 contract simply for profit. But she would not be ashamed 
 of forming a connection with a man without the consent 
 of her parents, and without any legal formalities, if she 
 were seriously in love with him. She is more indifferent 
 to the judgment of the world than are the women of 
 other countries. 
 
 This mental and moral attitude has no connection with 
 frivolity or thoughtlessness. It is a fact shown by sta- 
 tistics that two thousand women annually, of their own 
 accord, accompany the exiles to Siberia, frequently to 
 hard labor. In this way, a lady of high rank. Baroness 
 Rehbinder, some years ago went with the celebrated 
 physician Dr. Weimar, who was implicated in the trials 
 for the attempts at assassination. 
 
 It can generally be said of those who " go out among 
 the people " that, when the home life is oppressive or 
 obstructive, they seek emancipation from it at any cost. 
 It was in this view that what at the time was called shatn 
 marriage was invented, though it has nearly gone out of
 
 SHAM MARRIAGES. 55 
 
 use. The young girl found a comrade of the same views 
 of life as herself, who consented to marry hevpro forma, 
 but who neither had nor claimed any control over her, 
 and by whose aid she escaped from the surveillance of 
 her family. Sometimes it happens that the two (as in 
 Mrs. Gyllembourg's " Light Nights " ), after having be- 
 come better acquainted, actually marry ; in other cases 
 the man is said to have abused the rights formally con- 
 ferred upon him and a separation is the result. Generally 
 the newly married couple have separated from each 
 other immediately after the wedding, each being free 
 and independent. As is well known in "Virgin Soil," 
 Turgenief has described a kindred case, the relation 
 of brother and sister in the case of Nezhdanof and 
 Marianne, after he carried away the young girl. 
 
 However much these young women feel themselves 
 drawn towards the common people, it very seldom hap- 
 pens that they fall in love or marry out of their own 
 rank ; and, if it does happen, it usually brings its own 
 punishment. The following is an instance from my 
 own circle of acquaintance : A young girl loved a man of 
 her own, the higher classes. They were both exiled by 
 the administrative process, but were sent to the opposite 
 ends of Siberia and could never learn the least thing 
 about each other. In the country town where the young 
 girl was, after the lapse of a few years, she became 
 acquainted with a young workman exiled for the same 
 political reasons she was. She met him daily. He fell 
 passionately in love with her ; they had a child. Other 
 exiles, on the way home, came to the town. Among 
 them was a young man of the same class in society as 
 the young girl, who knew something about her lover. 
 She was never wearied of asking him questions, and sat 
 and talked with him through the whole night. At day-
 
 56 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA, 
 
 break, as she was sitting with the child at her breast, 
 the workman killed her in a fit of jealous frenzy. He 
 thought that in her face he read regret for having 
 stooped down to him. Two years after, the child was 
 brought to St. Petersburg, to her parents. 
 
 Very significant and instructive is an unprinted and 
 prohibited novel of Korolenko, the title of which is 
 " Strange," and the plot as follows : 
 
 A woman has been sent in exile to a distant province. 
 One of the gendarmes who has accompanied the young 
 lady is the narrator. She has not been able in advance 
 to find out where she is to be sent to, and is thus, by two 
 gendarmes, taken almost through the whole of Siberia. 
 One of the gendarmes, an uncultivated but fine fellow, 
 feels so deeply affected by her youth and charms that 
 he actually falls in love with her, and cannot obey his 
 orders. He tells her the name of the town which is 
 selected for her abode. " Good ! " she says ; " there are 
 several of ours there." Immediately on her arrival, she 
 goes to a young man, whose name she knoAvs, but whom 
 she has never seen, and takes lodgings in his house. 
 She falls ill, of a lung disease. 
 
 A month later the gendarme comes again through the 
 town, seeks her out, and finds the young man by her 
 bedside, and with astonishment hears them still using 
 the formal "you" to each other. It is impossible for 
 him to understand what kind of bond it is which unites 
 them ; it is clear that it is not love ; but the companion- 
 ship of ideas is foreign to his scope of comprehension. 
 He makes known to the young girl his attachment for 
 her, but she drives him away with the greatest abhor- 
 rence. She does not dislike him personally ; but solely 
 because he is a gendarme, from principle, from love for 
 the cause to which she has devoted her life ; he is for her
 
 EARNESTNESS OF THE REFORMERS. 57 
 
 not a human being, only an instrument in the hand of 
 an evil power. The poor gendarme cannot possibly 
 understand this any more than what has been stated 
 above. 
 
 An author, who has a European reputation, gave me 
 the following account of his connection with this circle : 
 "About ten years ago, while I was living in Berlin, I 
 frequently received letters from discontented Russians, 
 of both sexes, some of them asking me to write for them 
 some pamphlets, which they could translate and distrib- 
 ute among the peasants; and others, in relation to a 
 monograph I had written about a celebrated revolution- 
 ary individual, a book to which I am chiefly indebted 
 for my popularity in certain social circles in Russia. A 
 juvenile naivete shone through the style of some of the 
 letters; but the tone of warm juvenile enthusiasm, united 
 to an energy of style, which is uncommon even in men 
 of ability, in one letter, where the Christian name of 
 the writer was only indicated by an initial, awakened 
 great surprise in me. As I remarked, in my answer, that 
 it was not new to me to find enthusiasm and energy 
 among the young men in Russia, I received, to my amaze- 
 ment, the following reply : ' It is very possible that you 
 have been accustomed to find these qualities among our 
 young men ; but it does not apply to my case, for I have 
 for some years already been a grandmother.' An ex- 
 tended correspondence was the result of this letter. 
 But, after the lapse of some time, this, and other corre- 
 spondence of a similar nature, had to be suspended, on 
 account of the innumerable precautions my correspond- 
 ents were obliged to take. As several of my books had 
 at that time just been forbidden in Russia, they did not 
 dare to write my name on the envelopes. They changed 
 the name, so that I was obliged to inform the letter-
 
 58 IMPEESSIONS OF RUSSIA, 
 
 carriers of it. At the time of the attempts at assassina- 
 tion, all correspondence of this kind was suspended," 
 
 Not infrequently they are very young children who 
 embark upon the peculiarly Eussian plans for the im- 
 provement of the world. For, even if the old sometimes 
 possess a youthful enthusiasm, yet in Eussia, as else- 
 where, it is the rule that years and experience bring 
 both men and women to regard the existing state of 
 things as stronger than it is, and the prospect of being 
 able to overthrow it, as much less promising than it 
 appeared to them in their youth. The observation has 
 also long since been made that, in the numerous political 
 trials of the last twenty years, hardly any one has been 
 convicted who was over thirty years old; even those 
 who were twenty-five years old were uncommon, the 
 ages of the majority varying from seventeen to twenty- 
 three. 
 
 In the spring of 1887, a young girl of sixteen was 
 arrested in St. Petersburg, whose parents were well 
 known everywhere in good society. Out of regard to 
 the high standing of her father, she was set at liberty ; 
 but yet with such conditions that she now remains under 
 the surveillance of the police. A group of young stu- 
 dents had a weekly meeting in her mother's house, to 
 read Shakespeare aloud in Eussian, as it was said. The 
 fact of these six or seven students meeting together so 
 regularly aroused suspicion ; and the police sent a warn- 
 ing, received an explanation, and answered: "It would 
 be better to abandon these readings." 
 
 They apparently complied. Then the young students 
 were arrested. A manuscript translation of a little so- 
 cialistic tract, written by a man by the name of Thun, 
 was found in the rooms of one of them ; and a card of 
 invitation was found, in the same handwriting, signed
 
 GIRLS AS PROPAGANDISTS. 59 
 
 with the young girl's name. It was of no avail that she 
 denied all knowledge of the tract contained in the manu- 
 script. 
 
 She was very peculiar: homely, with beautiful eyes; 
 difficult to become acquainted with, for a little thing 
 would silence her. In the presence of a dashing woman 
 of the world or a beautiful coquette, she opened not her 
 mouth. She contended that it was impossible to say a 
 word in the presence of that kind of woman. She had 
 the whole severity of youth; forbearance was a virtue 
 she knew only by name. And she had youth's naive 
 faith in the efficacy of every kind of propaganda. Her 
 mother, a lady of thirty-five years of age, was high-spir- 
 ited and passionate, with all the luxurious vital powers 
 of the Russian blood. The whole emotional life of the 
 daughter had been absorbed by the intellectual; she 
 managed her mother as if the latter had been her own 
 grown-up child. 
 
 Still more rare than this type, there is among these 
 women the patient, light-hearted, on whom no oppo- 
 sition makes any impression. A letter from a young 
 married woman, who had been exiled to a town in 
 Siberia, but without being confined in prison, was some- 
 what to this effect: ''Dear Friends, I can imagine that 
 you are somewhat uneasy about me. But never in my 
 life have I been happier. It is quite pleasant to be sep- 
 arated for a while from my beloved husband, who was 
 beginning to tire me. But that is truly one of the most 
 unimportant things. I have been received here not as 
 a criminal, but as a queen. The whole town is made up 
 of exiles, descendants of exiles, friends of exiles. They 
 actually vie with each other in showing me kindness 
 nay, homage. Every other evening, I am at a ball, and 
 never off the floor. This place is a true ball-paradise," etc.
 
 60 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 More frequent than this arrogance is a humility, a 
 profound, boundless modesty, which is genuinely Slavic. 
 In a small house with a garden, in a remote quarter of 
 Moscow, lived an extremely finely endowed young girl, 
 who for many years had been severely ill ; and, as a re- 
 sult, from time to time, especially when excited, lost the 
 power of speech. She lived a purely intellectual life, 
 wholly absorbed in intellectual pursuits ; and, on account 
 of her poor health and weakness, was hardly a woman. 
 But a purer and stronger intellectual enthusiasm, and 
 more arduous exertions in that direction, are not often 
 seen. She translated a great deal from foreign lan- 
 guages, and also wrote, herself. There was a combination 
 of energy and the most profound humility, which struck 
 the stranger who conversed with her. Her father had 
 been a well known professor of mathematics. She and 
 her two sisters, bright and healthy girls, supported 
 themselves respectably, orphans as they were, without 
 aid. The worship of the gifted invalid by the two sis- 
 ters, especially by the younger, was very touching. 
 
 One evening, in a company, a distinguished foreigner, 
 who had spent some time in St. Petersburg, described 
 another young girl of the same turn of mind and of the 
 same plane of culture, only seventeen years old, and of 
 far bolder temperament. " I have," he continued, " met 
 her for a short time in society, but we were almost 
 immediately separated. I merely noticed that she had 
 beautiful, clear eyes, and cordial, but very decided man- 
 ners. The day before my departure, I received a long 
 letter from her, which seemed to me to be very interest- 
 ing, because it gave me the impression of being charac- 
 teristic of a whole family. She wrote, 
 
 " ' Permit me to express to you in writing what I had 
 not any opportunity to say otherwise. I do not speak
 
 A YOUNG GIBL'S LETTER. 61 
 
 in my own name alone, but in behalf of a large part of 
 the young people of Russia, with whom you have not 
 had time to become adequately acquainted. I should 
 have said it to you, day before yesterday, at the D s' ; 
 but could not in the few moments we talked together. 
 You regretted having known, comparatively, so few of the 
 young people. That is partly because the time of your 
 visit was very unfortunately chosen, so far as the Rus- 
 sian youth are concerned. It is just the time of exami- 
 nation in all of the public institutions of education. But, 
 entirely apart from that, the Russian youth could not 
 make themselves known to you. Life deprives us of its 
 highest good, freedom, and all the happiness which is 
 inseparable from it ; but do not believe us insensible to 
 that which alone gives meaning and value to human life. 
 Quite the contrary. If fate has sent us so few blessings, 
 we love those we do receive all the more dearly, and 
 prize them the more highly. We prize above every- 
 thing the science which emancipates. It is not allowed 
 to the Russian youth to express in writing what they 
 feel ; but it would pain me, as a patriot, if you should 
 get an unjust impression of them. You once called 
 Rudin the typical representative of the Russian weak- 
 ness of character. ' Weakness ! " I exclaimed to myself 
 when I heard it. Oh, no ! Do not forget that the Rus- 
 sian literature is only an incomplete reflex of the life 
 and character of the Russian people. Do not forget 
 that they would make us deaf and dumb, and that we 
 are still too few in number not to be compelled to be so. 
 But we are really not like Rudin. Rudin is intelligent, 
 and has a certain quality of intellectual perception, but 
 has no depth of soul ; he loves no one and no thing. He 
 is allured by the beauty of ideas; he is not drawn on 
 by true and earnest love for the human race. It is on
 
 62 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 this account that he is a failure in his relation to Natha- 
 lie, and especially in life, even if he does not succeed as 
 a hero. But, great God ! do not believe about us that 
 we are a failure in the wearisome battle of life, which 
 we are in, day in and day out. How unjust ! my strong 
 and living faith is that Russia will some day come forth 
 cured of its political disease, and disclose itself liberally 
 and manfully. I believe not only in the Russian people, 
 but I believe in our intelligent youth, in their recep- 
 tiveness of everything which is true and therefore 
 beautiful. It betrays itself in the profound respect for 
 the men who understand how to find out and unveil the 
 meaning of things, and to open for us wider horizons.' " 
 
 There is, perhaps, nothing in this letter indicative of 
 uncommon abilities, and the seventeen-year-old child is 
 visible behind it ; nevertheless, there is a personality in 
 it which may be typically Russian, and which it would 
 be impossible to find in a Scandinavian girl of that age, 
 and a will gleams out through the words, flashing like 
 a steel blade, a will which is full of promise. 
 
 One can form a vivid conception of this progressive 
 youth of both sexes, as they enter upon life, face to face 
 with the common people, whose elevation is the object of 
 their aspirations. 
 
 These young people represent the highest culture of 
 the age ; among the peasants there is an ignorance Avhich 
 renders it almost impossible to begin the communication 
 of information. An exiled mathematician, who had re- 
 turned from Siberia, a very practical young man, told me 
 that in the country town he was regarded as a man with 
 a supernatural insight, simply on account of his large 
 library ; and after he had taught some peasants there, in 
 the spring, how to graft fruit-trees, they came to him 
 the next day from the whole neighborhood with sick
 
 CREDULOUS COSSACKS. 63 
 
 children and sick cattle, and besought him to undertake 
 a general cure : " Make them well, little father ! make 
 them well ! " When he assured them that he had not the 
 power to do it, there was not one of them who would 
 believe him. They begged, cried, asked him what they 
 had done to him that he would not help them : " You 
 know very well you can, if you will ! " 
 
 In Benjamin Constant's old work on " Religion," it is 
 related that at the beginning of this century, when a 
 Russian general in full uniform rode out into a country 
 town in a part of Siberia but little frequented, he was 
 regarded by the natives as God himself, and that the 
 memory of his appearance got such a firm hold among 
 the people that when ten years later a Russian colonel 
 came to the same place he was greeted as the " Son of 
 God." 
 
 That would hardly be possible now. Still, the follow- 
 ing happened last year. A cultured Russian passed 
 through a town inhabited by Cossacks of Little Russia. 
 He was asked the question : " Will you be so good as 
 to tell us if you have been in the other world ? " He 
 was offended, since he supposed that the inhabitants 
 meant to indicate to him that they did not believe what 
 he had said. But the fact was that one of the inhabitants 
 of the town had returned from a pilgrimage and had told 
 them tliat he came from the other world, and those re- 
 cently deceased in the town had requested him to bring 
 greetings to their relatives. He had gone away again, 
 loaded with rustic presents, to the departed relatives of 
 the credulous Cossacks. Now they wanted to find out 
 from the Russian gentleman whether these gifts had 
 reached their proper destination. 
 
 In the presence of such ignorance and naivete mutual 
 understanding is difficult, most difficult, perhaps, be-
 
 64 IMPBESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 cause the peasant does not like to be treated as children 
 are by their teachers. As a matter of course, he does 
 not like to have morals preached to him. When an 
 attempt was lately made on an estate to give a new 
 drama of Tolstoi, aimed against intoxicating liquors, and 
 in which the devil personally appears as the maker and 
 distributer of spirits, the peasants expressed their dis- 
 gust at it. It was, they said, a tale for children. 
 
 But the same peasants would readily believe that, if 
 the harvest was poor this year, it was because the priests 
 were now on a fixed salary. Heretofore the latter said 
 the mass earnestly, to get a good harvest and rich tithe : 
 this year it was all the same to them ; therefore they 
 prayed negligently and without real heartiness. Drought 
 followed. And the same peasants explained the last Rus- 
 sian-Turkish war by saying that in the country of the 
 Turks there lies in the ground a huge beast, of great age, 
 and under the claw of his left hind-leg an immense treas- 
 ure of gold is buried, which the Tsar wanted to wrest 
 from the Turk. 
 
 It must not be forgotten that by the last returns sev- 
 enty-six out of one hundred of the soldiers qould neither 
 read nor write. 
 
 On the other hand, let us examine the moral idea which 
 underlies the whole struggle of the intelligent people of 
 Russia : The wish to be useful, to see those about them 
 haj^py in freedom. This idea crops out in many differ- 
 ent guises, now in the costume of the utilitarianism of 
 Bentham and Mill, now in the garb of Tchernuishevski's 
 phalanstery, now in Dostoyevski's strait-jacket, but it 
 is the basis of the philosophy of the enlightened reform- 
 ers of the fatherland and their friends of reform. 
 
 In speaking of the relations of the two sexes, atten- 
 tion has been called to the equality between the man
 
 PEASANT MARRIAGES. 65 
 
 and woman, and to the greatest possible sum of human 
 freedom as the right of both. On this point we can com- 
 pare the manner of thought and action prevailing among 
 the peasants. External considerations are almost wholly 
 excluded from the marriage question in this class. No- 
 where else in Europe does the heart play so small a role 
 in affairs of this kind. That early marriages do not indeed 
 of themselves bestow the happiness of love is shown 
 here ; for as a rule the age at which they marry is eigh- 
 teen for the men and sixteen for the women. A result 
 of the extreme youth of these marriages is that the " old 
 man/' the head of the family, is often a man less than 
 forty years old and who uses to the full extent his power 
 and the respect which must be shown to him. For a 
 long time past he has sent his sons into the fields and 
 been at home alone with the sons' wives. For centuries 
 he has gone about among all the young women in the 
 house, like a Turkish sultan, and none of them has dared 
 to defy him. A whole range of Russian national songs 
 treat of the cane of the father-in-law. The result is that 
 the Russian peasant never has treated woman as man's 
 equal helpmate. The proverbs run : " Love your wife as 
 your own soul and beat her like your fur ! " " If you 
 cannot thrash your wife, whom can you thrash ? " " It 
 is my wife my thing." Even in the seventeenth cen- 
 tury the father, on giving his daughter in marriage, bought 
 a new whip to give her the last domestic discipline coming 
 from him, and then gave it solemnly to the son-in-law, 
 with the direction to use it early and unsparingly. On 
 entering the bridal chamber, the ceremonial custom was 
 for the bridegroom to give his bride one or two lashes 
 over the shoulders, with the words : " Now forget your 
 father's will and suit yourself to mine." The national 
 song, nevertheless, directs him to take a " silken whip."
 
 66 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 What a stride it is from this to the conceptions of the 
 youngest generation about the right of women freely to 
 give themselves away and freely recede, and their ideas 
 of the common work of the sexes for the freedom and 
 happiness of the masses ! 
 
 And yet, if the distance is enormous between these 
 alert and sprightly young people and those for whom 
 and among whom they would labor, the contrast between 
 an intelligentia with its system of morals and the official 
 world of Russia, which holds in its hands the whole ad- 
 ministration and all the material means of the country, 
 is not less immense. 
 
 Here is an intelligent elite, for whom the rule of 
 ethics is not the official patent morality, nay, even not 
 the legal for the motto, "Nothing unlawful," is, for 
 many who belong to it, the stamp of the Philistine, 
 but for whom above all ethics stands that which they 
 call the divine S2)ark, this spark which Dostoyevski 
 traces out and finds even in criminals and the partially 
 insane, and for whom morality is what they call " the 
 unconscious condition/' that is, that in which the indi- 
 vidual does what is right without exertion, without self- 
 conquest, because it agrees with his nature. 
 
 Imagine an intelligentia with these rules of ethics, as 
 a spiritual guiding power in a state which is ruled and 
 governed as Russia, where the most ignorant bigotry, 
 in the darkest of the Christian creeds, is the law and 
 fashion, which from the court is diffused downwards, and 
 where a single man's will, even if he has none, is the 
 supreme controlling law. 
 
 These two underlying powers are drawing away from 
 each other on every side. What does it lead to ? Can 
 any mortal draught the parallelogram of these forces, the 
 resulting tendency and its course ?
 
 GOGOL'S APOSTROPHE. 67 
 
 We are reminded, in considering it, of the passage in 
 Gogol's "Dead Souls," where Tchitchikof's kihitka is 
 lost in the distance, driven with mad haste, 
 
 " And dost not thou, Eussia, drive away like a troika, 
 not to be overtaken ! The road smokes behind thee, the 
 bridges creak. Thou leavest all behind thee. The be- 
 holders, amazed, stop and say, 'Was it a flash of light- 
 ning ? what means this blood-curdling course ? what is 
 the secret power in these horses ? What kind of horses 
 are you ? have you whirlwinds in your withers ? have 
 you recognized tones from above, and do you now force 
 your iron limbs, without touching the earth with your 
 hoofs, to fly hence through the air, as if inspired by a 
 God? Russia, answer whither thou art driving?' There 
 comes no answer. We can hear the little bells on the 
 horses tinkling strangely ; there is a groaning in the air, 
 increasing like a storm ; and the E-ussian land continues 
 its wild flight, and the other nations and kingdoms of 
 the earth step timorously aside, without checking its 
 career."
 
 V. 
 
 In the spring of 1887, the fiftieth anniversary of the 
 poetic debut of the old poet Polonski was celebrated in 
 St. Petersburg. This festival offered an opportunity of 
 obtaining a glimpse of the official world, and of becoming 
 acquainted, at the same time, with many of the literary 
 and artistic celebrities of Russia. 
 
 Yakof Petrovitch Polonski (born 1820) is very highly 
 esteemed, and is exceedingly popular as a lyric poet. 
 He, Maikof, and Plestcheyef are the leading living lyric 
 poets of Russia of the older generation. The last (born 
 1825), like Dostoyevski, belonged to the "Petrashev- 
 skians," who were sentenced to death in 1849 ; but, by 
 commutation of his sentence, he was sent to the Ural 
 and put into the Orenburg battalion of the line. It was 
 not till 1857 that he was restored to his rights of inher- 
 itance and rank, and given permission to reside at the 
 capital of the country. Plestcheyef to this day belongs 
 to the liberal group in St. Petersburg. Polonski and 
 Maikof, on the contrary, have a close connection with 
 the government. This does not imply that they have at 
 any time participated in politics or cherished principles 
 hostile to freedom; but, since they are both men of 
 moderate means, and it is just as impossible in Russia as 
 in smaller countries to live as a lyric poet, even by the 
 aid of an occasional novel, the government endeavored 
 to improve their condition by giving each of them an 
 office in the censorship. This combination of lyric poet 
 
 68
 
 POLONSKI'S JUBILEE. 69 
 
 and literary censor, which is so tragi-comic in itself, is 
 decidedly a peculiarity of Russia. In any other country 
 it would be taken for granted that if any one needed 
 absolute freedom, it would be a lyric poet, and that if 
 any one was not adapted to curtail the liberty of others, 
 it would be he. 
 
 More or less weakness of character and poverty have 
 united to bring these poets to the point of receiving 
 gratefully the bounty of the government. 
 
 Since Polonski was censor as well as government 
 officer, it could be anticipated that the whole official 
 world would be present to assist at his jubilee. Since 
 he was to be honored as the representative of belles- 
 lettres, it was not less certain that the larger number of 
 the authors in St. Petersburg would be present. In fact, 
 it was only the extreme liberal party, of which the re- 
 views Vyestnik Yevropui and Sevyerni Vyestnik are the 
 rallying-points, that did not participate in the festival. 
 The only really liberal authors who were present sat, 
 humorously enough, as guests one even as an honored 
 guest between those who had forbidden the publica- 
 tion of their books and prevented the delivery of their 
 lectures. 
 
 On one side of Polonskii sat Vyshnegradski, then ad 
 interim, but since fully constituted, minister of finance, 
 a fine-looking, elderly man, with broad shoulders, but 
 with a countenance that did not inspire confidence ; and 
 who, prior to his assuming the office, had been somewhat 
 criticised. The unthinking mob, which in Russia, as 
 elsewhere, likes to throw mud at anything which shines, 
 had set the folloAving absurd report in circulation, and it 
 obtained general currency, though, naturally, no credit : 
 It is said that, on his appointment as minister, he was 
 taken to the Kazdn Church, before a celebrated image of
 
 70 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 a saint, adorned with jewels, and there was obliged to 
 take a solemn oath that the treasury of the state should 
 be sacred to him. He took the oath readily ; but by a 
 strange accident, it is added, after the ceremony, some 
 diamonds and rubies were missing from the vestments of 
 the saint. This story is of about the same kind as the 
 accounts which are found in the Kussian national songs, 
 of how the Cossack chief Platof pays a visit to the 
 Emperor Napoleon, in Paris, disguised as a merchant, 
 gives the Frenchman a description of himself, then leaps 
 upon his horse and rides away before the emperor's nose. 
 But the story is, nevertheless, indicative of the suspicion 
 which the continual robbery of the public funds by offi- 
 cials has created among the people, even towards men in 
 the highest places. A foreign author, who had described 
 the Russian situation in Poland as that, when eighty 
 thousand rubles were appropriated for a road, forty 
 thousand must go into the pockets of the officials, re- 
 peatedly heard in St. Petersburg the answer: "Lucky 
 fellows, those Poles, if it is really the case there ! Since 
 here, when eighty thousand rubles are appropriated for a 
 road, eighty thousand goes into the pockets of the offi- 
 cials." 
 
 Since the Zemstvos have leen deprived of jurisdiction 
 throughout the land, it would seem that stealing goes on, 
 regardless of consequences, in the most barefaced man- 
 ner. It appears to the common people as if every dis- 
 order on the part of the officials escaped punishment now 
 more than ever before. 
 
 By the side of Vyshnegradski sat a patron of litera- 
 ture, a general in uniform, with a face as red as a lob- 
 ster, and faience eyes, and expressed his good wishes for 
 lyric and novelistic literature of the right kind in and 
 out of Kussia.
 
 HOMAGE TO POLONSKI. 7l 
 
 Polonski, who was placed at the middle of the left 
 side of the table arranged in the form of a horse-shoe, 
 is a tall and dignified old gentleman, with a mild, intel- 
 lectual countenance, and a long, white beard. His hair, 
 smoothly combed back, has still preserved its dark color. 
 He came in with a cane in his hand, for he is slightly 
 lame ; in his face there was a somewhat uneasy expres- 
 sion of satisfaction at receiving homage. Later, the 
 expression of pleasure at the consideration which was 
 shown him broke through all his embarrassment. There 
 was something childlike in this character, stamped by 
 the circumstances under which it had been developed, and 
 which plainly had many excellent qualities. The friend- 
 ship with which Turgenief continually honored him, and 
 which does honor to his life, could not otherwise be ex- 
 plained. (The Vesnd collection, published by the Danish 
 author, Thor Lange, contains a series of genial letters 
 from Turgenief to Polonski.) 
 
 Opposite to him at the table sat his brother in Apollo 
 and in the censorship, Apollon Nikolayevitch Maikof, 
 with his speech under his arm, with his long, white hair 
 falling down as German professors sometimes wear it, a 
 sharply cut countenance with a pure, strong profile. He 
 rose first and moved a little away from the table and 
 began to read from his paper, not, as elsewhere is the 
 custom, with his face towards the company, but, as was 
 the case with the later speakers, turned towards the 
 honored guest, so that those who would hear what was 
 said must gather in a throng about him. When he came 
 to the statement of the fact that the Tsar, in honor of 
 the day, had doubled Polonski's salary as censor, there 
 was loud applause from all directions, and with surpris- 
 ing servility came shouts of " The hymn ! the hymn ! " 
 meaning the national song. They all rose to their feet
 
 72 IMPBMSSIONS OF RlfSStA. 
 
 and sang it. Then the telegrams were read. When 
 Katkof's came, it was received with demonstrations of 
 shouts and applause, and a silence, not less significant, 
 on the part of some. When these shouts of joy for a man 
 whose name is the symbol for every suppression and 
 reaction in the interests of their fatherland were heard, 
 it could be seen that in this hall there was assembled an 
 extract of everything in Russia that gags, paralyzes, and 
 brags, although on that account the presence of many 
 distinguished and finely cultured men is not to be denied. 
 Among those who shook their heads and looked in- 
 quiringly at their neighbors, when the mention of Kat- 
 kof's name awaked such a storm of applause, was the 
 celebrated Slavophile, Orestes Miller, the historian, a 
 small, grizzled man, with a round head, animated features, 
 and an expression of sense and enthusiasm, united Avith 
 the conservatism of a professor. He has long sought to 
 occupy a middle standpoint between the fanatical Slavo- 
 philes of the Aksakovian school, who see an original 
 production in all Russian works, and the scholars who 
 investigate in the European methods, like Stasof, who, 
 as, for instance, in the question about the subjects of the 
 Russian epic poems, has supported the view that all this 
 is the echo of tradition which a long time previous had 
 been spread among the most distant nations of antiquity. 
 Miller has written a valuable essay on the greatest na- 
 tional hero of the Kief-cycle, Ilia of Murom. In the 
 more modern literature, Dostoyevski is his ideal, and he 
 was just expounding to his neighbor at the table the 
 excellence of that author's " Karamazof Brothers," when 
 he was interrupted by the shouts for Katkof. He little 
 suspected that not a year after he should receive his 
 dismissal from his professorship at the University at St. 
 Petersburg because in two introductory lectures in sue-
 
 VSEVOLOB GARSHIN. 73 
 
 cession he had stamped the character and effect of the 
 Katkofskian re-action as injurious to Russia, oblivious 
 of the fact that the Tsar himself, in a letter to Katkof's 
 widow just after his death, had called him Russia's great- 
 est patriot. 
 
 Not far from him sat a younger man, whom love of 
 literature alone had brought into this circle, a wild and 
 free bird in defiance of anybody, Vsevolod Garshin. He 
 was strongly built, dark-haired, with the stamp of a self- 
 educated man. He rolled his eyes about in a strangely 
 watchful and wild manner : he had had repeated attacks 
 of insane melancholy, and fears were entertained for his 
 future condition. On no one did the reception given to 
 Katkdf make so profound an impression as on him. But 
 who could then imagine that, not many months later, the 
 almost universal servile attitude of the Russian press at 
 the death of Katkdf should be the occasion which caused 
 him permanently to lose control over his faculties. The 
 panegyrics over a man whose influence he regarded as 
 the root of all evil in the new era of the Russian Empire 
 gave a shock to his brain. At first he continually 
 groaned, " No, I should never have believed that our 
 press was despicable to that extent, to that extent low- 
 minded : What shall we do ? what shall we tlien do ? " 
 And again and again he broke out in sobs. After that 
 he sat for half a year in his black melancholy, and wept 
 continually. When he was asked the reason, he answered, 
 " I weep for Russia." In the hope of causing his recov- 
 ery, the directors of the railroads, by which he was em- 
 ployed, gave him a leave of absence and the means to 
 travel south ; but, the day before he was to set out, the 
 sick man put an end to his life by throwing himself over 
 the stairs from the upper story of the house in which he 
 lived with his young wife.
 
 74 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 After Maikof, a stranger to Polonski, who happened 
 to be present, spoke, by invitation, and, although there 
 was nothing in the speech, received hearty applause. It 
 was not difficult to make an impression of eloquence 
 here ; for it seems that, with the exception of the advo- 
 cates, no man in Eussia has the talent of speaking, nor 
 the courage to try. Not a single Russian arose who did 
 not have his speech on paper in his hands, and who did 
 not read it. Even among the advocates, there are not 
 many who have a reputation for eloquence ; perhaps the 
 best known are Alexander Passauvert, " the great advo- 
 cate," Prince Urussof, Koni, and Utin. Yet it is sig- 
 nificant that he who is most popular and makes the 
 most money is the Pole Spasovitch, author of the volume 
 which treats of Poland in Pypin's great work about 
 Slavic literature. It is certain, in any case, that even if 
 in Russian Poland, as here, all public and political life, 
 which are indeed the natural school of eloquence, are 
 wholly prohibited, yet the Poles have access to three 
 parliaments out of Russia ; and their natural gifts, from 
 ancient times, lead them in the direction of weighing 
 and selecting their words. One will seldom hear a more 
 eloquent man than the Pole Joseph Koscielski : he is a 
 member of the Prussian House of Lords and of the 
 German parliament. 
 
 Among the persons present at the festival for Polon- 
 ski, whose acquaintance a foreigner would be interested 
 to make, the old lyric poet Pleshcheyef must also be 
 mentioned, a man of large frame, with white hair and 
 beard, one of the few old men in Russia who have been 
 true to the convictions of their youth ; and Dostoyevski's 
 widow, a lady between forty and fifty years old, with 
 delicate, regular features, who must have appeared to 
 great advantage by the side of the irregular, plebeian,
 
 AIVASOVSKPS JUBILEE. 75 
 
 good-natured physiognomy of her husband. An uncom- 
 fortable husband he must have been, even less fitted for 
 matrimony than poets in general, and fully as irregular 
 as any one to whom it has never occurred to make his 
 books a series of arguments for mystical religion and 
 pious asceticism. 
 
 A short time after, there was a similar festival in 
 jubilee-delighting Eussia, with speeches and telegrams, 
 for the old marine painter Aivasovski, whom they would 
 thank for "having raised Eussian art to the height it 
 now occupies." Aivasovski is chiefly indebted for his 
 fame to the fact that there are very few Eussians who 
 have thoroughly known the ocean, and many who have 
 never even seen it. None of them were qualified to crit- 
 icise or sit in judgment on his marine views. When he 
 was young, he may have painted some fine pictures ; later, 
 he has only repeated himself, and manufactured his sea- 
 views as waffles are served, hot and fresh on the spot. 
 Always the same story ; always the same waves, seen 
 from right or left, in sun or moonlight. The exhibition 
 of his painting, some time ago, in Copenhagen, was a 
 fiasco not without good cause. 
 
 A day or two after the jubilee, he responded with a 
 dinner to one hundred and fifty persons ; consisting of 
 those who had been present at the festival in his honor, 
 the whole Academy, the Minister of Education, the 
 President of the Synod, the Tsar's tutor, Pobyedonostsef, 
 and others. Each guest received Aivasovski's portrait, 
 a large photograph, representing him sitting before a 
 canvas, and tnis canvas, one-fourth the size of an octavo 
 page, pasted to the photograph, was a painting by his 
 own hand. In this manner he distributed to his guests 
 one hundred and fifty small paintings: waves, ship- 
 wrecks, moonlight effects on the water, The rector of
 
 76 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 the university delivered a long, ineffably silly speech. 
 He said that the Black Sea might vanish (be dried up ?), 
 but the memory of it would never disappear ; for it was 
 immortalized by Aivasovski's paintings. The press, on 
 this occasion, was represented only by Suvdrin, the 
 editor of Novoye Vremya, as the other newspapers 
 had been unable to see in Aivasovski an artist of any 
 rank. 
 
 Taken as a whole, the official world in Russia is doubt- 
 less no worse than elsewhere. The spirit of deference, 
 timid snobbery, and arrogant leaders of society are its 
 characteristics everywhere. At the same time, perhaps 
 the lack of culture and the natural simplicity is even 
 greater, which is the more unfortunate because the 
 higher officials in Russia have a far greater uncon- 
 trolled range of power than in any other European 
 country. 
 
 Russia, as is well known, is divided into departments : 
 Russia proper, into fifty; Poland, into ten; and on the 
 frontier three, four, and five of them are placed under 
 one governor-general. In addition, the largest cities, 
 like St. Petersburg, Moscow, Kharkof, Odessa, have 
 governors-general, who possess a military dictatorship. 
 Until the abolition of serfdom, in 1861, the governor was 
 the absolute ruler in his department, a lesser Tsar, 
 over about a million and a half inhabitants. Since then, 
 the situation is changed only to the extent that he is sur- 
 rounded by a group of heterogeneous committees of con- 
 trol. But the whole of this apparatus is of extremely 
 slight practical importance, since nearly all of these 
 committees consist of officials under the governor, or of 
 other officials of low rank, the watchword of whose life 
 is and must be official servility. Instead of .sharing in 
 the governor's responsibility, these committees dimin-
 
 EXILE BY ADMINISTRATIVE PROCESS. 77 
 
 ish it, without limiting the full extent of his power 
 to any perceptible extent. It is only necessary to 
 read Saltykov's gory description of Eussian provin- 
 cial governors, in the work, "Our Pompadours," to 
 get an idea of the plane of intellectual development 
 which these men occupy, and of what can happen any 
 day. 
 
 To this must be added that, even since the legal 
 reforms of 1864, the governor has retained the privi- 
 lege of reporting to the Minister of the Interior the 
 persons whom, " in the interest of the public welfare," 
 he desires to send to the distant provinces of the empire 
 by the administrative process, a privilege not limited 
 to him, since "the third section of his Majesty's private 
 Department of Justice," the secret police, who have the 
 superintendence both of the officials and their subor- 
 dinates, have the right, without judgment or evidence, 
 to send to prison or to exile every one who is suspected 
 by them. How is it possible that such institutions 
 should not bring to the surface all that is evil and 
 cowardly, hidden away in human nature, in those who, 
 at the same time, represent the machinery of state and 
 are in a situation to place others under its wheels, and 
 must themselves continually take precautions not to 
 share the same fate ? 
 
 It is quite true that there are Russian officers of high 
 rank who, from their judgment and humanity or from 
 their strong sense of justice and plain manner of proceed- 
 ing, understand how to make themselves respected in the 
 most difficult circumstances, like the distinguished Gov- 
 ernor of Warsaw. On the other hand, there can scarcely 
 be any doubt that the Governor-General of Poland, Gen- 
 eral Gurko, possesses very few qualifications for his high 
 office, or that old Prince Dolgorukof, Governor-General pf
 
 78 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 Moscow, discharges his duties badly. He is an extremely 
 obliging and polite old gentleman to foreigners, and yet 
 he has a stamp of shallowness and vanity, which makes 
 a painful impression, when we remember that the weal 
 and woe of so many people depend on the state of his 
 emotions and judgment. That he has many friends 
 among the rich, conservative merchants of the city was 
 shown by the exhibition, in his ante-chamber, of compli- 
 mentary presents, a collection of costly gifts sent to 
 him on his jubilee, which filled one great case after 
 another. But when tact and magnanimous forbearance 
 are demanded, official zeal would evidently run away 
 with him. 
 
 An incident which happened in the autumn of 1887 
 plainly showed this. A concert was given at the univer- 
 sity, in which an orchestra of the students took part. In 
 the midst of a solemn pianissimo passage, the sound of 
 two blows on the ear were heard. It was a student who 
 gave them to Inspector Brysgalof, "an impertinent 
 camel," as one of the professors called him, a creature of 
 Katkdf, who had done all he could to deserve and excite 
 the hatred of the students. The blows were accompanied 
 by the words : " From all the students." There was a 
 general commotion ; the police, Cossacks, all were called 
 up to prevent the young men from escaping from the 
 university. It came to a general fight : many students 
 were struck and wounded in the courtyard, when they 
 resisted arrest. 
 
 The whole affair was taken as a good excuse for the 
 authorities still further tightening the reins by which 
 the young men at the university are driven. No less 
 than eighty-six students were exiled on this account by 
 Prince Dolgorukof. What remained after this kind 
 of a thorough purification were the extreme congerva-
 
 CONSERVATIVE STUDENTS. 79 
 
 tives, who are more autocratic than the government 
 itself, who lament from the bottom of their souls the 
 liberation of the serfs, and who, according to circum- 
 stances, mix a dose of Slavophilism or of Panslavism in 
 their way of looking at political life.
 
 VI. 
 
 In Eussia, as elsewhere, it is not the official world with 
 which the foreigner has the greatest desire to become 
 acquainted. He seeks in every large city, as soon as 
 possible, to be introduced to those whom the inhabitants 
 themselves regard as the elite. As I have elsewhere ex- 
 pressed it : There is always a great difference between 
 the tea which the Chinese drink and that which is sold 
 throughout the rest of the world. He who is fond of 
 tea will in every China seek for the tea drunk by the 
 natives. 
 
 The foreigner, who, after having become acquainted 
 with one Slavic race, comes to another, soon sees that, in 
 order to understand the new race thoroughly, he must 
 make use of the one already known as a standard of 
 comparison. For only thus can he find the resemblance, 
 without which all comparison is meaningless. By com- 
 parison with the qualities of the intellectual aristocracy 
 in Warsaw could the peculiarities of the most advanced 
 and interesting persons in St. Petersburg and Moscow be 
 grasped in their delicacy. The Russians have very few 
 qualities in common with the Scandinavians and the 
 Germans ; and even Avith the Finns, who live under the 
 same rule, and generally use the same language, there is 
 hardly any similarity. The attitude of Finland to Russia 
 has been admirably compared to that of an honest, quiet 
 tradesman, who has lived sensibly but monotonously and 
 a little tediously, to that of a rollicking student, at one 
 
 m
 
 RUSSIAN AND POLISH PECULIARITIES. 81 
 
 time dissolute and then famished, ready for all sorts of 
 follies, but also for business, and who is always thinking 
 more of the problem of human life than of the rent he 
 has to pay. The capital of Finland, in spite of the differ- 
 ences and battle of the languages and what revolves 
 about it, on a flying visit makes a predominating Scandi- 
 navian impression on a foreigner. It is certainly true 
 that a large, free, cosmopolitan culture is found among the 
 best educated Finns, partly owing to their close connec- 
 tion with a power of the world which it would be quite 
 impossible to find in a place of the same size in a Scan- 
 dinavian country. Nevertheless, frivolity, slander, and 
 Philistinism flourish here, as in other parts of the [North. 
 There is no real standpoint of comparison with Russia 
 to be found here. 
 
 With Poland it is entirely different. Nay, the simi- 
 larity at first sight is so striking that it overshadows the 
 dissimilarities, and conceals the Russian peculiarities. 
 But, in order to find it, we must begin by eliminating all 
 the traits which the Poles and Russians have in common. 
 
 In this way we naturally approach the qualifications 
 which have any precise character ; but they are not so 
 insignificant as they may seem. The common observer 
 sees no difference between the cultured classes of the 
 European nations. As he moves among these people, 
 who are everywhere dressed in the same manner, and 
 who everywhere observe the same rules of life and of 
 politeness, they seem to him the same ; and even if he 
 thinks he discovers some differences, they seem in reality 
 to be purely accidental. On the other hand, he who is 
 inclined to critical comparison, and is, therefore, accus- 
 tomed to discriminate between essential and unessential 
 qualities, typical and accidental traits, and is skilled in 
 tracing the ii^dividual propensities back to the national.
 
 82 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 and these again to the characteristics of the race, will 
 always be on the alert to avoid hasty generalizations : 
 he looks through the skin, hears through the word, and 
 constantly corrects one impression by the aid of another. 
 If, for instance, he would give his impressions of a great 
 capital, like Berlin or Warsaw, then perhaps for months 
 he would fasten his eyes on lists of hundreds and hun- 
 dreds of men and women whom he has known, while he 
 constantly points out their characteristics to himself, 
 compares these with each other and with characteristics 
 of a like number of individuals of other nations, to find 
 out the most fundamental traits and the common charac- 
 teristics. It is thus that the natural scientist finds by 
 comparison the constituent qualities of the different 
 kinds of animals. 
 
 At every single personality, every single trait, or every 
 group of traits, which is observed, we must ask ourselves, 
 " Could not this be found outside of Kussia ? " After 
 that which is common to the human race has been deter- 
 mined, then that which is common to the Slavic races, 
 then that which the aristocracy or peasants in all coun- 
 tries have in common, then comes the investigation into 
 that which is peculiarly national. 
 
 In the first conversations, the foreigner will scarcely 
 find the men who pass for the most clever in Russia 
 cleverer than those who are regarded as the most gifted 
 in Warsaw ; and he is more likely to find them less 
 gifted. 
 
 The essential trait, to which attention is called earli- 
 est, is, without doubt, that the chief interests of the 
 Russians are modern. The chief interests in Warsaw 
 are not of this kind, as there Poland a historic thing, 
 the dream about a past which shall be made into a 
 future absorbs the thoughts of the best people. In
 
 BUSSIA'S INTEBEST8 MODERN. 83 
 
 Russia hardly anything relating to the past is thought 
 about. Within the Russian intelligentla the historic 
 sense is even perceptibly weak. Peter the Great, even, 
 had done his part to saw it off, or rather to pluck it up 
 by the roots. That the men of revolutionary ideas of 
 Russia lack it, is in part because the modern founders 
 of the empire had shaped its tendency in the direction 
 of the present, the newest, as the only thing at hand. 
 To this extent he is to be regarded as the father of the 
 so-called nihilism; and the Slavophiles have thus one 
 more reason for regarding him Avith ill will and horror. 
 
 The Russian intelligence, moreover, is less unhappily 
 situated than the Polish, because it is not hemmed in by 
 any foreign and hostile nationality. It has connections 
 in the official circle nay, quite up in the family of the 
 Tsar ; and it is by no means so denationalized as it was 
 in the first ten years of the century. 
 
 Por example, the young Duke George Alexander (of 
 Mechlenburg), son of the Princess Imperial Katharina 
 Mikhailovna, grandson of the celebrated Princess Impe- 
 rial Helen, and permeated with traditions from the time 
 of his grandmother, is not infrequently met in liberal 
 circles. Although he is a prince of the imperial family, 
 he does not hesitate to make the first call on a foreigner 
 who does not belong to the nobility, if he thinks that 
 the acquaintance would be of any advantage to him. 
 He is a young man of large and sound culture, with 
 many interests. A more unconventional officer than he 
 would probably be sought for in vain in the Russian 
 army. His mother's palace in St. Petersburg, by its size, 
 reminds one of Christianborg in Copenhagen. She is 
 also the owner of large estates in different parts of 
 Russia, and the young prince impresses one as being 
 well acquainted with Russia. He is polished, quiet, and
 
 84 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 intelligent ; his manners present an attractive mingling 
 of German solidity and Russian intellectual freedom. 
 He is an interesting illustration of how the intellectual 
 currents which are blended in the highest circles of 
 Russia in our time result in a half cosmopolitan, half 
 national culture. 
 
 His grandfather, the Prince Imperial Mikhail, and his 
 elder brother, Nicholas, were taught by the well known 
 Swiss, Csesar La Harpe, the same person who had pre- 
 viously been the tutor of Alexander the First, and in 
 their schoolboy days received a thorough course in the 
 liberal culture of the eighteenth century. So completely 
 were the young imperial princes to be educated without 
 regard to the traditions of Christianity, that, as is shown 
 by the memoirs (edited by Durof) prepared for the Tsar- 
 itsa Katharina describing the methods of instruction 
 adopted by La Harpe, the following was taught to them 
 as to the founder of the Christian religion : " Jesus, 
 surnamed the Christ, a Jew, from whom the Christian 
 sect takes its name." ^ The young imperial princes, 
 however, were forced by the tediousness of their teacher 
 to let the philosophy he taught them go in at one ear 
 and out at the other, and to employ all their leisure 
 hours in the drill yard, where the beating of drums and 
 the parades were their chief delight. Mikhail, who had 
 some mathematical talent, became a zealous artillery 
 officer, and still was no more absorbed in the peculiarly 
 military problems than in the arts and sciences of 
 peace. He would have readily given utterance ^to his 
 older brother's memorable sentence, "I detest war: it 
 spoils the armies." ^ Reviews and parades, orders and 
 
 1 J^sus, surnomin^ le Christ, jidf, dont la secte des Chretiens tire le 
 nom. 
 
 * Je d^teste la guerre : elle gate les armies.
 
 HELENA PAVLOVNA. 85 
 
 epaulets, were eveiytliing to him in his youth. When 
 Nicholas became Tsar, from enthusiastic zeal for his 
 authority, he excluded his brother from every position 
 whatever, that was in the slightest degree influential ; 
 and, from indignation at this, the latter on all occasions 
 expressed himself in bitter derision about his surround- 
 ings, sneering at everything and everybody, with the 
 reckless irony of a discontented man. 
 
 It was to this man that in the last year of the life of 
 Alexander I. (1824) the young Princess of Wiirtemberg, 
 who on being received into the Greek Church took the 
 name Helena Pavlovna, was married. During the 
 twenty-five years of her married life, she was compelled 
 to suppress all her interests, and to be apparently 
 absorbed in court festivals, audiences, and tedious drives, 
 and dared to occupy herself with reading and music and 
 to enjoy the society of artists and scientists only during 
 the time which etiquette dealt out as sparingly as possible. 
 At the age of forty-five she was a widow, and seemingly 
 lived some years only for her daughter Katharina 
 Mikhailovna and the children whom the latter had from 
 her marriage with the somewhat bigoted re-actionist, 
 Duke George of Mecklenburg-Strelitz. At the death of 
 the Czar Nicholas, a new epoch was begun in her life, 
 and she opened her palace to everything intellectual to 
 be found in the different parties in St. Petersburg. The 
 leaders not only of the Slavophile, but of the liberal 
 party frequented her house. Conversation there was 
 spirited and without restraint. The mistress of the 
 house was still handsome, and she liked to see fine-look- 
 ing men about her. Her household contained only 
 handsome men, among them Abaza, afterwards Minister 
 of Finance. She also patronized the distinguished 
 vocalist, who afterwards became the wife of the latter,
 
 86 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 and noTV as Julia Feodorovna Abaza is one of the ladies 
 in waiting at her daughter's court. By the side of the 
 politicians of the different shades, artists and scien- 
 tists, Russian and foreign, had free access to her house. 
 For a long time it was the custom that distinguished 
 artists or scholars who came to St. Petersburg took up 
 their residence, by her invitation, in the beautiful pal- 
 ace at Mikhailof Square. She had lost the power of 
 continuous activity or work during that long period of 
 her life when her whole existence had been absorbed by 
 the etiquette of the old court. But interest in and love 
 of knowledge was fresh in her to the last. 
 
 It is her inheritance which Katharina Mikhailovna's 
 heir has entered upon with greater earnestness and 
 penetration in spite of his youth and in spite of his 
 oppressive situation under the existing Russian rule.^ 
 
 A point like this makes one feel sharply the distance 
 from Russian Poland, where no thread from the world of 
 intelligence reaches completely within the court circles. 
 
 At the present time there is no central salon in 
 St. Petersburg. Formerly, Countess Aleksei Tolstoi 
 formed such a centre. The widow of the celebrated 
 poet, one of the most cultivated women in Russia, is 
 now an elderly woman and no longer an attraction to 
 society. Among the advanced Russians it is the style 
 nowadays to answer questions relating to that subject 
 with : " A salon ! a circle ! an intellectual aristocracy ! 
 Really, what do you expect ? There is nothing of the 
 kind here. The house where you live is an oasis. All 
 around it is a desert." And if you ask for their great 
 men, where they are to be found and seen, the answer 
 readily slips out : " I don't know them ; I have never 
 
 1 Comp. (Julius Eckhardt): Aus der Petersburger Gesellscha/t, 
 5th ed., p. 30 and following.
 
 SELF-DEPRECIATION. 87 
 
 heard of them. We are perhaps in advance of the Ger- 
 mans in this one thing, that we do not have great men 
 like them. We lack a Felix Dahn, a Gustav Freytag, 
 and Julius Wolff, and so on. We do not have the solid 
 and learned, earnest men, who on the other side of the 
 frontier write novels in four volumes, and historical 
 works in fifteen. There is an utter want of that kind 
 of genius among us. We have not even the Prussian 
 Feldwebel with clinched fists, in whom our neighbors 
 see the new Pericles. He is deeply indebted to us. The 
 stupidity of our statesmen is his genius. To that extent 
 you can find his genius here." 
 
 This trait of depreciating and speaking ironically 
 about themselves is of very frequent occurrence among 
 the progressive Russians, more frequently than among 
 the Poles of the present time, and united with an irony 
 pointed at foreign self-conceit, which it is difficult to 
 find elsewhere. 
 
 Just as the Russians, as a rule, do not extol the ge- 
 niality or the industry of their countrymen, so also the 
 more refined and more sceptical among them glorify just 
 as little their intellectual powers or their trustworthiness. 
 " Look out for a Russian," you will hear in St. Peters- 
 burg : " he has more imagination than intellect, and more 
 intellect than moral sense." This is hardly true about 
 the common people of Great Russia, whose quick appre- 
 hension, constancy in work, and perseverance in adversity, 
 are crowned by the most meritorious virtue, a great 
 gentleness, and who, however credulous they may 
 be, and however easily on that account they may be 
 frightened for the moment, still have an equipoise in 
 their nature, a consistency in their method of thought, 
 and a quiet courage, which makes them composed and 
 steady in times of danger.
 
 88 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 Among the cultivated Russians, on the contrary, the 
 foreigner will often enough meet with instability and 
 capriciousness, of which the young men of Turgenief 
 afford so many examples. Little traits which illustrate 
 it will be at his service by the scores : 
 
 A young Russian sees a young Englishwoman on a 
 public promenade in Heidelberg. He does not rest until 
 he has won her, and she gives him her hand. They 
 come to Russia. He has little property and does not 
 care to work to any extent. He has hardly passed the 
 honeymoon before he declares that there is no conge- 
 niality, no affinity to be found between him and his wife. 
 They then live in different cities : he amuses himself as 
 well as he can in St. Petersburg ; she remains in Schiis- 
 selburg, educates her daughter, in the English style, to 
 independence, lives constantly in recollection of her 
 husband. He amuses himself, travels, as a choice lies 
 in a boat on the Black Sea and dreams. He is now 
 forty years old and has not yet found his career. He 
 has for a long time been a farmer, but wishes to change 
 his occupation and become an advocate. 
 
 Is not that Russian ? asks the foreigner. It is human, 
 and common to the Slavs. A Pole has certainly not 
 very infrequently done about the same. A Frenchman 
 might, I dare say, become tired of an Englishwoman, 
 but would hardly enter upon a new career at forty. A 
 German would apply for a divorce, remain at his trade, 
 and immediately marry again. It is Slavic, it is true, 
 but hardly peculiarly Russian, 
 
 "Tell me your family drama," says the foreigner to 
 his Russian acquaintances. They tell a story like this : 
 There were two brothers L., of the aristocracy, one 
 married but childless. His wife becomes enceinte, and 
 informs her husband that his brother is the father of the
 
 SOCIETY MORALS. 89 
 
 child. A duel between the two brothers follows, in 
 which blood is spilt, but no one killed. The wife leaves 
 her husband, who is living and has lived with a ballet- 
 dancer, marries the brother, and by him has a large 
 number of children. The fathers and mothers in law are 
 delighted. They immediately received the newly mar- 
 ried pair with open arms, and society approves of what 
 has been done. Is this Russian, or not ? 
 
 That which is specially Russian must be the content- 
 ment and tolerance of the fathers and mothers in law. 
 
 Professor T. of the University became infatuated with 
 a lady who was married to one of his colleagues. He 
 moved into the same apartments with Mrs. M. They 
 had both their names on the door, each received in their 
 rooms, and were invited everywhere together. 
 
 This is more characteristic. In the capitals of other 
 countries marriage would have been essential. 
 
 Baroness L. was first married to a young, fine-looking 
 man, who held a high official position, left him to marry 
 his superior officer, Avho was thirty years older than her- 
 self. Since this marriage she for some years travelled 
 about with a young Austrian count of a celebrated 
 family, then came back to Russia, while her husband by 
 his official situation is tied in Madrid. In St. Peters- 
 burg she has a young artist living in her house, sees a 
 young poet every day, shows a lively sympathy for sev- 
 eral other men, and is not the less, after some hesitation, 
 on the part of society, received everywhere, being still 
 young and remarkably pretty. She drives to a ball 
 at the house of the minister of Foreign Affairs, and sits 
 there dressed as a gypsy queen, with a gold ring on her 
 forehead, takes an active part in the social life of the 
 highest circles, and makes eyes to the young gentlemen. 
 The next day she sits clothed in a simple woollen dress,
 
 90 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 without ornaments, knitting a stocking in a garret with 
 a poor gray-haired lady, who knows the addresses of all 
 the exiled, and takes care of money sent to them. She 
 writes a novel for a prominent French periodical, about 
 interesting countesses from Russian hi(/h life, who fall 
 and rise again, and she writes pamphlets at one kopek 
 for the collection of popular writings in Moscow. She 
 stands on almost confidential footing with several young 
 men of the radical wing of the liberal party ; but on still 
 more confidential footing with the prefect of police of a 
 great city, through whom she can and does obtain 
 pardons in large numbers. 
 
 This combination ought not to exist outside of Eussia. 
 
 Nicholas Y., a very well educated young man, had 
 revolutionary tendencies in the sixties. A young girl, 
 very handsome and enthusiastic, fled out of the country 
 with him. She was then a Nihilist, had taken part in 
 commotions of the students, accompanied him from 
 place to place " civilly married " to him, as she called 
 it, which means in Russia not married at all. They went 
 to London. When they returned, in 1878, both were 
 changed. He, a capitalist, re-actionist, working to get 
 exorbitant railroad grants in Bulgaria. She, exclusive, 
 formal, an Anglomaniac, correct and strikingly dressed, 
 with several diamond ornaments on a dress of black 
 velvet. It would not have been believed that they had 
 . ever led a life of independent and rebellious ideas and 
 emotions. On his death some years after, it is said that 
 she found among his papers several which placed his 
 character in a light of which she had never dreamed, 
 and which was unfavorable to her. Then she had 
 another transformation, sought the most extreme libei'al 
 circles, and has now wholly devoted herself to the litera- 
 ture and politics of the progressives, declares that she is
 
 RUS8TAN INCONSTANCY. 91 
 
 living her youth over again, because she believes that in 
 the present times she finds once more the vigorous 
 impulses from the sixties. 
 
 This inconstancy, which emanates from the very 
 receptive nature of the cultivated Russian, is less sur- 
 prising than elsewhere, and is accepted by the customs 
 of the country. 
 
 This class, moreover, in the higher stratum of society 
 also not infrequently manifests a certain cynicism in the 
 presence of brides by the " civil " rules to be found else- 
 where only among Bohemians. 
 
 Critic F. reads aloud in company an article about M.'s 
 poems. M., who enjoys a certain prestige as a lyric poet, 
 is a small, robust, thick-set man, about thirty years old, 
 with a dark Jewish-Mongolian countenance, a kindly, 
 attractive smile, and rather embarrassed demeanor. His 
 poems are ponderous, rich in sentences, and belong to a 
 kind of lyric usually characterized as deep. The critic 
 positively overwhelmed the absent poet with his praise. 
 In bombastic, incoherent prose, he extolled the wonder- 
 ful beauties, which were not to be found in reading the 
 poems through the first time. The comic aspect of the 
 situation was that Mrs. M., who was divorced the pre- 
 vious year, is present, listens to the panegyrics upon her 
 ex-husband, and by the side of him she now prefers 
 expressed to the author of the article her objections to 
 his view of the subject. 
 
 One must go to the South German circles of actors and 
 authors to find anything like this. That which bears 
 the special Russian stamp on it is perhaps that no one in 
 the company seems to find anything out of the way in 
 it. It is a peculiarity of Russia that, when a marriage 
 tie is dissolved, it is generally the wife who desires to 
 enter upon a new union, and very often the husband, in
 
 92 IMPRESSIONS OF EUSSIA. 
 
 order to make this possible for her, assumes the blame, 
 so that a divorce may be decreed, although he thereby 
 makes it impossible to be married again himself. The 
 following is a case which happened last year : an esti- 
 mable and finely educated advocate, who was married to 
 a young princess, received the confession from her that 
 she was in love with an officer of the guard. He 
 declared himself to be the guilty party, and she, by 
 reason of this accommodation, not very easy for him, 
 married her lover without impediment. 
 
 These glimpses of fundamental traits from the St. 
 Petersburg family dramas shape themselves into a typ- 
 ical picture. But the peculiarities are brought into the 
 clearest light Avlien we compare prominent Russian 
 individuals of the higher circles with prominent Poles 
 of the same class. 
 
 The typical Polish nobleman of our time is a grand 
 gentleman whose practical interests are agricultural, 
 whose diversions are amusements and the theatre, 
 whose intellectual interests are concentrated in the 
 advancement of the cause of the Catholic Church 
 and thereby of the Polish aristocracy. To him the 
 Church is the precious pledge of the nationality, and in 
 his mind the aristocracy stands as the indispensable 
 leader of the nation. He publishes, at his own expense, 
 some old national work, he subsidizes the national thea- 
 tre in Posen or the Polish press in Warsaw, enters into 
 alliance with Rome and with the Jesuits, that is, if he 
 is a zealous Conservative and a zealous Pole. Otherwise, 
 he only thinks of amusing himself, lives for the ballet, 
 never misses a horse race, marries the daughter of some 
 rich Jewish banker to gild his tarnished coat-of-arms, 
 and then continues the life of his youth with greater 
 dignity and fewer creditors. He never does any real
 
 A TYPICAL BUSSIAN. 93 
 
 work. The old aristocratic disdain and aversion for 
 labor exist to this day unchanged in Poland. A young 
 Polish nobleman who works is cited everywhere as a 
 phoenix. 
 
 It is quite different in Russia. In the aristocracy 
 here, for the most part, the broad-shouldered, persistent 
 muzhik shines out. 
 
 Here is a type : He is of a princely family ; that is to 
 say, he belongs to one of the only half a hundred Rus- 
 sian families who are of real princely blood, because 
 they are descended from the old rulers of the country. 
 He has inherited hardly any property. Without any 
 trace of the Ranudo-like ^ disinclination to work, which 
 is the characteristic of the Polish nobleman, he studies 
 engineering first in Russia, then in Germany; on 
 his return goes to work with an axe in his hand, 
 builds bridges, and lays out railroads, at first in the 
 employment of others, and afterwards on his own 
 account. Not that he loves work on its own account. 
 As a practical Russian, he means to become rich, very 
 rich. He becomes a manufacturer, gives up his manu- 
 factory to become a financier ; as a speculator on the 
 exchange develops a sagacity and prudence which are 
 not surpassed by old bankers ; has the keenest scent for 
 money -making, and at forty years of age is a millionnaire. 
 He is a practical and coarse-grained nature, a mathemat- 
 ical head, a calculator of probabilities, who has never 
 known any kind of enthusiasm, and has never had a 
 glimpse of artistic taste. If he travels to Italy, it is 
 not to enjoy nature, or see works of art: he is to be 
 found dallying with roulette at Monaco. 
 
 He is practical but not narrow-minded, and not de- 
 
 1 Don Ranudo (read backwards dii Nar " Oh, thou fool ! ") is the 
 principal character in Holberg's comedy of that title.
 
 94 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 praved. He is not like the Polish landed proprietors, 
 who" in Galicia (until in more recent times it was pro- 
 hibited) tortured their Little-Russian peasants, and pre- 
 vented their going to church, by locking the doors of the 
 Greek church to them, and giving the keys to the Jews, 
 so that the peasants must buy them back in order to 
 worship the Lord on their festivals ; he has himself no 
 kind of religion, and he is willing that all men should 
 have theirs. Nor is he like the Polish landed proprietor 
 in Galicia of the present day, who lives by the manu- 
 facture of spirits, and by forcing as much of it as possi- 
 ble into his peasants. His heart is without any sensi- 
 tiveness ; he is as harsh as he is obstinate ; but he does 
 no man any harm. In his youth he has been a humani- 
 tarian not from emotion, but from force of a process 
 of reasoning in which the right is the logical justice ; 
 now he is so no longer to that extent, as he no longer 
 believes in the utility of the efforts of single individuals 
 in respect to the great sum of social misery, and as he 
 is entirely incapable of the enthusiasm which leads to 
 action even if the profit of the action is infinitesimally 
 small. Very sharp-sighted as he is, he feels an almost 
 personal hostility to all metaphysics ; he has written a 
 book, a sort of philosophy of mathematics, in which he 
 advocates the necessity of introducing object lessons 
 into the department of mathematics, and combats the 
 use of the words line, point, etc., as unreal abstractions. 
 
 Like so many persons with mathematical minds, he is 
 skilled in music, well informed in all musical technics, 
 conversant with modern music, and eager to hear a great 
 deal of good music well performed. 
 
 As coarse as a peasant, unrefined but not frivolous, 
 narrow but not shallow, reckless and loving money but 
 upright and sometimes almost liberal, he is a decided
 
 THE IDEAL ELEMENT. 95 
 
 materialist from conviction in all matters as to whicli 
 he has any knowledge. He cannot with calmness hear 
 even a lady submit to him for consideration personal 
 immortality as ever so weak a possibility with which 
 imagination might amuse itself. To the question why 
 he has preferred the ballet-dancer whom he keeps in 
 preference to any of the other actresses, he answers : 
 " She is a bit more tidy than the others," and it seems 
 almost to be the moving cause, for in her regard for him 
 he neither believes nor can believe. 
 
 But, in spite of this candid materialism, openly ex- 
 posed, this man is far from being an out-and-out mate- 
 rialist. He would not be a typical Kussian if he wholly 
 lacked an ideal element. And he has it. Tchernuishev- 
 ski's old book, " What is to be Done ? " (" A Vital Ques- 
 tion " ^ ) is his Bible. Its rebellious propositions and con- 
 tents are to him the truth in regard to the traditions of 
 the old society. He demands, not aloud but in his quiet 
 thoughts, a reform in the relations of the sexes, would 
 have that freedom introduced which is proper for a man 
 of age, who has left the official religion and the official 
 miorals equally far, far in the rear, and there, at this 
 point of his spiritual life, is a nook where the social 
 Utopia sprouts and blossoms in shade and twilight. 
 
 o^ext, the following type is more characteristic : he is 
 also a prince, but probably of Tatar descent ; the name 
 indicates this, but the physiognomy is entirely European. 
 He is very fine-looking, very elegant, with eyes which, 
 in spite of his being almost fifty, shine like those of a 
 youth, or rather like those of a magnetizer. He is unu- 
 sually gifted, possessing at once great artistic, linguistic, 
 and oratorical powers. 
 
 1 Translated from the Russian by N. H, Dole and S. S. Skidelsky; 
 published by T. Y. Crowell & Co.
 
 96 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 Being without money, he chose a practical career while 
 yet very young. But he met with a mishap at the out- 
 set. Somewhere in a foreign country, in a semi-private 
 circle, he had made a speech of a political tendency 
 which had caused displeasure. On his return home 
 he was punished by exile to a little country town in 
 Esthonia, where he was obliged to remain for ten or 
 twelve years, exclusively limited as to society to men, 
 of whom not one stood on the same plane of culture as 
 himself, and shut out from all activity, all development, 
 and all means of livelihood. At last, he lost all hope of 
 ever being liberated from his place of exile, and in a sort 
 of desperation married a young woman of the neighbor- 
 hood, who, indeed, was both pretty and good-hearted, but 
 separated from him by so deep an abyss in culture, that 
 she, on her part, has never desired to enter her husband's 
 circle in society at St, Petersburg as princess. She lives 
 only for her home and her son. 
 
 He came back finer-looking and more elegant than 
 ever, thoroughly cured of political enthusiasm. As if in 
 scorn, freedom was given him in the guise of a govern- 
 ment appointment in which he must work in its service 
 directly against that system of thought for which he 
 had suffered. Cold as ice, materialist in his manner of 
 thought and in all the relations of life, he has allowed 
 himself only one passion : the passion for collecting. He 
 collects books, manuscripts, bronzes, women. In liter- 
 ature and art he gives his allegiance to the principle, Ai-t 
 for the sake of art ; ^ in life, to the principles from the 
 time of the court of Louis XV. Among French authors, 
 he specially affects the line of Flaubert, Zola, Huysmans ; 
 among the Russian poets, Andreyevski, a lyric writer, 
 whose poems are not on emotional subjects, have no emo- 
 1 L'artpour I'art,
 
 ANOTHER TYPE. 97 
 
 tional relations, and who has had the artistic, exceed- 
 ingly odd idea of turning a whole novel of Turgenief 
 into verse. 
 
 He has much passion, but hardly a flash of emotion. 
 He is frank, entirely truthful, perhaps, except when 
 it is a question as to his age, reserved towards men, 
 open towards women, who worship him, and in whom he 
 trusts after having educated them. More than one is 
 bound to him as if by enchantment, although he has con- 
 stantly taught them to root out every germ of emotion 
 as a germ of misfortune, and although his conversation 
 with them chiefly turns upon his relations to his other 
 mistresses. 
 
 Now and then, this man shuts himself up in his room, 
 and sits lost in silent adoration of a statuette of a favorite 
 French author, with a long, thick mustache, more sin- 
 cerely loved by him than perhaps any Parisian woman 
 has ever been. He makes a journey to Paris simply to 
 buy a particular edition or a single autograph. 
 
 He has no convictions outside of the literary and 
 artistic. But within this circle he has his Russian 
 enthusiasm as a passion, wholly absorbing him, irra- 
 tional in the midst of all his intellectual coldness. 
 
 What is common to the Slavs is easily compre- 
 hended in him. On closer examination and comparison, 
 that which is essentially Russian may also be compre- 
 hended. In Poland there is an eminent nobleman, K. J., 
 who belongs to the same class of men. He is elegant, 
 cold, prudent, and yet, in certain directions, enthusiastic. 
 This Pole and this Russian, to every one who knows 
 them both and is able to compare them, are equally 
 brilliant ; but the Pole is vainer, the Russian more 
 directly fond of sensual pleasures. There is a remnant 
 of chivalrous tradition in the Pole, which the Russian
 
 98 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 has shaken off. The Russian satiety goes deeper than 
 the Polish, and at the same time leaves room for more 
 force. The Pole presents a weak side from his Polish 
 dilettante desire to distinguish himself in every depart- 
 ment ; the Russian is of harder metal. The Polish ideal 
 is, and continues to be, grace ; the Russian, force. 
 
 If we now place the two typical Russian characters 
 sketched here side by side, we shall notice that, however 
 different they are, they have this in common, that the 
 anticipation and struggles of their youth have been made 
 of no avail by circumstances, so that they have been 
 forced by necessity to be smaller men than they were 
 framed for, hardened, practical materialists, in no situa- 
 tion to do anything profitable for others than themselves, 
 and entertaining their ideals as one cherishes a harmless 
 eccentricity. 
 
 The two currents in Russian intellectual life, which at 
 once strike every observer, the tendency towards West- 
 ern Europe, the disposition to acclimatize and further 
 develop the general European culture, and the tendency 
 inward, the national self-absorption, with a hostile atti- 
 tude towards " the Gentiles " in the west, are most 
 plainly personified in those Tsars of great historic 
 renown, Peter the Great and Nicholas, two funda- 
 mental Russian types. 
 
 If you go still farther back, you find both these 
 characteristics united in the old Muscovite Tsars, Ivdn 
 III. and Ivan IV. the Terrible, the latter being espe- 
 cially important. He has well been characterized as a 
 combination of Louis XI. of France and Henry VIII. 
 of England : a mystical, bloody tyrant and prudent 
 monarch like the former, and having about as many 
 wives as the latter. It looks as if Peter the Great 
 broke with all the traditions from the old Muscovite
 
 CONFLICTING TENDENCIES. 09 
 
 princes -when he began his violent reforms. And their 
 coarseness, stubbornness, power, cruelty, and mystical 
 faith in the might of the Tsar rise up again in this 
 century in Nicholas. But even then Ivan III. turned 
 to the different European courts in order to procure from 
 them physicians, artisans, and artists. He invited into 
 Russia foreign masons, metal-founders, and goldsmiths, 
 and caused architects and engineers to be brought from 
 Bologna and Venice. Ivdn IV. also caused handicrafts- 
 men to be brought from various parts of Europe ; he 
 approached England and, in spite of the opposition of 
 the clergy, brought the art of printing into his empire. 
 In other words, in the more remote times the contrast 
 between the condition " of the learners to the culture of 
 Western Europe and the originality in the strongly 
 marked institutions of the Muscovite Tsar and the long- 
 bearded Byzantine Russia (governed from a palace which 
 was a compromise between a barrack and a Greek Cath- 
 olic monastery) was far weaker, far less sharp, than since 
 that time. It was only when Peter I. at a blow abol- 
 ishes the dignity of the Patriarch, takes from the Greek 
 Church its landed estates, interdicts the national dress 
 (nay, the beard), even abandons the long Byzantine cos- 
 tume in order to dress in an ordinary uniform, and sta- 
 tions a herd of foreigners, more or less unscrupulous, but 
 unacquainted with Russian peculiarities, at the head of 
 all the affairs of the empire, that the tendency towards 
 Western Europe comes to the front as exclusive. And it 
 was only when Nicholas wrapped himself up in a decided 
 hate towards the ideas and reforms which emanated from 
 the liberal west, when he limited the number of the stu- 
 dents at each of the universities to three hundred, dis- 
 continued instruction in the common constitutional law 
 of Europe, intrusted the philosophical instruction to the
 
 100 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 clergy of the orthodox church, caused the manuscripts 
 from which history and kindred branches were taught to 
 pass under the supervision of the censor, and about 1840, 
 Speaking in general terras, would not allow any foreign 
 newspapers or books to cross the frontier, that the ten- 
 dency which closed Russia to Europe was developed 
 not less exclusively. At that time, it went so far that 
 all the instructors in geometry in the land were ordered, 
 when they were teaching the properties of triangles, to 
 remind their pupils of the holy Trinity, and that the 
 performance of Lessing's ''Emilia Galotti," Goethe's 
 " Egmont," and Schiller's " Fiesco," were forbidden, 
 while Rossini's " William Tell " was allowed only with 
 the words and title of " Charles the Bold." 
 
 And if the heterogeneous old Russian types appear 
 sharply in these Czars, Ivan III. and Ivan IV., Peter and 
 Nicholas, the modern Russian type of civilization is 
 shown not less clearly and peculiarly in the person of 
 Alexander I., with its commingling of energy and fem- 
 inine receptivity, of comprehensive liberalism with 
 care for all the oppressed and love for the title of libera- 
 tor, on the one side, and inertia, the mysticism of Mme. 
 de Kriidener, a propensity to diffuse conceits or Utopias 
 like the Holy Alliance, on the other. 
 
 This nature in our time is found in many a young 
 Russian of rank, who travels to Berlin to seek out and 
 passionately attach himself to Eugene Diihring or 
 Edward von Hartmann, calls himself positivist or pessi- 
 mist and to that extent regards himself as standing on 
 the heights of modern progress, but, returned home, 
 with tearing haste is developed into a Russian high con- 
 servative, enthusiastic for the mission of absolute i)Ower, 
 for the omnii)otence of the dominion of the Slav and the 
 glory of the Greek-Orthodox Church. One of these
 
 FOREIGN INFLUENCES. 101 
 
 younger men, Prince Z., a good man, but not a good 
 poet, a philosopher, who is accustomed at least once a 
 year to sit at the feet of Edward von Hartmann, imme- 
 diately after Katkdf's death, sought to succeed him in 
 charge of his newspaper in Moscow and carry it to 
 greater lengths in his spirit. He failed in solving this 
 problem, not from lack of good will but of power. 
 
 In the mean time, most significant for Russia, and yet 
 entirely in analogy to the situation elsewhere, is the 
 intellectual division into the Western European and 
 Slavophile groups. It is noticeable and extremely Rus- 
 sian that the primitive national party of the Slavo- 
 philes, not less than the Western European, owes its 
 origin to the study of foreign philosophy and poetry. 
 It is just as true that the great revolutionary spirits of 
 Russia are a product of the movements which at the be- 
 ginning of the thirties took possession of the University 
 of Moscow. Some of the professors, who had studied 
 in France and Germany, at that time awakened the 
 interest of the young students for French socialism and 
 German philosophy. In all secrecy and from prohibited 
 books, the young men in separate groups appropriated, 
 some of them the ideas of Saint-Simon and Fourier, and 
 others the views of life of Schelling and Hegel, They 
 gradually divided themselves up in such a manner that 
 one party, to which Herzen and Bakunin belonged, 
 united that manner of thought which was nearly allied 
 to that of Hegel's most advanced disciples (Ruge, Feuer- 
 bach) to the French Socialistic ideas, which were pro- 
 claimed by Louis Blanc, and in modern French light 
 literature by George Sand and many others ; while, on the 
 other hand, the natural philosophy of Schelling and the 
 enthusiasm of the German romanticists for everything 
 national and old German was kindled in the party of
 
 102 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 the Slavophiles, who, wholly in the spirit of these Ger- 
 mans, demanded a purely Slavic culture and posed as the 
 representatives of the national principle in its full 
 sharpness. They cast longing looks back to the time of 
 Peter the Great. The Muscovite Russia was the home 
 of their thoughts and dreams. The horrible rule of 
 Ivan the Terrible, in spite of everything, was dearer to 
 them than the modern liberalism, so destitute of charac- 
 ter, and parliamentarianism. Their most precious study 
 was Slavic antiquities, and they thought that they were 
 diving into the Russian national spirit when they had 
 dived deep into the Byzantine theology. 
 
 To that extent they substantially gave a voice to the 
 forces and efforts which had existed since the time of 
 Peter the Great. In those days there was no other ele- 
 ment of opposition than the Raskolnik, that is to say, 
 the old orthodox party, which, since the time of the 
 reformer Nikon, had seceded from the State Church and 
 been split up into numerous sects. The Patriarch Nikon 
 had wished to regulate the ceremonies of the church. 
 From his time on, the church demands that its followers 
 shall cross themselves with three fingers and say three 
 hallelujahs in succession, and fearful consequences have 
 overtaken those who resisted. But the Raskolnik have 
 defied the knout, exile, and execution for their conviction 
 that one ought to cross himself with two fingers and 
 only say two hallelujahs in succession. They have 
 allowed themselves to be burned alive for their convic- 
 tion, for they believed that they would suffer everlasting 
 damnation if they consented to the number three. It is 
 even only a year or two since that these sects have been 
 suffered to have their own chapels and pray as they 
 pleased excepting, however, such sects as are still 
 declared to be dangerous and are persecuted. The most
 
 WARRIORS OF THE SPIRIT. 103 
 
 interesting group of them at the present time is the so- 
 called Dukhobortsi (Warriors of the Spirit), who are in 
 the largest numbers in the department Voronezh, and 
 who were exiled to the Caucasus, to a region without 
 water. They have shown such energy as to have con- 
 verted this desert into one of the most fruitful and 
 richest regions in the Caucasus. They work in common, 
 old and young, women and children. They can all read, 
 although they have no schools ; they teach their children 
 themselves. They do not recognize holy images. They 
 hang up in their houses, in the corner where the images 
 are usually placed, an embroidered towel. They do not 
 carry the cross, but, regarding it as a symbol and memo- 
 rial of Christ's sufferings, detest instead of honoring it. 
 
 In time of war they have rendered the greatest ser- 
 vice to the country, when there was need of transporting 
 supplies or the wounded over the sometimes impassable 
 roads of the Caucasus ; they freely rendered their ser- 
 vice to the State, which had treated them so harshly, and 
 gave their wagons and time without compensation. Yet 
 it is characteristic in this connection that in all these 
 sects the most profound hatred of the heathenish, he- 
 retical institutions of Western Europe has been nour- 
 ished. 
 
 But the national consciousness and hatred of the for- 
 eign, mounted from the lowest classes of society to the 
 highest during the great national struggle against Napo- 
 leon, who in 1812 inundated the land with hosts of 
 Frenchmen, Germans, Italians, and Spaniards. The 
 great prosperity of the national literature followed the 
 great contest with its victorious exit, which, both in 
 Pushkin and in Griboyedof, however much the one is 
 influenced by Moliere and the other by Byron, is contro- 
 versially^ turned against the foreign influeiice in the
 
 104 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 empire. To a certain extent the Slavophiles thns only- 
 continued the agitation, which had been planted and had 
 reached maturity. This intellectual current must not be 
 confounded with the Panslavist, to which there is a cer- 
 tain resemblance in name. The Panslavists themselves 
 have been European radicals like Bakunin, in so far as 
 they, in the service of the national cause, to the advan- 
 tage of the dissemination of the peculiar Russian com- 
 munism and association, wished the union of all the 
 Slavic races and the foundation of a great Slavic empire, 
 monarchical or republican. The Slavophiles, on the other 
 hand, have directed the most vigorous assaults towards 
 those sympathizing with the Poles in the west; they 
 represent the narrower Russian national feeling, and 
 like to look back to the old Byzantine basis of culture 
 and faith for the Russian national life.^ 
 
 If we turn back now to our starting-point, the com- 
 parison between the Russian and Polish intelligence, we 
 shall see that the Russian intelligence is obliged to make 
 almost as painful a choice of forces as the Polish. The 
 dilemma of the modern Polish patriot is this, that, if he 
 decides to labor uncompromisingly for progress, he under- 
 mines the Catholic Church, and thereby, for the time 
 being, the Polish nationality, and labors in reality for 
 the oppressive government, the force at hand most 
 hostile to himself and to progress of every kind. If, on 
 the other hand, he chooses intellectual stagnation, he 
 plainly sees the danger that the nationality, which is 
 protected thereby, and of which they were and are so 
 proud, will fall behind in European culture, and become 
 antiquated and outstripped.^ The corresponding dilemma 
 
 1 Comp. Julius Eckhardt: Jinigruasich und Altlivlandisch ; die 
 russische neue Aera. 
 
 2 Comp. Georg Brandes : Indtryk fra Polen.
 
 PROGRESSIVE RUSSIA'S NEEDS. 105 
 
 of the progressive Russian patriot is this : to the best 
 of his ability he would shake off foreign influences. 
 But at the same time that he considers that what this 
 brings in its train is ruinous to national originality and 
 growth, he sees that the Russians are less advanced than 
 the inhabitants of any of the European countries except 
 Turkey.^ However strongly he may complain, like 
 Tchatski, the celebrated typical Russian in Griboyedof's 
 "The Misfortune of Having Intelligence," that Moscow 
 imitates Paris in manners and customs, in language and 
 modes of expression, in fashions and follies, neverthe- 
 less, like Tchatski, he winds up by turning abruptly on 
 the Russians themselves, who feel that they are only lit 
 to be imitators, and who, when a man has five or six 
 ideas by means of which he rises above the people, and 
 dares to express them freely, fall upon him like barba- 
 rians. All the attacks on the intellectual supremacy of 
 the foreigners become at last an attack on that Russia 
 which submits to and finds its profit in it. Tchatski, 
 in his last soliloquy, utters the painful cry, " It is also 
 my fatherland." And thousands have ended with this 
 cry of distress. 
 
 In other words, the progressive Russian who desires 
 the broadening and development of the nationality of 
 his people, and that the foreign element should be kept 
 at a distance, soon comes to the conviction that the frag- 
 ments of Western European culture in his land are 
 always worth more than the unquestionable national 
 roughness and the equally national barbarity. He can- 
 not indeed distinguish between the people and the gov- 
 ernment, for a great people have the government they 
 deserve. He sees that for whatever finer culture, scien- 
 tific insight, and artistic taste he himself possesses, he 
 ' Eckbardt: Jungrussisch und Altlivlundisch, p. 18.
 
 106 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 is indebted to the civilization of Western Europe, and 
 that it is the Russian people's own fault if they have 
 only used this civilization to varnish the brutality of 
 their form of government and the barbarity of its admin- 
 istration. The more nobly and earnestly he wishes for 
 his country the gifts of justice, humanity, and freedom, 
 the plainer it becomes to him that they can be obtained 
 by unremittingly and uncompromisingly opposing the 
 ruling national tendencies of the century. He feels the 
 impossibility of wishing for progress and freedom of 
 thought at the same time with the strengthening of 
 national feeling in Russia. Not only the sentiment 
 of fatherland, but that national feeling which he feels 
 in his heart to be justified here, become re-actionar}- 
 from necessity. The freedom-loving patriot can long 
 enough and enthusiastically enough demand the devel- 
 opment of the people from within. He can only by 
 virtue of the points of view supplied by the culture of 
 Western Europe judge what there is in his own coun- 
 try which ought to be promoted or repressed; and, 
 wherever he makes his exit, if he desires to see hu- 
 man and civil rights respected in his land, and to see 
 strong emotions and productive ideas disseminated and 
 rooted there, he comes out by returning to the deficient 
 western culture, only too often caricatured in Russia, 
 which the sects detest, and which the national party of 
 the Slavophiles abhors and condemns. For on the 
 plane of development Russia has at this time reached, 
 he inevitably finds himself compelled to choose between 
 the two forces, either the national with the sacrifice 
 of the ideal of progressive freedom and culture, or the 
 decidedly liberal, but then also without any firm footing 
 on Russian soil, and with only a weak connection with 
 the national spirit.
 
 THE TWO PATHS. 107 
 
 All the most remarkable men of Eussia have this 
 dilemma to contend with. Minds like Pushkin, Gogol, 
 and Dostoyevski chose definitely to pursue the former 
 direction; those like Alexander Herzen and Ivan Tur- 
 genief, the latter.
 
 vn. 
 
 In the year 1887, the hostility in Russia towards the 
 German Empire reached its height. They had the feel- 
 ing that the future conflict was not very distant, and the 
 foreigner frequently heard expressions about the im- 
 pending European war. As a rule, these expressions 
 were desponding. There is nowhere such a lively per- 
 ception of the very great weakness of Russia as in 
 Russia itself. But what without qualification was sig- 
 nificant for Russia was the almost universal wish for 
 defeat. The foreigner heard this not only in Northern 
 but in Southern Russia, and it made no difference 
 whether the speakers were Russians from the east or 
 the west, provided only they were able men who loved 
 freedom. I have certainly heard the wish expressed, as 
 if by common consent, by more than fifty Russians, of 
 the most varied classes of society, and entirely unac- 
 quainted with each other, that there should be a decisive 
 defeat in an ensuing war. We can scarcely imagine a 
 more instructive symptom than what I have here stated 
 of the deep despair which exists as to the present condi- 
 tion of the country. No other possibility of liberation 
 from the predominant misery presents itself than that 
 which is offered in the weakness which an unsuccessful 
 war will entail on the ruling system. 
 
 It is not the first time that this sentiment has flourished 
 in Russia, and that wishes apparently so 'unpatriotic 
 have been cherished by men who have the greatest love 
 
 108
 
 ABSOLUTE POWER MODERN. 109 
 
 for their country, and are the best educated. It was the 
 case in the time of the Crimean War, and the wholesome 
 results which accompanied the defeat are distinctly 
 remembered. 
 
 The terrible oppression which exists at the present 
 time is by no means of so old a date as is sometimes 
 believed by those who think that Russia, as a matter of 
 course, is and constantly has been behind Europe. This 
 is a re-action toward the short but powerful and remark- 
 able period of freedom and emancipation in the first ten 
 years of the rule of Alexander II. On the whole, in 
 Russia freedom is the old, and oppression the compara- 
 tively new. The oldest Russian law-book (Pravda 
 Russkaya) does not recognize corporal punishment. 
 Serfdom was first introduced in the sixteenth century, 
 and Pskof, the last free city, like the old Novgorod, a 
 republic governed by a popular assembly for centuries, 
 by the cruel order of the Muscovite Tsar, Vasili, was 
 deprived of all its privileges, its inhabitants carried 
 away to the interior of Russia, " in order to live happily 
 by the grace of the Tsar," and replaced by a newly 
 imported race of men. In the eighteenth century the 
 deliberative assemblies of the provinces, the Zemstvos, 
 which in the Middle Ages had spoken loudly and ener- 
 getically, first lost all their importance, and the theory 
 of absolute power, on which the authority of the rulers 
 now rests in Russia, first took form in the nineteenth 
 century. It is not even of domestic origin. 
 
 Alexander I., in the first period of his reign, mani- 
 fested an almost modern spirit. He appeared to be a 
 man sincerely fond of freedom. He loved his age, de- 
 spised the proceedings of the revolutionary re-action ists, 
 was for a long time an admirer of Napoleon, continued 
 for a long time to wish well to France, and cherished
 
 Ho IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 plans for the elevation of Poland. It seemed as if under 
 him the power of the Tsar, like everything else in 
 Europe, was to be humanized, and as if the voice of the 
 people would be heard. So, under the strong re-actionary 
 counter-shock towards the French revolution and empire, 
 it was two persons who were not Russians, the Piedmon- 
 tese De Maistre and the Frenchman Bonald, who shaped 
 the great theory of re-action which was victorious through- 
 out Europe, which the doctrinaires of Russia passion- 
 ately appropriated, and which, easily manipulated by 
 them, became the new corner-stone of the Tsar's throne. 
 
 The present condition in Russia is, then, neither the 
 result of a stagnation for a thousand years, nor of a 
 uniform progress towards the better, which has been too 
 slow and much delayed, nor of a retrograde movement 
 in culture uninterruptedly continued for a long time. 
 It is the product of a re-action now twenty-five years old, 
 constantly fortified anew by insurrections and attempts 
 at assassination. 
 
 It is not that there is a Avant of good will and earnest- 
 ness on the part of the Tsar. Justice is done every- 
 where and in all circles to his character. It is known 
 that he likes to see honorable, upright men about him, 
 and also that he was angry at the corruption and deceit 
 which during the last Russo-Turkish war extended even 
 to the highest officers of the army, and had so large a 
 share in the unfavorable progress of the campaign. In 
 other words, it is admitted that he is a man of honor ; 
 but a great man, a great leader, is at this moment 
 needed on the imperial throne of Russia. It is, per- 
 haps, a misfortune for a people to need great rulers. 
 A country like Holland or Switzerland certainly has no 
 need of any. But it is a greater misfortune not to have 
 a great ruler when one is needed.
 
 FRIVOLITY OF THE COURT. Ill 
 
 The Tsar's virtues as a private man are readily recog- 
 nized. For the first time for centuries, for the first time 
 probably at all, he furnishes an example of an occupant 
 of the throne of Russia, about whose relations to the 
 other sex even evil tongues have not the slightest thing 
 to report. The men, as well as the women, who have 
 occupied it, have for all time been renowned for their 
 erotic extravagances. The emperor seems to be a pat- 
 tern as a husband and a father. About this exemplary 
 imperial family, the Russian court nevertheless runs 
 riot with its elegant frivolity and its numberless irregu- 
 larities, without re-acting upon it, but also without being 
 influenced by the spirit which emanates from it. All 
 the world knows that the Prince Imperial Alexis lives 
 openly with the beautiful Countess de Beauharnais, 
 sister of General Skobelef, whose husband, a cousin of 
 the Prince Imperial, the Prince of Leuchtenberg, has 
 seen his profit in resigning his rights to a prince of the 
 imperial family. The beautiful German Princess Maria 
 Pdvlovna, consort of Prince Imperial Vladimir, of whom 
 the author of the book La Societe de St. Petershourg, 
 instigated by his hatred to the Germans, relates all 
 imaginable evil, is, as it were, an incarnation of the 
 passion for court pleasures. It is not necessary to 
 believe what is said of her by the pen inspired by hate ; 
 but thus much is true, that there is a sort of recklessness 
 which stamps the tendency she gives to the amusements 
 of the court. She arranges parties in which they amuse 
 themselves with all kinds of games, but chiefly with 
 playing hide-and-seek {cache-cache). In such games now 
 and then a lady of the highest rank will be found 
 hidden away with an officer of the guards in an empty 
 bath-tub. One of the amusements of the youth in these 
 court circles, also, is to get up sleighing parties, in which
 
 112 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 the finest ladies are taken out in basket sleighs drawn 
 by officers. The sport is that the officers at a certain 
 time upset the sleighs, with all their contents, in the 
 snow. They laugh at the result. 
 
 In certain higher circles of the court, where a different 
 spirit rules, there is no other amusement than dancing. 
 They dance continually, on all occasions, with a real 
 mania. They make up for their detention for many 
 months at Gatshina by whirling away in an endless 
 round dance. Where they do not dance, the tediousness 
 is overwhelming. Tea-parties in these upper circles are 
 described as tiresome. The guests arrive ; after a while 
 the grand persons appear, and take their places in silence. 
 Evidently no one dares to ask so exalted ladies about 
 anything. Then from their side drops a question as to 
 the state of the health of one of the ladies present. As 
 a rule she answers briefly, and therewith the conversa- 
 tion dies away. If she is very ingenious or very good- 
 natured in relation to the embarrassment of the grand 
 company, she shapes her answer so that it makes a new 
 question almost necessary ; but when the little series of 
 questions and answers having intimate connection with 
 this subject is exhausted, as trustworthy eye-witnesses 
 assure me, twenty or twenty -five minutes may elapse 
 in a pause of complete and painful silence, during 
 which the guests look smilingly on the exalted visitors, 
 who, in turn, distribute their smiles upon those about 
 them. 
 
 Even if there is a little more noise, the impression 
 may sometimes be not less painful. Eye-witnesses 
 have described the following scene : the old courtier, 
 Count A., fell while waltzing, and remained sitting 
 on the floor. This evoked a laugh from the Tsar. 
 Stimulated by having been the occasion of such a burst
 
 AMUSEMENT AT COUUT. 113 
 
 of good humor on the part of one whom it had been the 
 study of the count's life to please, the old man danced 
 out, and let himself fall again, this time with comic 
 gestures. Renewed laughter. From that the aged 
 courtier devoted himself the whole evening to evoking 
 smiles from the lips of the august being by playing the 
 clown. While all this was going on, his daughter, the 
 present Countess 0., one of the ladies in waiting to the 
 empress, sat straight and stiff, with contented mien and 
 a smile m her eye, swallowing her anger at her father's 
 abasement, and really satisfied with the obvious favor 
 which fell to his lot. The scene reminds one of what 
 IS immortalized in the well-known painting of the 
 court of the Tsaritsa Anna Ivanovna, which is widely 
 known in Russia by the copper-plate engraving, and in 
 which the members of the first families of Russia are 
 represented playing leap-frog in the ball-room of the 
 palace for the amusement of their sovereign lady. 
 
 Court life was far from being so spiritless as now in 
 the time of Alexander II. The court bigotry, so closely 
 connected with shallowness, was also unknown during 
 his time. Now you find large circles among the aris- 
 tocracy who belong to the Radstock-Pashkof sect, which 
 was founded not many years ago by an impostor. In 
 these circles they pass their time in reading " The Evan- 
 gelists," damn all who don't think as they do, and, above 
 all, pick their neighbors to pieces. Fanaticism and a 
 malicious propensity to gossip generally go hand in 
 hand here. A large part of the members of this stratum 
 of society send their sick to the priest Joan in Cron 
 stadt, whom they believe able to work miraculous cures 
 by the laying-on of hands. Even Loris Melikof sent a 
 daughter to him when she was ill. 
 
 The vigorous Greek-orthodox re-action in the highest
 
 114 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 circles is comparatively new, and is now in full bloom. 
 It began under Alexander II. It was not that this mon- 
 arch was favorable to it ; far from that. But his consort, 
 a German princess, at first from a desire for popularity, 
 afterwards from a want of an object in life, when 
 she felt that she had entirely glided out of the exist- 
 ence of her volatile husband, took up the cause of 
 the Greek-orthodox Church with constantly increasing 
 warmth. Thus it happened for the first time from time 
 immemorial in this empire, where the clergy occupy an 
 inferior position and have little influence, that a priest 
 of the imperial household, the wise and fanatical 
 Bashauof, became influential at court. It was to this 
 man to whom it also happened to prepare the present 
 Tsaritsa, by instruction in the Greek religion, for her 
 change of confession. And among the court ladies 
 who were smitten with zeal for spreading abroad the 
 sound doctrine, and combating Roman Catholicism and 
 Lutheran Protestantism, especially when found within 
 the boundaries of the Russian Empire, Countess Antonie 
 Dmitrievna Bludova, a slightly deformed, energetic, 
 and intelligent girl, made herself very conspicuous. It 
 was she who, under Alexander II., cemented the union 
 between the Muscovite Slavophile party and Aksakof and 
 Katkof, and was the first to master the Polish Marquis 
 Wielopolski's plan for a reconciliation between Russia 
 and Poland, with a hostile attitude towards Germany. 
 Through her father, the well-known powerful minister, 
 she accomplished the appointment of Wielopolski as 
 governor in Poland ; but then, after the revolt in 1863, 
 she was converted to the doctrine of the necessity of 
 the eradication of Roman Catholicism, and actually 
 initiated the horrible religious persecutions in Lithuania 
 and White Russia. It was she who stood at the head
 
 RESULT OF THE CRIMEAN WAR. llf) 
 
 of the idolizing of Vilna's executioner, Muravief, in 
 St. Petersburg, after the attempts at revolt were drowned 
 in the blood of the Poles ; and it was she who, on an 
 appeal to the liberal Prince Suvorof for a subscription 
 for the memorial present which was being procured for 
 the hero, at a public dinner received the courageous 
 answer, which deprived the prince of all popularity, 
 " If you will make the general a present of a gold axe, 
 my purse is at your service, countess." She took care 
 that Katkdf's most fanatical and bloodthirsty articles 
 were laid before the Tsar just at the moment when he 
 was in a receptive mood for that kind of reading ; and 
 when, after Karakdsof's attempts at assassination in 
 1866, a decisive re-action took place, she contributed 
 perhaps more than any one else to bringing about the 
 result of placing the whole educational system in 
 bigoted hands, hostile to culture. From that time to 
 the present, "this religious re-action has continued unin- 
 terrupted, partly from fashion and partly as a prudential 
 precaution. The political re-action took it up in its 
 current, and carried it farther on. 
 
 This political re-action can be dated from 1863. An 
 orgy of ideas had preceded it, in which the whole nation 
 revelled in hopes of progress, and became intoxicated 
 with plans of emancipation. 
 
 The result of the Crimean War had put an end to the 
 system of the Tsar Nicholas. The time was passed 
 when fanatical narrowness and cruel harshness alone 
 ruled over everything in the Russian Empire. Not 
 only had the books and newspapers of Europe been 
 excluded, but the greatest obstacles had been put in 
 the way of travellers across the frontiers, whether going 
 or coming ; nay, the hatred to the age had gone so far 
 in the first man of the empire, that he detested rail-
 
 116 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 ways and prohibited their construction, so that Russia, 
 at his death, had only the single line between St. Peters- 
 burg and Moscow, and this one was managed in such a 
 manner that the merchants preferred to send their goods 
 by the old teamsters, in common wagons, as the safer 
 and cheaper way. 
 
 The defeats in the Crimea brought the deliverance. 
 In however great respect for his father Alexander II. 
 had been educated, he was compelled at once on his 
 accession to the throne to repeal some of the most 
 absurd of these laws. This was received by the peo- 
 ple who had been so long gagged and fettered as if 
 from this time any kind of criticism of Nicholas's sys- 
 tem of government would be allowed, and as if it was 
 the Tsar's own intention now to change everything. 
 During the Crimean War, Herzen had already estab- 
 lished his Russian printing-office in London ; and his 
 weekly newspaper, Kololcol (The Bell), gave the sig- 
 nal for the free and reckless inquiry into all the blun- 
 ders and follies of the old regime. Never had such 
 language been heard in Russia, never had any one 
 wielded such a pen. The boldness carried away the 
 readers and conquered all minds. Herzen was soon the 
 most influential man in Russia, the idolized dictator of 
 the intelligent youth. He seemed to be omniscient ; 
 nothing which happened in the land, from which he 
 had been banished, escaped his attention, so thoroughly 
 was he informed. He published secret state papers, 
 like the memoirs of Catherine II. ; he threw light upon 
 embezzlements, frauds, infamous and cruel deeds, com- 
 mitted in various parts of the empire. He had so many 
 connections, and in such high places, that on a day 
 when Kolol'ol contained serious charges against one of 
 the imperial adjutants-general, and a number printed
 
 CREATION OF A PRESS. 117 
 
 in St. Petersburg, without the compromising passage, 
 was hiid before Alexander, who was a constant reader 
 of the paper, a week or two later the Tsar received the 
 original number in an envelope, with a few lines which 
 gave the reason why it was sent in this manner. So 
 widely spread was his newspaper, that in Nizhni alone, 
 in 1859, one hundred thousand copies, which had been 
 introduced from Asia, were seized by the police. 
 
 There was at once formed a group of parties with 
 different shades of opposition or progress. There was 
 the opposition to the Germans flourishing at the court, 
 on the part of the higher nobility who had been set 
 aside by Nicholas in the interest of absolute power. 
 There was the opposition of the Slavophile, who, as 
 unaristocratic as possible, idolized the people. Finally, 
 there was Herzen's, Ogaref's, and, in a short time, the 
 sceptical, radical, and gradually socialistic opposition of 
 Bakunin, who had escaped from Siberia. And all these 
 groups of opposition, under these conditions, for the first 
 time in Kussia created a press. 
 
 Until the forties there had not existed in the great 
 empire any other press than the official. Under Nich- 
 olas the newspaper, " The Russian Bee," an academical 
 organ, which was conducted in the spirit of the old 
 classical poets, Lomonosof and Derzhavin, carried on the 
 same war against the romantic tendency inaugurated 
 b}"- Pushkin as Oginski's organ in Warsaw had carried 
 on against Mickiewicz and his friends. It was the great 
 Kussian critic Byelinski who gained a hearing for the 
 national poetry of the nineteenth century. It was 
 under the control of the literary impressario, Krayev- 
 ski, who is still living, that the newspaper "The 
 Annals of our Fatherland " was published, and it was 
 sustained by the genial articles of Byelinski. When he
 
 118 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 died, in 1847, worn out by his literary strife, by pov- 
 erty and disease, the Annals were continued in Sovre- 
 mennik (The Contemporary), to which journal the 
 poet Nyekrasof contributed, and which in 1858-62 
 was in the main inspired by Tchernuishevski, who, as 
 an author of novels and works on political economy, had 
 made a deep impression on his time. 
 
 But the importance of the press in Kussia must be 
 dated from the end of the Crimean War, and from the 
 debut of Herzen as a journalist. For before this time the 
 influence of the writers was extremely small, chiefly 
 because the more intelligent circles spoke and read only 
 French, with persistent contempt for the journalistic 
 productions in their mother tongue ; besides, they were 
 compelled to limit their attention to purely literary 
 questions, especially such as this, whether the Russian 
 literature ought to be purely national or not. 
 
 Now, at the close of the sixth decade, hundreds and 
 hundreds of newspapers and periodicals were at once 
 established. How numerous they were is best shown 
 by a fact stated by Eckhardt, that in 1858-60 not less 
 than seventy-seven large newspapers were compelled to 
 suspend publication, without being perceptibly missed. 
 Then, as it still happens down to the present day, 
 the large monthly periodicals, each number as thick a 
 good-sized book, began to give abstracts of books in the 
 natural sciences, literary history, or economy, to furnish 
 political comments, and to publish long society novels 
 of German, French, English, or native authors. The 
 legitimate daily newspapers, with genuine Slavic enthu- 
 siasm, plunged into the most extreme radicalism. They 
 became, as it wei'e, giddy from the heights which 
 European culture had attained, and to which the youth 
 of the capitals and the denizens of the provincial towns.
 
 EMANCIPATION OF THE SERFS. 119 
 
 who had known nothing of the life of Western Europe, 
 were now suddenly carried. 
 
 The first question which forced itself upon the 
 thoughts of all was about the education of the people. 
 There were hardly any schools in the land, and the few 
 that did exist were, in the rural districts, wholly in the 
 hands of the ignorant popes. There were no other 
 teachers than the priests of the country towns. At 
 this time, Sunday schools were started, first in the capi- 
 tals, and then in various parts of the country, and the 
 teachers in these schools taught without pay, from pure 
 enthusiasm for the cause of the elevation of the people. 
 In the various divisions of the army, the officers taught 
 the recruits in similar schools, the officers of the Guard 
 distinguishing themselves as teachers above all others. 
 
 It was under these conditions that the great, far-reach- 
 ing reforms which characterized the beginning of the 
 reign of Alexander II. were begun. The first of these 
 was that which, on the 19th of February, 1861, led to 
 the emancipation of the serfs, and gave to more than 
 fifty million of men personal freedom and a share in the 
 ownership of the soil of Russia. As a matter of course, 
 it caused a tremendous diminution of the power of the 
 noble landed proprietors. It was a measure at once 
 democratic and autocratic. And it was carried through 
 at a time when the powers that had hitherto been 
 respected had lost their splendor. The defeats in the 
 Crimea had destroyed the prestige of the army ; the short- 
 comings and the mistakes and the frauds of the admin- 
 istration, which the war had brought to light, had given 
 a death-blow to official authority; the clergy had long 
 been utterly despicable. Now, by one blow the power 
 of the nobility was diminished in an un2)recedented man- 
 ner, at the same time that a large part of their property
 
 120 IMPRESSIONS OF BUS SI A. 
 
 was taken from them without any proportionate com- 
 pensation. The hope that there would be a political 
 reform under Alexander II. was greatly weakened, just 
 because the social reform in this form came first. For a 
 long time, the enlightened classes had hoped for a " con- 
 stitution," as it must naturally be in the beginning, an 
 aristocratic constitution. Now political liberalism stood, 
 in the presence of this gigantic advance of the power of 
 the Tsar, without any hope for the future. For now, 
 when all the lofty peaks of society were levelled, the 
 position of the power of the Tsar alone was unaffected 
 and even expanded to a dominion over soldiers and peas- 
 ants unlimited by any kind of barrier. 
 
 The great peasant population was still very far from 
 being satisfied. They had for a long time cherished 
 Utopian expectations, and now, especially since the 
 socialistic agitators had strengthened their illusions, 
 were waiting for the immediate transfer to them, then 
 and there, of all the land which they had cultivated, 
 without any equivalent. This disappointment brought 
 the peasants in the departments of Kaziiu and the Volga to 
 an armed insurrection. At the same time, disturbances 
 broke out among the students. The abnormal limitation 
 of the number of students at each of the universities to 
 three hundred had been repealed, and the scholar had 
 suddenly attained a prestige almost surpassing that 
 which the officers of the Guard had hitherto enjoyed. 
 Now, with a genuine Russian lack of principle, the 
 execution both of legal reforms and of a new plan of 
 education was intrusted to the old re-actionists. So far 
 as the former reform was concerned, the leading men, 
 like Count Panin, Minister of Justice, accommodated 
 themselves to the demands of the times ; but only three 
 months later, when the emancipation of the serfs had
 
 UNREALIZED HOPES. 121 
 
 set all thought in vibration, a regulation for the govern- 
 ment of the universities was published, which deprived 
 the students of all the liberties previously given them, 
 and cut off their hopes of obtaining any of those which 
 they had been led to anticipate. They were deprived of 
 the liberty of holding meetings, forbidden to have charity 
 funds, and, in order to reduce their number, each stu- 
 dent was required to pay a fee of fifty silver rubles each 
 semester. In all the university cities, in Moscow as well 
 as in St. Petersburg, in Kief as well as in Kharkof, the 
 young men refused to submit to the new rules. Con- 
 flicts with the police and the military followed. 
 
 In 1862 the irritation in Russia reached its height. 
 In various parts of St. Petersburg there was a series of 
 fearful conflagrations which indicated the breaking loose 
 of revolutionary instincts. The government interfered, 
 established a summary court for incendiaries, closed the 
 Sunday schools and other institutes and clubs, put re- 
 straints upon the press, made the censorship more rigorous. 
 
 Thus when the baleful blindness of the Polish dema- 
 gogues and the indiscreet and cruel measures of the 
 noble Wielopolski against the dangerous spirit of rebel- 
 lion in Poland brought about the outbreak of the Polish 
 insurrection, it was the event from which all the re-action- 
 ary lusts and powers in Russia were to imbibe new force. 
 
 Up to this time, Alexander Herzen had been the hero 
 of cultured Russia. He had continually manifested a 
 lively sympathy for oppressed Poland, treated its cause 
 as his own and as that of his friends. He now ex- 
 pressed himself warmly in behalf of the revolt, even 
 after the protecting attitude of the powers of the west 
 and their threatening mien towards Russia (which made 
 the Polish nobility, with Zamoiski at their head, conquer 
 their scruples against an alliance with the popular leaders
 
 122 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 in Warsaw) had aroused and goaded tlie Russian national 
 feeling even among the liberal groups of the empire. 
 
 Then it was that Katkof entered upon the scene, and 
 in the course of a very short time won all power out of 
 the hands of Herzen, and rose to the position of the 
 most influential man in Russia. This remarkable man, 
 who died only in August, 1887, represented during 
 twenty-five years the principle of oppression in a land 
 of oppression, promoted during the whole of that time, 
 with all his coarse energy, everything that was inimical 
 to liberty, wrote down everything that was non-Russian, 
 demanded and supported the establishment of complete 
 uniformity in the great empire. 
 
 Mikhail Nikoforovitch Katkof is a unique phenomenon 
 in the history of Russia. As long as the empire has 
 stood, it has never been seen before his time that a pub- 
 licist, without official position and without any external 
 or official authority, has exerted an influence on the acts 
 of the government, saying nothing of what was the 
 case with him, exerting a greater influence than the gov- 
 ernment itself. To that extent, but only to that extent, 
 can his life be said to point towards a new time. Never- 
 theless the cause of satisfaction vanishes when we 
 examine into the manner in which he reached this degree 
 of power. He attained it because, with a recklessness 
 which too often disregarded the claims of truth and the 
 demands of justice, he devoted himself to flattering 
 the national vanity and cultivating the national pride in 
 its most detestable forms. 
 
 Katkdf made his debut as professor of philosophy in 
 the University at Moscow with contributions of slight 
 importance to the history of philosophy. He was, from 
 the beginning, an adherent of German philosophy, 
 especially an admirer of Schelling, and then belonged to
 
 MisE OF katk6f. 123 
 
 the same circle as the enthusiastically satirical Byelinski 
 and the celebrated international revolutionist Bakunin. 
 He called himself an idealist and taught the cult of 
 the ideal. As a worshipper of the ideal in 1848 he was 
 removed from his position. 
 
 In 1856 he established a monthly periodical, "The 
 Kussian Messenger " (Russki Vyestnik), and in 1861 he 
 assumed the control of the daily paper, " The Muskovite 
 News " (Moskovskiya Vyedomosti). He began his career 
 in both of the journals as an extreme liberal of the Eng- 
 lish type, demanded self-government, extension of the 
 distribution of power, constitution, etc., until in 1861-2, 
 when radicalism broke out of bounds, when the disturb- 
 ances of the peasants and of the students frightened 
 timid people, and when it was brought to light that a 
 multitude of men and women in high positions in Russia 
 were in communication with Herzen's revolutionary 
 party in London, the possibility of a complete change in 
 public sentiment was apparent. 
 
 Then Katkdf felt that the moment was propitious for 
 a change of front and for setting himself up as the 
 Savior of Russia. He broke the silence which had 
 been laid upon the whole press of Russia in regard to 
 his old exiled friends, Herzen, Ogaref, and Bakunin. 
 Although their names could not be mentioned, and their 
 existence was officially ignored by the government, he 
 attacked them openly as enemies of their fatherland, 
 and to blame as the cause of all the disturbances. This 
 was the first shock given to the great influence of Herzen 
 among the cultured classes of Russia. And then in 
 1863, at the time when the Polish revolt broke out, when 
 Herzen committed the imprudence of offending the 
 Russian national feeling, and the approval with which 
 the uprising was greeted by the Russian emigrants had
 
 124 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 the result that the liberal Russian newspapers manifested 
 their sympathy by silence, then it was that Katkof made 
 his master-stroke. He denounced the emigrants and 
 nihilists as 2^^^fidious traitors to their country, preached 
 the strongest Russian chauvinism, demanded not only 
 that the rebels should be put out of the way, but that 
 the independent existence of Poland should be blotted 
 out by changing the kingdom to a Russian province. 
 When the revolt was quelled, Katkof was one of the 
 most popular men in the higher circles of Russia. It 
 was he who caused Muravief to be sent as "Hanging 
 Dictator" to Wilna. It was under his segis, under the 
 pretence of the law of self-preservation of the State, 
 that the democrats gave the Lithuanian peasants freedom 
 and land through the unbridled plundering of the Polish 
 nobility, and that the Slavophiles urged religious perse- 
 cution under the pretence of wishing to eradicate the 
 tyranny of the Catholic Church. 
 
 From this time on, Katkof could only rise and rise in 
 influence in the same degree as the re-action in Russia 
 rose. He had identified himself with it. 
 
 The quondam philosopher was henceforth the most 
 zealous adherent of the Greek orthodoxy. The quondam 
 English liberal was henceforth a worshipper and de- 
 fender of the national absolutism, more national than 
 the government, more monarchical than his monarch. 
 All his disputes with the Court and the Tsar were only 
 lovers^ quarrels, occasioned by too much zeal on his part. 
 
 His power increased to an incredible degree. When, 
 on one occasion, the ministry forbade the publication of 
 his newspaper, he nevertheless issued it as usual, only 
 with the comment that it was forbidden, but that the 
 prohibition must have arisen from a misunderstanding. 
 It passed unchallenged ; the Tsar sustained him.
 
 KATEOF'S INFLUENCE. 125 
 
 The Polish nation, from this time forth, was to the 
 Slavophiles the embodiment of the detested Western 
 Europe and of the detested Catholicism. But the 
 ownership of the soil was given to the Lithuanian peas- 
 ants, chiefly because the Slavophiles, with Milyutin at 
 their head, hated the Poles as aristocrats. For them the 
 Polish nationality was a peculiarity of the noble caste, 
 and, as such, ought to be rooted out of Russia. Here 
 also the absolute power sought to contract an alliance 
 with the masses against the higher classes. 
 
 But to Katkof personally the uniformity of the Russian 
 state was henceforward the most important principle. He 
 allied himself with the Slavophiles in order through their 
 worship of democracy to bring the government to stir 
 up the Finns against the Swedes in Finland, the Lithu- 
 anians against the Poles in Poland, the Esthonians and 
 the Letts against the Germans in the Baltic provinces, 
 because they necessarily insisted on the idea that the 
 strengthening of all these oppressed small nationalities 
 in their relation to the ruling people was only the first 
 step to the final and complete Russianizing of those 
 countries. 
 
 Then in 1866 came the attempt of Karakosof to assas- 
 sinate Alexander II., and it gave to the re-action its last 
 strong impulse. Katkof shouted with joy, " The pistol 
 shot of Karakosof has purified the air." It is quite true 
 that in a short time the government got frightened at 
 its alliance with democracy. It once more cast its 
 looks towards the nobles, whom it had hitherto mis- 
 trusted, because they had wished for a constitution. 
 Even Katkof's paper was suppressed for two months, as 
 a punishment, because its editor had dared to publish a 
 warning from Valuyef. But soon the reign of terror, 
 friendly to the peasants, conquered under Milyutin in
 
 126 IMPRESSIONS OF ttUSSlA. 
 
 Poland, and the example from Poland could not be 
 defied in Russia proper. The unrestricted, absolute 
 power and the unqualified Greek Catholic orthodoxy, 
 which had been upheld in the western provinces, were 
 necessarily upheld throughout the whole empire. Now, 
 when the glamour of the name of the Tsar has become 
 weaker, we can see the possibility, as a result of the 
 situation, that in times of disturbance a dictator might 
 usurp the power, a man of revolution, for instance, 
 if such could be found, Avith a past and a popularity, 
 like Skobelef, the celebrated cavalry general who died 
 under such horrible circumstances. 
 
 From 1866 the current of re-action continually in- 
 creased. Everything helped it on, radical as well as 
 retrograde agitations in foreign lands. Soon at several 
 places in the empire the oppression becomes too strong, 
 produces this revolutionary propaganda or attempts at 
 political murder, and for every political prosecution 
 re-action takes a new stride, with doubled frenzy. 
 Everything strengthens it, everything works to its 
 advantage. The old "Nihilism," which was described 
 by Turgenief, which was substantially an intellectual 
 emancipation, with its whole energy concentrated on 
 the attack on Christianity, and with a love for science, 
 which found its expression in dislike of art as useless 
 and undemocratic, was over about 1870. The insurrec- 
 tion of the commune in Paris, and the outbreaks of the 
 internationals, set the minds of the youth in active fer- 
 ment at this time. A generation had arisen, which, 
 instead of the individualized radicalism of the older 
 " Nihilists," had socialism for a religion and the people 
 for a God. 
 
 From all parts of Russia and Siberia young girls 
 streamed to Zlirich to study medicine and socialism. In
 
 POPULAR PROPAGANDISM. 1^7 
 
 1872 Prince Krapotkin began to work among the arti- 
 sans in the suburbs of St. Petersburg. In the beginning 
 of the seventies, young men and women of the families 
 of the highest rank, by hundreds and hundreds, "went 
 out among the people," labored there twelve, fifteeu 
 hours a day in the fields, in the workshops, in the 
 factories, in order to propagate modern ideas everywhere 
 among the common people. But in the provincial and 
 country towns, where everything is spread by rumor, 
 the presence of a propagandist could not possibly long 
 be a secret to the police and government. One arrest 
 followed another. Not less than thirty-seven provinces 
 were declared, in a government circular of 1875, to be 
 " infected by socialistic contagion." In 1876 and 1877, 
 the whole of this generation, as it may be called, of 
 youth with their minds in a ferment was mowed down. 
 All the prisons were full of political offenders, and it 
 was constantly found necessary to build new ones. 
 Mere suspicion led to imprisonment. A letter from a 
 friend who had " gone out among the people," an answer 
 from a child twelve years old, who, when interrogated 
 by the police, did not know what he said from fright, 
 was quite sufficient. So also in 1876 to 1878, in the 
 different Russian cities, on the chance occasion of a 
 funeral or a death sentence, there were demonstrations 
 and street revolts, the outbreak of passionate despair, 
 meaningless in so far as they could never reach the 
 proportions of a general revolt, and invariably imme- 
 diately suppressed by the military. The uselessness of 
 all such demonstrations produced the result that a party 
 of terror was finally formed, which determined to work 
 by single attempts at assassination. 
 
 The earlier propaganda made its exit at the end of 
 the seventies with the 193 trial. These unfortunate per-
 
 128 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 sons had been in prison for four years, while the slow 
 and thorough investigation lasted. The Russian cell 
 system during this period bore so heavily upon them, 
 that of the one hundred and ninety-three no less than 
 seventy-five committed suicide, became insane or died. 
 A special tribunal had been arranged for the trial of 
 this cause, so that it was not to be expected that the 
 judgment would be against the government. There were 
 sentences of ten, twelve, fifteen years imprisonment, with 
 hard labor, for two or three lectures, privately delivered 
 to a handful of workmen, or for having bought or loaned 
 a single book. And so harshly were political prisoners 
 treated in prison that in the central prison at Kharkof 
 (" house of terror ") there were several attempts at insur- 
 rection among them for the purpose of obtaining the 
 same treatment as the common criminals. And when 
 the senate of Alexander II., which in other respects was 
 pliant enough, in the form of a petition for pardon, ac- 
 quitted the larger number of the 193, the Tsar person- 
 ally set aside the verdict of the Senate. Kot even in 
 the laws which this government had promulgated did 
 it seek its support against its antagonists. It was, 
 therefore, natural that these antagonists did not regard 
 it as anything else than organized injustice, against 
 which all weapons seemed to be allowable. 
 
 In 1877 followed Viera Sassulitch's attempt to assas- 
 sinate General Trepof, who had caused a political pris- 
 oner to be whipped, and her acquittal by the jury, 
 which aroused the attention of the whole of Europe. 
 In August, 1878, came the bullet from " Stepniak's " re- 
 volver, which, in the forenoon, in the open street, killed 
 General Mesentzef, chief of the political police.^ Among 
 the numerous attempts at political murders which now 
 1 Stepniak: Underground Russia, Introduction.
 
 ^trSSlA'S FOREIGN POLICY. l29 
 
 followed are the four against Tsar Alexander II,, of 
 which the first occurred April 2, 1879, the last, which 
 resulted In his death, March 13, 1881. 
 
 Nothing has set Russia farther backward than this last 
 occurrence, Avhich was pregnant with misfortune. It 
 immediately prevented the formation of a sort of parlia- 
 mentary constitution, Avhlch had just then been prom- 
 ised. It frightened the successor to the crown back 
 from the paths his father had entered upon at the begin- 
 ning of his reign, and it seemed to justify the rulers in 
 reprisals and measures of prevention of every kind. 
 
 Thus they have reached a point where they now are, 
 reached a policy which is no policy, a policy of appre- 
 hension and irresolution. 
 
 Generally, when we speak of the policy of Russia, we 
 mean its foreign policy, and many are dazzled by the 
 extraordinarily large display of the power of the empire. 
 We speak about Russia's great "mission" in Central 
 Asia, about its irresistible advance towards India, etc., 
 and then we admire Russian statesmanship. But what 
 power is there in Russia's subjugating a little larger 
 or smaller number of semi-barbarian tribes in Asia, 
 and what statesmanship is there in involving itself 
 continually with moi;e wars there, when it must con- 
 cern Russia to collect all its powers and make all its 
 preparations for the great impending conflict ! These 
 Russian generals, with their victories won from Tatars 
 and Turcomans, remind us altogether too much of those 
 French commanders who were victorious over Abd-el- 
 Kader and were defeated by Moltke. What else are 
 they doing in Russia now, than once a year to conquer 
 an Abd-el-Kader ! 
 
 And to pit against a man with Bismarck's genius for 
 managing foreign affairs, Russia has not a single prime
 
 130 IMPRESSIONS OP RtrsslA. 
 
 minister, not one of any kind whatever. For there is no 
 prime minister in the Russian ministry. The unlimited 
 power of the Tsar does not tolerate this at all. AVhen 
 Gortchakof was chancellor it was only a title. Under the 
 present management, Russia, the great exponent of the 
 Slavs, has succeeded in making itself detested to the ut- 
 termost by all the Slavic nations. This government has 
 carried it to so great an extent that Russia is now hated 
 by Bulgaria and Servia (nay, by the common people of 
 Roumania) as it is hated by the Poles, and that means 
 much. Russia liberated Bulgaria from the Turkish reign 
 of terror, and has now successfully, after the lapse of 
 not ten years, by falsehood, violence, hypocrisy, by in- 
 famous acts for whose authority the Bulgarians looked 
 to the higher circles of the Russian government, brovight 
 matters to the pass that the liberators of that day 
 are more hated than the oppressors were ten years 
 ago. 
 
 But the internal policy is still more pitiable. It is 
 certainly not a parliament which is most greatly needed. 
 Only the naive youth in Russia can think that. A par- 
 liament could easily be imagined so chosen that it would 
 be more conservative than the government itself. It 
 would, in all probability, if established now, be such a 
 body as the Duma (city council) in Moscow is. That 
 is elected. Yes ; Moscow has what Paris has so long 
 fought for in vain, its own elected mayor. The Duma 
 is not on that account the less conservative, and it would 
 not present a different appearance if it had been the gov- 
 ernment and not the citizens in Moscow who had elected 
 its members. No, it is not a popular assembly that it 
 concerns Russia to get first. Russia needs a bond fide 
 administration. Yet it is understood everywhere there 
 are no institutions, no provincial home rule, no inde-
 
 EDUCATIONAL ORDEES. 131 
 
 pendent courts, no genuine ^ seminaries of learning, no 
 schools In the proper sense. 
 
 During the whole of the reign of this Tsar the enor- 
 mous Siberia has been denied the permission to found 
 even a single university. It was feared that it would 
 give Asiatic Russia too much independence. Permis- 
 sion has only just been given for the foundation of a 
 university at Tomsk, which, in the present circumstances, 
 is of hardly any importance. 
 
 All knowledge is dreaded. The most recent circular 
 (illegal, but carried into effect), which after Katkdf's 
 death was prepared by the curator in Odessa, makes it 
 the duty of the school committees to decide whether the 
 parents are sufficiently well off for the children to be 
 admitted to a grammar school. They are required to 
 ask how the parents live, in what kind of a house and 
 of how many rooms, how much money they earn annually, 
 and who their friends are. 
 
 The universities are closed at the least sign of a dis- 
 turbance. This happened to all the universities in Russia 
 proper in the spring of 1888, after the unimportant affair 
 of Brysgalofs box on the ear at Moscow ; St. Petersburg, 
 Moscow, Kazan, Kharkof, and Odessa were at once closed 
 for fear of students' pranks. 
 
 Since then the curator of the universities in Odessa 
 has prepared a new circular, in which it is said : " Since 
 several instructors have allowed themselves publicly to 
 express their thoughts without the reservations which 
 are due to their position in the educational system, and 
 without feeling themselves bound by the duties of the 
 service when the question turned upon something which 
 had no direct connection with this service, and since 
 they have even appeared as recognized organs for cer- 
 tain circles of society, have taken part in party debates,
 
 132 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 nay, have even allowed themselves to be drawn into 
 controversies in newspapers, the curator requires them 
 for the future to use greater prudence." 
 
 It forbids them to take part in the discussion of social 
 and literary questions. It closes with the expression of 
 the hope that for the future they will solemnly devote 
 their leisure hours to matters of instruction and educa- 
 tion. 
 
 All this was because a poor little teacher in a club 
 had suffered himself to criticise Katkof. 
 
 Upon the whole, we in Western Europe can form no 
 idea of the grade of civilization occupied by these cura- 
 tors. When, in 1884, the students in Kief had arranged 
 a banquet on the jubilee of the old university, one fine 
 day, by a gratuitous regulation of the curator, they were 
 wholly excluded from participation in the festival. 
 When they, mortified and exasperated as they were, 
 hissed at the curator and the well known president of 
 the Synod Pobyedonostsef, as a punishment they were 
 all expelled from the university. There was only one 
 single man m Russia with whose principles it agreed to 
 praise this act : it was Katkof. The students, he wrote, 
 who had not participated in the demonstration are 
 responsible for not having prevented it. 
 
 From absokitely trustworthy sources there has been 
 communicated to me the following incident, wliich re- 
 cently occurred in the case of another curator, Novikof, 
 who had come to examine (audit, as it is called) a school 
 in Novgorod. He finds at the teacher's two books : one, 
 a collection of Korolenko's tales ; the other, a volume of 
 Dostoyevski's. Xot having any idea as to who the first 
 author is, he looks for the name of the publisher and finds 
 the name of the magazine Russakaya Mysl (The Kus- 
 sian Thought), which is published in Moscow and edited
 
 MONSTROSITIES IN INSTRUCTION. 133 
 
 by Goltzef in a moderate, liberal spirit. He says, in 
 a discontented tone, "Don't read productions from the 
 socialist organ ! But," he continues, " what dissatisfies 
 me still more, is that you have Dostoyevski here. 
 He talks about love too much in his books. I know, 
 indeed, that it is the Christian love ; but it doesn't 
 matter, it is love all the same, and love is good enough 
 in the beginning, but look out how it ends ! " 
 
 Now, if we distinctly conceive what authority such a 
 curator of universities possesses, especially those who 
 rule over the universities at the capitals, we shall not 
 be greatly surprised at the monstrosities in instruction 
 to which the press now and then dares to call atten- 
 tion. Recently the Vyestnik Yevropi thus called at- 
 tention to the oddity of some lectures on psychology 
 which this spring seriously occupied the good society in 
 St. Petersburg. Vladislavlef, a professor of Philosophy, 
 gave an outline of psychology, which contained the fol- 
 lowing analysis of the sentiment of respect: "This sen- 
 timent," he said, " increases or diminishes in proportion 
 to the income of its object. A man who has three thou- 
 sand rubles a year necessarily has a great respect for a 
 man who has fifteen thousand. And a man who, for 
 example, has over seven million rubles a year (in this 
 he seems to allude to the Tsar) necessarily makes the 
 impression of a colossal greatness. On the other hand, 
 poverty engenders indifference or disdain." He said all 
 this without irony, and also not even citing many 
 instances of the fact, but as the expression of a psy- 
 chical law. 
 
 Where such a management and such instruction are 
 possible, it must be self-evident that the acquisition of 
 the higher education is rendered difficult for the young 
 men. So far as the young women are concerned, the
 
 134 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 conditions are even more unfavorable. Although it has 
 been constantly forbidden them to attend the universi- 
 ties of Russia, to say nothing of passing examinations 
 and taking degrees, still no young women in Europe 
 crave a scientific education like those of Russia. About 
 ten years ago, some liberal professors in St. Petersburg 
 and others in Moscow, under the leadership of Professor 
 Guerrier, established a kind of university for women in 
 each city. The professors of the universities and men 
 eminent for their literary culture (like Vesselovski and 
 Storosyenko) gave their time without pay, and young 
 girls from seventeen to twenty and upwards came in 
 crowds to hear good lectures on science, mathematics, 
 history, literature, and some other branches. As a mat- 
 ter of course, these lectures were neutral in politics. 
 For some time, a dislike for this course had been mani- 
 fested on the part of the Tsar. Por when the Tsaritsa 
 was asked to allow them to ornament the diplomas not 
 only with medallion portraits of the Tsaritsas Catherine 
 and Elizabeth, but also with hers, permission was re- 
 fused, so that it was necessary to put the date in the 
 space which was reserved for the portrait of the Tsar- 
 itsa Maria Peodorovna. A year ago last spring the uni- 
 versities for women received a blow in a communication 
 stating that they would be closed from and after the 
 month of June, 1887, and that all instruction of that kind 
 would be suspended. The expression that he wished to 
 send all the Russian women back home is, in Russia, gener- 
 ally attributed to a person occupying a very high position. 
 
 This is the condition in which the most intelligent 
 part of the youth grow up. 
 
 It was from feeling that in such conditions all exer- 
 tion to attain a higher position must fail, that Garshin 
 has a novel with the following argument.
 
 GARSHIN'S PARABLE. 135 
 
 A palm, which has been brought from its tropical 
 home to a conservatory in St. Petersburg, struggles 
 towards the clear sky and burning sun of its native 
 land. It grows on in the hope of bursting through the 
 glass roof of the conservatory and gaining its freedom. 
 Finally, the wished-for moment comes. The panes in 
 the roof yield to the pressure of its branches, the 
 curled-down plant stretches itself out into the clear air 
 of the open day. Then it meets the cold wind and the 
 damp snow. It is frozen through, its crown withers 
 away, and the owner of the conservatory has the tree 
 cut down.
 
 VIII. 
 
 "The Russian press! I am provoked at this ever- 
 lasting talk about the Russian press," broke out the 
 editor of the Russian paper having the widest circula- 
 tion. " There is simply no press in Russia. There are 
 printing-presses and paper, of course, and black marks 
 on a white surface ; there are editors and journalists, but 
 a press is not and cannot be found." 
 
 From the nature of the case, the Russian press cannot 
 have any political importance, entirely without regard to 
 the question whether, like the newspapers in the depart- 
 ments and some periodicals in the capitals, it has to pass 
 under the supervision of the censor or not. 
 
 The best known newspaper, in a foreign language, is 
 a French official journal (the Journal de St. Peters- 
 bourg) ; next the two larger German papers in St. 
 Petersburg (St. Petersburg ZeiUing and the " St. Peters- 
 burg Herald ") ; and a small German sheet in Moscow 
 (the Moscow Zeitung), the last being extremely moder- 
 ate, and at every opportunity only defends and demon- 
 strates the excellent, admirable relations which prevail 
 between Germany and Russia. Besides the official 
 government paper, and a little sheet written in a light 
 and entertaining, and sometimes rather frivolous style, 
 but which has a very large circulation, there are in 
 St. Petersburg two newspapers which are generally 
 read : Novosti (News), a so-called liberal paper, digni- 
 fied in its tone, edited by Notovitch, whose best assist- 
 
 136
 
 THE NOYOTE VREMTA. 137 
 
 ant, in directions which are not political, is the poet 
 P. Weinberg, the Avell known translator of Heine. 
 Since the pnblisher is of Jewish extraction, this paper 
 is continually taxed with serving the interests of the 
 Jews. It is sober, serious, earnest, supports the cause 
 of European culture, but is not on that account the less 
 patriotic in its attitude toward England and Germany. 
 
 With this paper the Novoye Vremya (the New Times) 
 lives in constant controversy. It is a well written jour- 
 nal, but entirely without principle, edited after the 
 pattern of the French Figaro (especially as this news- 
 paper was edited in earlier times), by Suvorin, a literary 
 man of business, who in his day made himself renowned 
 in Russia by his open declaration that the time had 
 now come when literature ought to step down from its 
 pedestal, and understand that it is a commodity like 
 other wares, subject to the same laws of supply and 
 demand as everything else, and that there is no disgrace 
 in it. In obedience to this view, Novoye Vremya drifts 
 with the wind ; in the shortest time possible attacks and 
 defends the same cause and the same person, generally 
 in incisive, entertaining articles. The newspaper is 
 more read than respected. It is known that it is with- 
 out faith and law (sans foi ni loi). From its nature it 
 cannot occupy a leading position, and its political influ- 
 ence is absolutely nil. 
 
 Since Suvorin, besides his newspaper, has a great pub- 
 lishing house in Moscow, his literary influence is neces- 
 sarily not unimportant. Many young liberal authors, for 
 the sake of the honorarium, exhibit the weakness of 
 putting their articles or novels into his widely circulated 
 sheet, however little they may sympathize with its 
 standpoint. Suvdrin spares no expense in advertising ; 
 and, as he has agents in all the large cities, Europe is
 
 138 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 constantly kept informed througli the telegraph bureau 
 of what the Novoye Vremya has said about this or that, 
 a thing in and for itself as unimportant as the barking 
 of a dog or the soughing of the wind in the streets of St. 
 Petersburg, but which at a distance is regarded as an 
 affair of some weight. The feuUleton of this sheet is 
 edited by a certain Burenin, who is entirely worthy of 
 his master. The other coadjutors take the tone which 
 is given them by Suvorin and by him. 
 
 About one of them, B of, a foreign author, who 
 
 had delivered a course of lectures in St. Petersburg, 
 
 related the following veritable anecdote : " B of 
 
 wrote to me several times, while I was still at home, 
 sent me a book, and ended with placing himself and the 
 Novoye Vremya at my disposal on the occasion of my 
 visit to St. Petersburg. Immediately after my arrival 
 he called on me, invited me to his house, with so much 
 zeal that he assured me that a plate was ready for me at 
 his table every day. He gave a very favorable report of 
 my first lecture, after having requested the use of my 
 notes in the preparation of his article. Several times 
 he expressed the wish that I would take his wife with 
 me on a shopping expedition. His manner was so insinu- 
 ating as to affect me not quite agreeably. I held a little 
 back ; and when, at last, after a renewed invitation, I 
 indicated that it would be impossible for me on that day 
 to make any purchases in company with his Avife, he 
 inserted in his paper the same evening, without any 
 reference to the preceding articles, the boldest attack 
 upon me. ' He had long kept silent, and watched,' said 
 the article, 'but at last so great a lack of talent and 
 conceit must be punished;' nay, concealing the fact, 
 known to him, that I had received one of my lectures 
 back from the censor, so that I was obliged to substitute
 
 KATKOF'S JOURNAL. 139 
 
 another, unknown in Riissia, but previously delivered, 
 he charged me principally with not being able to hit 
 upon anything new, but with confining myself to the 
 presentation of old and well known stories. * The 
 Kussian public,' it added, * was not so stupid as I sup- 
 posed, nor yet so ignorant. It is understood very well 
 that in such circumstances the stranger treats it like 
 a fool in order to get his fingers into its pockets.' " My 
 informant adds, "Even with abundant experience from 
 the press of other lands, even with all the surprises of 
 the past which no one who lives the literary life 
 escapes, the foreigner will be surprised at the shameless- 
 ness and corruption, not so much of some Russian as of 
 some particular St. Petersburg newspapers." 
 
 Moscow, like St. Petersburg, has two large news- 
 papers. One "is liberal, written in the best style, and 
 the most honorable of all the Russian newspapers, 
 Russklya Vyedomosti (The Russian Times), published by 
 Sobolevski, a quiet, honorable, energetic, and scientific 
 man, formerly a professor, but now an editor. This 
 daily paper, certainly the most widely circulated in Rus- 
 sia, has 30,000 subscribers. Kext to this is the news- 
 paper hitherto better known in Western Europe, the 
 Moskovskiija Vyedomosti, the organ of the lately de- 
 ceased Katkdf. 
 
 Katkdf was a man without much knowledge and of 
 little reading. In the last twenty years of his life he 
 never read a single book. There was no need of his 
 reading or thinking to support and maintain the general 
 Russification. But he wrote exceedingly well; he was 
 of the first rank among the prose authors. His paper 
 did not have many subscribers ; not a third part of what 
 the Russkiya Vyedonwuti has. But it was written for 
 a single reader, who never skipped a single number,
 
 140 IMPRSSStONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 his Majesty the Tsar Alexander III. And voluntary 
 subscribers were not wanting when it was supported by 
 the order of the government. All the institutions and 
 foundations of the Crown, the schools, courts, etc., were 
 bound to support this sheet. 
 
 When Katkdf died, and the state of his fortune came 
 to light, his name lost a large share of its glamour. He 
 left an astonishingly large fortune, so large that it could 
 not be explained except by gifts from the rich merchants 
 of Moscow. Katkdf had indeed met their views by 
 opposing all reduction of the tariff. It also made a dis- 
 agreeable impression on the Tsar that he, by an evasion 
 of the law, by a transfer of his property in his lifetime, 
 cheated the State of the succession tax in addition. 
 
 Besides the Moskovskiya Vyedomosti, which still 
 exists but has lost all importance, there has just been 
 started another newspaper in a similar spirit. The 
 weekly newspaper Grazhdanin (The Citizen) has be- 
 come a daily, and, according to report, the government 
 will grant it a large annual subsidy. It is to be edited 
 by the well known author of poor novels. Prince Me- 
 shcherski, a re-actionist and tale-bearer, is to have the 
 same drift as Katkdf's paper, only with out-and-out 
 servility instead of talent. 
 
 The more important monthlies play a greater part 
 than in any other land, for the rules of the censorship 
 allow much to appear in a periodical that would be for- 
 bidden in a book form. Nevertheless in the last ten 
 years several of the best Russian reviews, like the 
 Dyelo, for example, have been suppressed. Every month 
 there appears a number of each of the large periodicals, 
 as thick as two numbers of the Eevue des deux Mondes 
 together. 
 
 The best known is Vyestnik Yevropi (The European
 
 MONTHLY PERIODICALS. 141 
 
 Messenger), edited by Stassulevitch, a stately and finely 
 cultivated man about sixty years old, formerly a univer- 
 sity teacher, now occupied with economical and hygienic 
 questions, such as the improvement of the river water 
 in St. Petersburg. His periodical is the organ of correct 
 liberalism. It has a circulation of 7,000. The two great 
 authors, now old men, Gontchardf and Arsenief, con- 
 tribute to this magazine, the former at the present time 
 publishing his life, and the latter a clever, scientific 
 critic, affable towards the younger generation. It relies 
 on a circle of men among whom the literary historians 
 Pypin and Spasovitch are well known. The latter has 
 already been spoken of. The former, who originally 
 belonged to Tchernuishevski's group and passed for a 
 radical, but escaped accusation, as author of the great 
 work, " The History of the Slavic Literature," in which 
 the pressure laid on by the censor is felt all the way 
 through, has presented a profound and real representa- 
 tion of the intellectual struggle for existence, and liter- 
 ary productions of the different Slavic races. Unfortu- 
 nately the most important part, the history of the 
 literature of Great Russia, is still wanting. The two 
 eminent advocates and publicists Koni and Utin are 
 also coadjutors of the Vyestnik Yevropi. The former 
 is best known as an author by his interesting treat- 
 ment of " Dostoyevski as an analyst of crime ; " the 
 other, by the series of articles published in the periodical 
 under the title " From Bulgaria," which was forbidden 
 publication in book form by the censor. 
 
 By the side of this great St. Petersburg review stands 
 Goltzef's Moscow periodical, Russkaya Myd (The Rus- 
 sian Thought), as suggested above, conducted in the 
 same spirit as Russkiya Vyedomostl, and supported by 
 the contributors to that daily paper. It has 10,000 sub- 
 scribers.
 
 142 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 Finally there is the Severni Vyestnik (The Northern 
 Messenger), with 4,800 subscribers, published by a lady, 
 Miss Evreinova, hitherto the most sprightly and most 
 modern of these periodicals, but which has now met 
 with a very great loss, because the celebrated and influ- 
 ential critic Mikhailovski has separated from it, and may 
 possibly carry a staff of sympathizers with him. This 
 periodical, on account of the advanced views of several 
 of the contributors, is suspected by the government and 
 placed under the censor. Miss Evreinova is a lady in 
 the forties, with a stern face and gray hair. She has 
 spent several years on the shores of the Adriatic near 
 Montenegro, in the study of the old Slavic conditions, 
 has copied and published manuscripts written in old 
 Slavic. Having used up her property in this work, she 
 assumed the publication of Severni Vyestnik as a means 
 of subsistence. She is a Russian slave to duty, with a 
 good but not discriminating intellect. 
 
 Her circle of contributors has hitherto chiefly con- 
 sisted of bright literary Bohemians, who in Russia are 
 utterly poor, hungry, and in debt, the older among them 
 generally unhappily married. They live exclusively 
 with each other in a world by themselves, sadly 
 enough, almost without exception, addicted to drink, and 
 utterly wanting in nervous equipoise on account of their 
 many years of misery and exile. Among them there are 
 still several eminent authors, who have succeeded in 
 passing through the anxieties of a literary life and of 
 exile with unimpaired bodily and mental health. 
 
 There was Pratopopof, who long ago contributed to the 
 ** Annals of our Fatherland," with great talent and 
 spirit. Then he was exiled, and is now back again. 
 There is Korolenko, who, broad-shouldered and boyish, 
 has returned from Yakutsk. There was Garshin, who.
 
 GLYEB USPTENSKI. 148 
 
 though subject to repeated attacks of insanity, has pub- 
 lished fine and vigorous novels. He was greatly under 
 the influence of Tolstoi, but nevertheless has his own 
 stamp of desperate pessimism. There was the leader 
 Mikhailovski himself, in his style inclined to the imita- 
 tion of the satirical tone of Saltykof, as a critic audacious 
 and wily, who is capable of placing a not inconsiderable 
 store of learning and remarkable ingenuity at the service 
 of the opposition. There is Zlatovratski, who describes 
 almost ideal peasants, and, himself resembling a poor 
 workman of the peasant rank, poor as Job, with a great 
 flock of children, and such a slave to alcohol that he does 
 not any longer dare to go out in the streets alone. 
 Finally there is Glyeb Uspyenski, a great and shining 
 talent, far more important than his brother, Nikolai 
 Uspyenski, whose Viesna was translated into Danish 
 by Thor Lange. In Glyeb, who is familiarly called by 
 his first name, the advanced youth see their apostle. 
 Unfortunately he too has fallen so low as to spend six 
 or seven hours on a stretch in the dram-shops of St. 
 Petersburg, but his abilities have not been impaired by 
 his irregular life outside of the pale of society. His 
 works, consisting of nothing but short stories, already fill 
 a long row of volumes. At the present time he presents 
 in novels and articles only the woman of the working 
 class, and he works over and elucidates the idea, which 
 haunts him, that this woman has no right to be a mother, 
 since she cannot support her child. He pictures the 
 loose morals of factory life, and the unmerited disgrace 
 which falls upon the woman who errs ; but he also 
 writes for the working-women, with the design of im- 
 pressing upon them that they, for the sake of the chil- 
 dren, ought not to become mothers. 
 
 Glyeb Uspyenski is the genuine literary gypsy. He
 
 144 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 borrows and gets along without troubling himself about 
 money. He cannot see a needy person without giving 
 him all the money he has with him, and often more ; 
 for he borrows of one to give to another. The admira- 
 tion which is given him in wide circles prevents any one 
 being angry with him for any irregularity. He is 
 forgiven with the words, "We must remember it is 
 Glyeb." 
 
 Apart from a few of the most eminent of these authors, 
 it may be said that what is common to all these younger 
 and older authors is propensity to drink, laxity in money 
 matters, lack of fundamental culture, and an every-day 
 dull melancholy. Several of them are utterly ruined by 
 the homeless life, with its debauches of ale, champagne, 
 and women. The loss of all illusions as to the attain- 
 ment of freedom and happiness, the feeling of boundless 
 disappointment in life, and of a lack of means to do any- 
 thing for the people or the country, brings them to 
 despair, and to seek to forget the despair in a life of 
 stupefaction. 
 
 It is clear that these writers know only a very small 
 part of society, and possess only a restricted and peculiar 
 intellectual culture. And as they have no acquaintance 
 with the higher classes of society, from which they sus- 
 piciously keep aloof, so these classes have no acquaint- 
 ance with them. Towards society in St. Petersburg 
 they occupy the position of pariahs. At best their works 
 only are known. The authors as persons have no exist- 
 ence for the fine gentlemen and ladies. 
 
 Even the oldest and greatest of them live entirely 
 secluded, and almost every one of them has a wife, who 
 does not understand him at all, and with whom it is 
 only with difficulty that he continues to live ; yet the 
 author makes all sorts of concessions from his good
 
 OUR POMPADOURS. 145 
 
 nature. When a near friend one day said to one of the 
 most important, an old man, " How can a stupid woman 
 get such a control over a man ? " he answered, " Only a 
 stupid woman. A man who has something to do has no 
 weapons against stupidity, which tires, nags, always be- 
 gins over, and never knows when it is beaten. An 
 amiable and intellectual woman would never gain such 
 an influence over her husband." 
 
 The old Saltykof (Shchedrin), the satirist, the most 
 popular author of liberal Russia, at the present time is 
 lying ill of the gout, and it is hardly likely that he will 
 recover. In the eyes of those who value the tendencies 
 in their poetical works more than that which is essen- 
 tially poetical therein, he is a greater author than Tolstoi. 
 Of all the authors now living, he is certainly the one 
 who has most consistently made use of irony as the 
 style of prose writing. In his whole form he is the 
 unconscious product of the circumstances. With a pas- 
 sion like his for justice and for civil freedom on the one 
 side, and the government on the other, all criticism of 
 the situation must necessarily assume the character of 
 pleasantry. But what pleasantry ! Read as an illustra- 
 tion his book, " Our Pompadours." 
 
 By a remarkable change in the meaning of the word, 
 they mean in the daily speech in Russia by the word 
 Pompadour, a man who governs by the aid of the rule 
 of his mistress. In Saltykof s work provincial governors 
 of this kind are characterized by the dozen. 
 
 As an idea of his method of representation, take this 
 fragment of a dialogue : The clerk is met in the morn- 
 ing at the office by his superior, an official under the 
 governor, with the exclamation, " Do you know that our 
 fellow has been dismissed ? " " Of whom does your 
 Excellency condescend to speak to me ? " " Of whom ?
 
 146 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 Of our little Pompadour, naturally." ''At this answer," 
 relates the clerk, "my heart stood still in my breast. 
 Little by little, it began to beat again ; I thought that 
 we should not be left without a head." "Does your 
 Excellency know who has been named as his successor ? " 
 "A certain Udarin." "A general ? " " Yes, a gen- 
 eral." ^ "Of what kind, if I may ask?" "A mam- 
 mal." " We were both thoughtful," continues the clerk. 
 " Then I went out into the market, and told the news to 
 some muzhiks who stood there. ' Do you know that his 
 Excellency Aufimof is no longer our governor ? ' ' Bah, 
 what of it ! ' The peasant had scarcely uttered these 
 words before my hand had given a sound whack on his 
 cheek. ' But a new one is coming ! a new one is com- 
 ing ! ' bellowed the peasant. I continued to strike I 
 heard it not. At last, it fell like dew upon my soul : ' A 
 new one is coming.' That was the consolation. I gave 
 the peasant ten kopeks." 
 
 Another sketch describes how the clerk one line morn- 
 ing, when the newly installed governor gives a free rein 
 to his ideas and dreams about his coming administra- 
 tion, allows himself the remark that the law sets certain 
 bounds to these fantasies ; as, for instance, as to whip- 
 ping. There are cases where the law declares it to be 
 useful, and others in which it is forbidden. " You will 
 then have the goodness to inform me when, and when 
 not," said the governor, ironically. " Not I, your High- 
 ness, but the law." "That is becoming interesting." 
 The governor, it appears further, had long known that 
 there were laws, but he always conceived them as bound 
 books arranged in a case. It was for him the order, 
 lawful order. When he, on the other hand, saw these 
 
 1 In Russia, there ai'e civil as well as military generals, and just as 
 many of them.
 
 PATRONAGE. 147 
 
 same books lying about among others on a table in a 
 room, that was disorder. But what he did not know was 
 that these same laws allowed him certain acts and for- 
 bade him others. He regarded them simply as a hymn, 
 composed in the interests of the small pompadours, for 
 their honor, to serve them for recreation. Since he was 
 modest by nature, and blushed whenever he heard any 
 one echo his praises, it can be understood that he did 
 not care to fumble in the laws. When it now dawned 
 upon the governor that the law forbids him to sentence 
 the bigwig Proshorof, whom he was burning to let feel 
 his wrath, to a good sound whipping, he became very 
 uneasy. It soothed him very little that, according to the 
 clerk's disclosure, he always had the recourse of having 
 him flogged secretly and without witnesses. And now 
 his state of mind at this discovery is portrayed. "He 
 had never yet felt such an annoyance. It seemed to him 
 as if he had fallen into a danger, and as if he heard an 
 inward challenge not to be a coward, but to show per- 
 sonal courage." And he shouted with the voice of a 
 commander : " Let Proshorof be flogged on the spot 
 publicly." 
 
 A favorite subject for Shchedrin's satire is the system 
 of patronage, which flourishes in Russia as nowhere else. 
 Every kind of patronage is possible here, if you have 
 connections among the superior officers. A St. Peters- 
 burg family of my acquaintance, who were going down 
 to Southern Russia, had a whole railway carriage sent 
 up from Orel, and travelled in it from St. Petersburg 
 down to the door of their country house. It even hap- 
 pened to me that one night on the railroad at Smolensk 
 a separate carriage, with a bed ready for use, was placed 
 at my disposal by the station-master, who had received 
 an order to that effect from his superior, while the oecu-
 
 148 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 pants, in spite of my protest, were turned out and placed 
 elsewhere. "You need not say anything against it," said 
 the station-master to me. " You may be sure that there is 
 not one of them who has paid for his ticket." I inquired 
 of some of the bystanders, and it appeared that such 
 was the fact. Thus, on this occasion, the higher patron- 
 age did not violate other privileges than those which 
 were acquired by the exercise of inferior authority. An- 
 other favorite subject for attack with Shchedrin is the 
 system of bribery, which flourishes in consequence of 
 the low intellectual standpoint and poor pay of the offi- 
 cials. That these men are stupid and servile is chiefly 
 because, as a rule, they must rise in the service from the 
 lower ranks. They are frequently invalids when they 
 approach towards power and influence. As the phrase 
 goes, "My uncle, the general, had a fit of apoplexy, so 
 he became a senator ; he lost his sight, and then he was 
 made a member of the council of the empire. If he can 
 only have a new accident he will die as minister." Brib- 
 ery naturally has its root in the fact that the salaries are 
 so low. They regard the drink money which is given to 
 the officials about as we do the honorarium which is 
 given to the clergy, although the latter also have their 
 salaries from the State. The worst of it is that the rela- 
 tion of the officials to the treasury of the State is often 
 so untrustworthy. From that comes the Russian prov- 
 erb, "All steal, except Christ," with the blasphemous 
 addition, " and he would if his hands were not nailed to 
 the cross." Or this proverb, " If you are going to talk 
 to an official, you must talk rubles to him." All these 
 customs have one good side, that the officials, just because 
 of their lax morals, sell the common people an otherwise 
 unattainable freedom : tolerance, impunity for the inno- 
 cent, and free passage for men and books. But it will
 
 RUSSIAN SCHOLABS. 149 
 
 be understood that this circumstance does not make the 
 government any more worthy of respect. 
 
 An administration like this naturally invites a satiri- 
 cal, humorous treatment like Shchedrin's. If you com- 
 pare his satire with that of a Polish author of the same 
 period, like Svientochovski, you will find that, while the 
 satire of the Pole is almost always anti-clerical, and is 
 weakened in its effects upon the masses by the appear- 
 ance of anything unpatriotic, yet in this direction the 
 Russian satire has its sting unsheathed and its spear-head 
 tempered and glowing like that which was plunged into 
 the eye of Cyclops by Odysseus. 
 
 The most important of the contributors to the news- 
 papers and periodicals have now been mentioned. Next 
 comes a whole long list of authors, historical, critical, 
 philosophical, and anthropological, whose learning is 
 irreproachable, whose style is a trifle professorial, and 
 who as a rule lack inspiration. 
 
 Among the historians, jurists, and critics who have 
 already been mentioned, as well as outside of these cir- 
 cles, the foreigner meets many who at first make this 
 impression upon him : They remind him of the German 
 scholars, particularly as they were a generation ago. 
 They have solidity, earnestness, and a little heaviness. 
 A Russian philologian is, indeed, only exceptionally 
 (like Korsh, in Moscow) crammed with learning like a 
 German, but to compensate for this these scholars are 
 usually able to clothe their thoughts in a much more 
 available form. They do not have the boyish innocence, 
 which at seventy unites red cheeks and light blue eyes, 
 as I have seen in the old German philologian Fleischer. 
 But they do have especially the Little Russians 
 breadth, good nature, which smiles in great dimples on a 
 brown cheek, roguishness, as a clever woman is roguish.
 
 150 IMPBESSIONS OF EUSSIA. 
 
 They are impregnated with the modesty of genuine and 
 refined culture. While the German, whether he has a 
 better or poorer opinion of himself, always and with 
 a certain degree of right acts upon the theory of the 
 conceded superiority of German science, the Russian 
 often places the information and knowledge of the for- 
 eigner above his own. The more he knows, the less con- 
 tented he is in general with the development of science 
 in Russia. 
 
 Among the scientists and authors in Russia there are 
 men of great originality, men whose whole being shows 
 how much originality is suppressed by the Russian rule. 
 Such a man is the naturalist Mikluho-Maklay. 
 
 He is not only a distinguished anthropologist, but 
 king of the Australasian island which bears his name. 
 He came back to St. Petersburg with his wife, an Eng- 
 lishwoman from Sidney, to publish a great work. As 
 king he had the right on his island to have one hundred 
 and forty-seven native wives, but, according to his own 
 account, he has not availed himself of it. He is a fine 
 man, with white hair, nearly fifty years old, with a 
 splendid head and young eyes. He is such a sufferer 
 from the gout that he lies all day long stretched out on 
 a deer-skin. He loves as his place of residence only the 
 island Maklay and the Happy Men's Islands, which sur- 
 round it. 
 
 The following little trait is genuine Russian : On his 
 table stands a lamp, made of the skull of a woman he 
 once loved, a young girl whom he nursed in the hospital 
 when as a young man he was studying medicine. Above 
 the skull is an oil-receiver and above this a green 
 lamp-shade. By the light of this lamp he does his work 
 in all parts of the world. Probably it is only a Russian 
 that would rather linger over the skull of his mistress
 
 gontchar6f. 151 
 
 than her portrait, and only a Russian who would turn it 
 to that use. Even the eccentricity of an Englishman 
 would hardly go to that extent. 
 
 Maklay detests and despises Giers. He had long 
 sought in vain from the Minister of Foreign Affairs 
 for permission to hoist the Russian flag over his island, 
 without being able to obtain the concession he sought 
 for. Then, one fine day, Bismarck caused the German 
 flag to be hoisted. Maklay telegraphed to Giers. He 
 replied : " We shall protect you, but no violence ! " As 
 if Maklay, with his poor uncivilized subjects, could use 
 violence against the German navy. This man has thus 
 become a German subject. 
 
 Originality is most strongly marked as a peculiarity 
 among other leading men in science and literature 
 in Russia. What grandiose forms it has assumed in 
 Tolstoi is well known, but in him, as is also Avell 
 known, it has a religious motive. In old Gontcharof, 
 on the contrary, who at an early period did his best 
 work in " Obldmof," it has by a comparative barren- 
 ness of many years, and by an effeminacy nursed by 
 the great admiration he has received, reached a height 
 which renders social intercourse with him difficult. 
 
 During the winter, he had promised to read a novel 
 which he had written for the illustrated weekly news- 
 paper Niva, in a house where he is a welcome and 
 honored guest. The sight of a lady whom he did not 
 know, and who had been invited to be present, so upset 
 him that he declared that he would not read at all. A 
 strange countenance, though young and pretty, was 
 enough to make his anger disconcert him. The follow- 
 ing little trait shows the irritable passion in him, which 
 seems to be an outcrop of a genuine Russian rudeness 
 at the bottom of his character: Turgenief and he had
 
 152 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 had a kindred idea of a novel and had talked it over 
 with each other. Turgenief published his novel first. 
 It is the one with the title ''A Nest of Nobles."^ 
 Gontcharof reads the novel, becomes furiously exas- 
 perated, sees Turgenief on the street, and runs after 
 him shouting, " Stop, thief ! stop, thief ! " Even now, 
 when Turgenief's name is mentioned in his presence, he 
 foams with rage. 
 
 It is evidently not easy to characterize the public to 
 which the Russian newspapers and periodicals address 
 themselves throughout the empire. It is too much scat- 
 tered ; and it is far more difficult than in the world of 
 readers of other countries for it to gain an expression 
 and receive examination through "the voice of the 
 people." Nevertheless, by many indications we can 
 conclude that it is docile in a high degree, unprejudiced, 
 and easily acted upon. The quality of a thorough appro- 
 priation of that which is read ought to be weaker than 
 in the principal countries of Europe, but the capacity to 
 receive is, without doubt, greater. The enthusiasm of 
 the female sex is especially great. 
 
 In the provincial towns a caricature of this peculiarity 
 is very often met with. I saw a lady from Orel, " still 
 young," bedecked and powdered, who passed as the 
 literary oracle of the town. She was an enthusiastic 
 admirer of Richepin, and quoted boldly : 
 
 L^ amour queje sens, V amour qui me cuit, 
 Ce rCest pas V amour chaste et platonique, 
 Sorbet h la neige, etc. 
 
 It was well meant, and in and for itself did not show 
 bad taste, but was exceedingly unbecoming. Another 
 1 Also publislied with the English title " Lisa."
 
 INFATUATION FOR POETS. 153 
 
 lady from Kharkof, old and stiff, was, in her own opin- 
 ion, the source of refinement for the place. She insti- 
 tuted readings of the masterpieces of Russian literature 
 for the common people, was also a writer, was loud- 
 voiced, noisy, knew everything that was printed, liter- 
 ary to the tips of her fingers and toes. 
 
 It is also true that among the Slavic people there is 
 seen more often than in other places that kind of enthu- 
 siasm for a poet or author which makes a woman worship 
 him for her whole life. It is hardly an accident that 
 the lady who for .twenty years continued in uninter- 
 rupted correspondence with Balzac, and at last married 
 him, was a Pole, Mme. Hanska, of the renowned family 
 of Rzewuski. Her daughter married a Mniszek. 
 
 In our time in St. Petersburg, a lady of a good family 
 has been seen to leave her husband and her home to run 
 away with the poet Nadson, then mortally ill, and nurse 
 him till his death ; and she now lives only in his 
 memory and for his fame. This lady's feelings for the 
 poet, and her worship of him, were cruelly made sport 
 of in the last years of his life and after his death, 
 although it is, nevertheless, ethnographically significant, 
 because it shows how strong the faith is in the highest 
 literary enthusiasm in Russia. 
 
 Some months after Nadson's death, his fair friend 
 published a somewhat comprehensive correspondence 
 between the poet and a lady of distinction, an anony- 
 mous countess, who had written to him without ever 
 having seen him or having made his acquaintance per- 
 sonally. The letters of the woman are fine but gro- 
 tesque. According to all indications, a young, beautiful, 
 aristocratically educated woman, not long married, had 
 apparently fallen in love with Nadson without ever 
 having met him, only from reading his poetry and seeing
 
 154 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 his portrait. The exchange of letters lasted for seven 
 months. Her letters were full of fire and constantly 
 more passionate. His answers were not without tender- 
 ness, yet calm and comparatively cold, although it can 
 be seen he had been much moved by this wonderful love, 
 which came to him so unsought and unexpected. Then 
 he dies. Shortly after, according to the preface of the 
 editress, the fair writer of the letters also died, but not 
 until she had obtained from her husband his word of 
 honor that he would give his consent to the publica- 
 tion not only of the letters which she had received 
 from the poet, but of those which she herself had 
 written. 
 
 For several months this correspondence was the sub- 
 ject of the attention and sympathy of the Russian 
 reading world. Then it was discovered, as had been 
 first suggested in the feuilleton of a newspaper as a 
 derisive conjecture, that the poet and his fair friend 
 had been the victims of a bold forgery. From what 
 motive it is uncertain, but a lady Avho frequented the 
 house, at first continually entertained the friend with 
 accounts of a certain countess of her acquaintance, who 
 lived in a state of hero-worship for Kadson. Then she 
 began to bring letters, said that she was willing to carry 
 back the answers, and thus for more than half a year 
 had kept the intrigue on foot. First she was compelled 
 to admit the death of the countess for the very good 
 reason that she had never lived ; then she confessed that 
 she had fabricated all the anonymous protestations of 
 love. It is unimportant whether her motive had been 
 her desire to make herself interesting, a disposition to 
 mystify, or only a mania for romancing and a vigorous 
 imagination. The only thing that is significant about it 
 is that the whole of the Russian i)ublic found nothing
 
 AUTnonS' REWARDS. 155 
 
 unusual or incredible ii\ such a personal passion, evoked 
 by black on white, without personal influences. 
 
 What is still more remarkable, you will not infre- 
 quently find in the men a similarly exalted nature, 
 readily receptive of literary enthusiasm. I think it is 
 in unison with the fact that certain types, among the 
 educated Eussians especially, have an uncommonly great 
 inclination to cultivate a life of emotion. Just so far 
 as, by aid of the life and literature, one can comprehend 
 the domain, which it is so difficult to penetrate, they 
 seem to fall more deeply in love and with more reverence 
 than in our time is the rule in other countries. The 
 very young Kussian expects a kind of spiritual aid and 
 salvation from the woman he loves. The older man, 
 when in love, tries to supply his wants by sustained 
 homage. It is the same propensity to worship which 
 leads the men of the lower classes in hordes to the 
 religious sects and mystics. And it is this which in the 
 domain of literature becomes an exquisite sensibility. 
 
 In spite of the great size of the empire, authorship is 
 not economically remunerative in Russia. Except the 
 two greatest poets, and some journalists without con- 
 science, no one earns money there by his labor with his 
 pen. But in a deeper sense, perhaps, in no other place 
 is it better rewarded to expose one's emotions and 
 thoughts in an article, an essay, or a larger book. The 
 author is understood by great groups of people with 
 a cordiality, and is appropriated with an intensity and 
 devotion which are exceptional elsewhere. 
 
 Everything there which can quench the thirst, the 
 burning intellectual thirst, is absorbed like dew-drops 
 on an arid soil.
 
 IX. 
 
 We had driven out to a large restaurant outside of 
 Moscow to hear the gypsies sing and see them dance. 
 Accompanied by the male members of the families, they 
 came in crowds, with the chief of the tribe at the head, 
 into the room where people sit and eat in the evening, 
 and sang a series of wild, wonderfully sonorous songs. 
 Several of the young girls dance ; a dance which had 
 nothing European in it, a dance for which only the free 
 space of a square between the chair and the table is 
 required, because the dancer, in a contracted place, 
 moves every fibre of her body while in apparent repose. 
 This pantomime, which is a whirlwind within these 
 limits, is Asiatic or African. The song, on the other 
 hand, to which the Russians take great pleasure in listen- 
 ing, barbaric as it sounds, is less original. If several 
 of the melodies are really gypsy tunes, still the mass of 
 them are, in fact, Russian national songs, which the 
 gypsies have appropriated and made their own. And 
 the language which they sing is Russian. Evidently the 
 musical taste of the Russian peasant, the poetic charac- 
 ter of the Russian national songs, have set their own 
 stamp upon the spirit of this foreign race so insuscep- 
 tible to external influences, so that the Russian, who seeks 
 among the gypsies for that which is unlike himself, for 
 the strange and the new, unknown to himself, finds not 
 a little of his own. 
 
 These were the thoughts which the grotesque song 
 
 156
 
 EARLY LOG HOUSES. 157 
 
 and dance first awakened in me, and when they were ex- 
 pressed they led by a connection of thought to a conver- 
 sation about the Russian peculiarity and power of assimi- 
 lation in architecture and the plastic art. This started 
 many ideas, and now, after the lapse of a year, brings 
 me to giving such an account as I can of Russia's artistic 
 originality in the past and in the present. 
 
 The Russians early showed originality in the art of 
 building. While the Scandinavians hewed the tree in 
 order to make their oldest log-houses, the Russians placed 
 the trunks of the trees one above the other, and fastened 
 them at their outer ends, so as to make walls. We do 
 the Russians injustice, therefore, when, without further 
 investigation, we call their art of building Byzantine, 
 for the Byzantine art has in its forms not the least sug- 
 gestion of a previous log-building. It was only in the 
 eleventh century that the Russians began to erect 
 churches after the Byzantine types, and even then they 
 ornamented them with Asiatic and Slavic elements. 
 
 The Scythian burial mounds, which have been opened 
 in the middle of this century, have brought to light a 
 medley of purely Greek and of Asiatic-Slavic objects of 
 art. Many of the antique Russian ornaments which 
 represent the forms of animals or plants, show in them- 
 selves a kind of animals and plants which have never 
 existed in Russia, the influence of the East, of Persia, 
 nay of India. But the Russian reproduction, which is 
 free from any iiifluence from Byzantium, has its distinct 
 peculiarities. 
 
 It is different with the production of religioiis images, 
 the representation of saints. In this domain Russia 
 has been and Russia has become wholly Byzantine. On 
 this point it has not separated in any respect from the 
 rest of the Greek Catholic Church of Eastern Europe.
 
 158 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 But, so far as religious architecture is concerned, there 
 the oldest Eussian churches are plainly distinguished 
 from the unmixed Byzantine style, by their slender 
 forms and the endeavor to tower into the heavens. 
 
 At the end of the twelfth century Russian art had 
 already become so advanced that it was not behind that 
 of Western Europe nor of Byzantium. The Russian 
 art-craftsmen understood how to work in metal with 
 such dexterity that their fame extended far and wide. 
 In the middle of the thirteenth century, the French 
 ambassadors found them in the Tatar-Mongolian service. 
 The holy Louis of France sent an embassy from Cyprus 
 to the great Khan of Tatary, whose force at that time 
 occupied a large part of Russia. The messengers found 
 a Russian architect and a French goldsmith working for 
 him. And Du Plan Carpin, who in 1246 was sent by In- 
 nocent IV. to the great Khan Gajuk, and who described 
 the pomp and wealth of the Tatar Court, speaks of a 
 Russian goldsmith who was a favorite of the Khan, 
 and who had made a throne of ivory, adorned with gold 
 and precious stones and ornamented with bas-reliefs. 
 
 It is utterly improbable that the Tatars, in the long 
 time they ruled Russia, should have tried to give a dif- 
 ferent direction to the artistic taste and style of the peo- 
 ple. Nomads as they were, they had no artistic style 
 of their own, and did not trouble themselves about the 
 Russians, except to get money out of them. But the Ta- 
 tar Khans, in all probability, served as means of com- 
 munication between the Asiatic races who possessed an 
 artistic style, on the one hand, and the oppressed Rus- 
 sian people, on the other. The Russian artists who 
 resided among them looked deeply into the art forms 
 of the interior of Asia, which were new to them, and 
 they remembered them when they came home. In 1247
 
 INFLUENCES FROM THE EAST. 159 
 
 the Russian national hero and saint, Alexander Nevsky, 
 celebrated for his victories over the Swedes and the Ger- 
 man order of knights, was obliged to pay a personal visit 
 to the camp of the golden hordes, and was thence taken 
 to the great Khan himself, in order to obtain a desired 
 alleviation and mitigation of the conditions of vassalage. 
 The journey took two years, and shows how many points 
 in common there were between the two courts, and how 
 easily impressions must have been received. 
 
 In this respect, I am greatly struck by a quotation by 
 Viollet-le-Duc in his work on Russian art, from Marco 
 Polo, the famous Venetian traveller, the first European 
 who (in the thirteenth century) travelled in and described 
 Asia. In this it is shown that a strong influence from 
 Eastern Asia has been effective in the production of the 
 gilded and colored metal cupolas, the variegated roofs 
 and highly colored walls in Russia. He thus describes 
 the palace of the great Khan in the city of Khanbalu : 
 
 "ia sale est si grant et si larges, que Men hi tnenuient 
 plus de six milles homes. II ha tanfes chambres que e'en 
 est mervoilles d, voir. II est si grant et si hien fait que 
 ne a home au monde que le pooir en aiist qti'il le seust 
 viiaiis ordrer nefaire et la covreture desoure sunt tout ver- 
 moile et vers bloies et jaunes et de tous colors et sunt enver- 
 tree si bien et si soitilement, qu^il sunt respredisant come 
 cristiaus, si que mont ou loigne environ le palais luissent. 
 Et sachies que cele covreiise est si fort et si fermeement 
 fait que dure maint a7is.'' ^ 
 
 i " The palace is so large and broad that it will hold more than six 
 thousand men. There are so many rooms tliat it is a wonder to see. 
 It is so large and so well built that no man in the world could ask for 
 or do it better, and the roof of it is vermilion and blue and yellow glass 
 of all colors, and it is so well and so skilfully varnished that it shines 
 like crj'Stal, so that the palace glistens far in the distance. And know 
 that this roof is strong, and so firmly built that it has endured for 
 many years."
 
 160 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 Although Russian scholars like Strogonof and Mar- 
 tinof have zealously fought against Viollet-le-Duc's theo- 
 ries about the Tatar and Indian influence in Russian 
 architecture and ornamentation, he seems to me to be 
 right in his view that the Russian art of building is 
 composed of elements which are almost wholly borrowed 
 from the East. 
 
 Russian art has been essentially religious, because the 
 religious sentiment in Russia (as in Poland) has been 
 fused with love for the fatherland and the place of birth. 
 The question with the clergy was how to fasten the 
 attention of the people upon religious subjects, and, since 
 the common people could not read, religious painting 
 was employed as a kind of figurative language ; and, in 
 order that this language should be understood at all 
 times, all changes were avoided. A hierarchical canon 
 was borrowed from the Byzantine masters, and in the 
 lapse of centuries nothing whatever has been changed 
 in the form and stamp of the images. The holy icon 
 was a national symbol, like the flag in later times, 
 revered and unchangeable as a coat-of-arms ; it repre- 
 sented a grave, thin, ascetic person in a long garment, 
 which was the ideal of the stalwart, carnally minded 
 men of the earlier days. 
 
 But it was only in this domain that Russian art was 
 stationary. Especially from the moment when Constan- 
 tinople was no longer a Christian city, but in the hands 
 of the Turks, the Russians ceased to seek there for 
 artistic forms, and in the fourteenth century their origi- 
 nal production reached its climax. With a prudent use 
 of their natural materials, they erected churches and 
 houses which exactly answered to their needs ; they man- 
 ufactured leather and ornamented it ; they wove cloths 
 and embroidered them in a manner which exactly an-
 
 CHURCHES AND DECORATIONS. 161 
 
 swered to their sense of beauty. At the same epoch 
 that the unity of .the empire was worked out, their 
 artistic production took on a homogeneous stamp. 
 
 They gave to their church edifices, which were sym- 
 bolical of the Kussian national characteristics, as much 
 splendor as possible. They were intended to attract 
 attention by their size and by the striking outline of 
 the highest parts. They connected a crown of cupolas 
 around a central cupola, gave them the form of a tower, 
 and crowned them with a skilfully worked-out bulb of 
 gilded or colored metal, which ended in a cross furnished 
 and united by chains. They gave to the outer walls, 
 which were covered with tiles, enamelled faience and 
 paintings, the character of a radiant, cheerful carpet. 
 The predominant colors are red, white, and green, which 
 last color is even specially adapted to the bulb-shaped 
 metal top.^ 
 
 And the Tatar rule was scarcely shaken off before 
 the Muscovites disclosed the greatest talent as artistic 
 armorers, as masters of chasing gold and silver and 
 working in 7iiello ; and they supplied all the neighboring 
 countries with embroidered linen and artistically manu- 
 factured leather. Their embroidery is distinguished, 
 like the vignettes on their old manuscripts, by the har- 
 monious combination of color* They have, upon the 
 whole, a keener sense of the harmony of colors than for 
 plastic beauty. Since the law for them as painters is 
 not inventive power but fidelity, they sought to atone for 
 the Byzantine stiffness of their figures and the lifeless- 
 ness of their paintings by surrounding them with gold, 
 precious stones, and pearls, and thus change the images 
 to a kind of gorgeous decoration. And since they did 
 not dare to make any change, and as no kind of origi- 
 1 Viollet-le-Duc: L'Art Rxisse, p. 108.
 
 162 IMPRESSIONS OF liUSSIA. 
 
 nality could be exhibited in the treatment of the head 
 and countenance of the holy persons, they strove, in 
 consequence, to make amends by encircling these heads 
 with golden halos, inlaid with pearls and precious stones, 
 and engraved with the most delicate appreciation of art, 
 and by ornamenting the breast of the image with plates 
 inlaid with gold and silver in blazing designs, and 
 worked in niello with arabesques. Some of these halos 
 and breast-plates from the sixteenth century, with small 
 green leaves and small blue flowers inlaid in the gold 
 matte, or with green in diiferent shades, enclosed by 
 white lines, and with single black leaves and black 
 geometric lines in the gold, are of a beauty, of a fasci- 
 nating, inspiring loveliness, of which no description can 
 convey any idea. 
 
 The common houses, built of the trunks of trees, 
 remind one of the manner of building in Switzerland 
 and Norway. Kindred material has produced kindred 
 forms, even if the peculiar Russian stamp is easily 
 recognizable. Thus even before the time of Peter the 
 Great, Russia had fully developed its artistic peculiari- 
 ties. In so far as the foreign invasion which ensued 
 did not place itself at the service of these peculiarities, 
 it only succeeded in retarding or stoj)ping their develop- 
 ment until the national spirit in this century took a 
 new start in artistic as well as in other domains. 
 
 The nineteenth century has brought an art of painting 
 to Russia for the first time. Catharina collected pic- 
 tures in the Hermitage, and founded an academy of art 
 in order to obtain artists for her empire as other coun- 
 tries have them. But what they painted, they never 
 sold. The rich Russian of her day bought only foreign 
 pictures ; and, in order not to make an utter failure, the 
 native artists then began, as well as they could, to imi-
 
 IVANOF. 163 
 
 tate the art of painting of other countries. Thus there 
 sprang up several generations of academicians, imitators 
 of David, who painted Spartans and Romans with bare 
 legs and flowing mantles. 
 
 The national revival of 1812, which was quickly felt 
 in the literature, had hardly any effect upon art. Nicho- 
 las secured two court painters, Beylof and Kotzebue, 
 the former of whom has become known by a cold 
 academical painting, "The Last Day of Pompeii," and 
 the latter by his battle-pieces, representing the victories 
 of Suvdrof and Kutiizof, which of necessity resemble 
 all such scenes of victory of former days. A single 
 artist comes to the front at this time, Ivanof, who is 
 now so celebrated, the painter of a single painting, which, 
 however, was never finished. 
 
 It was Gogol, who had formed a friendship with 
 Ivdnof, who gave him the idea of this picture from 
 sacred history, which was to be a prodigy, and which, 
 since he was never content with the execution of his 
 plan, made the artist continually begin ,new. For 
 twenty consecutive years, Ivanof busied himself with 
 this work, " The Coming of Christ." A throng of men 
 are standing on the banks of the Jordan, about John the 
 Baptist. The looks of all are fixed upon a point in the 
 distance, at which John points with his hand. Here 
 over the highland Jesus appears, a sad man, drawing 
 near to the throng, grazing the ground with his divine 
 feet. He seems to be half beatified. 
 
 The characterization in these heads was executed with 
 persistent passion. On the other hand, the coloring is 
 weak. In Tretiakof's gallery in Moscow, a gold mine 
 for the study of Russian art, you can trace a whole 
 series of the attempts through which the painting has 
 attained to its final form.
 
 164 IMPRESSIONS OF liUSSIA. 
 
 The unwearied study of Ivanof, prompted by true 
 genius, is the only great protest against the academic 
 art under Nicholas. The Tsar, who would be autocrat 
 over all things and all men in his empire, and who to the 
 best of his ability influenced poetry and poets also, 
 it was he who made Pushkin busy himself with the 
 history of Russia, also desired to have a noble and 
 conservative art, partly in a general way as an ornament 
 to his reign, and partly to solve the problem of glorify- 
 ing his own exploits. He succeeded only in destroying 
 the courage of independent men of talent, and nipping 
 them in the bud. 
 
 It is only in the last twenty-five years that there has 
 existed a real Russian school of painting, and that the 
 Russian lovers of art no longer go to foreign countries 
 when they wish to adorn their walls. It was when, with 
 the emancipation of the serfs, which liberated about fifty 
 millions of men, the great blast of freedom spread over 
 Russia, that the artists set to work, and on their can- 
 vases frequently of the greatest possible dimensions 
 placed important incidents from their national life, 
 very much as the authors at the same time began to write 
 novels in four volumes about society in Russia. And 
 now it became quite the fashion to be interested in 
 Russian art, as it recently had been the fashion to do 
 homage to everything foreign. The artists made good 
 sales, and, among their customers sometimes found a 
 Maecenas like Tretiakof, who alone has founded a col- 
 lection of Russian paintings which is many times greater 
 and very much better than that of the Hermitage. 
 
 A relationship is now disclosed between the course of 
 development of literature and art. Both move with the 
 same force and speed from an aristocratic romanticism 
 to a kind of realistic representation of the people. In
 
 MODERN ARTISTS. 165 
 
 literature the path leads from the refined heroes of 
 Pushkin and Lermontof to Tolstoi's and Dostoyevski's 
 dwelling upon the simple-hearted. In art, the path has 
 taken its course from the expounders of the deeds of 
 the great and the elegance of the upper circles of society 
 to the bald and sad pictures of the lot in life of the 
 oppressed and unhappy. So far as artistic fidelity to 
 reality is concerned, Russia now stands far above Poland, 
 and close to France. 
 
 It is quite true that the academy in St. Petersburg is a 
 sort of artistic hierarchy. The same Tchinovnisme (offi- 
 cial spirit) prevails there as everywhere in Eussia. The 
 chief authorities in this establishment have no idea of 
 art. At the head, for form's sake, stands Prince Imperial 
 Vladimir, and an ex-governor acts under him. The same 
 subjects are constantly given to all students : Priams who 
 come to sue for Hector's corpse. It is prescribed from 
 which side the light shall come, what person shall stand 
 in the foreground, etc. It is of no use that the stiident 
 is much more interested in an old apple-woman at the 
 corner than for King Priam and his whole court. It is 
 Priam and Hecuba that he must paint. " What is 
 Hecuba to him ? " 
 
 Among the modern artists of Russia there is a group 
 of decorative colorists. The best known among them 
 is not a Russian, though he constantly exhibits in Rus- 
 sia. It is a Pole, Semiradski, who has been under the 
 influences of Makart. He will be recollected by the 
 reader from his pictures, of which the photographs have 
 everywhere been widely scattered, " The Living Torches," 
 " The Sword Dance," " The Girl or the Vase ? " That 
 which is attractive in him and which he can impart is 
 not the highest art, which paints the sentiment of a 
 scene or the expression of emotion. What he aspires to
 
 166 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 is the correct representation of things and the pictu- 
 resque splendor of fabrics. 
 
 Endowed with less dramatic power than he, but other- 
 wise akin to him, is the Russian Makovski, an artist 
 very pleasing as a colorist, but of little psychological 
 power. He exhibited in 1887, in St. Petersburg, a great 
 painting, bought by an American : " Tsar Alexis Choosing 
 a Bride." The subject had a patriotic interest, in so far 
 as this bride who was sought for was the mother of 
 Peter the Great. Besides this the artist has availed him- 
 self of the opportunity of painting a throng of beautiful 
 young girls in the costume of the period. Strangely 
 enough, he seems to have used one and the same model 
 his pretty wife for all the young women among 
 whom Alexis shall make his choice. The whole does 
 not perceptibly rise above simple costume art. Neither 
 can his later picture, " The Death of Ivan the Terrible," 
 which has been much talked of, be regarded as much 
 superior to that style of art. In two of the figures there 
 is expression : in the frightened fool, who is lying at the 
 feet of the Tsar, and in the white-haired Russian digni- 
 tary, with a white beard, who, with eyes as if fixed with 
 fear, looks over the game of chess at the drooping man ; 
 the other spectators assume theatrical attitudes. 
 
 A unique position has also been achieved in the latest 
 Russian art by Verestchagin, just as well knoAvn in 
 Denmark also for his extraordinary natural gifts and 
 for his abuse of his talents. His biography has found 
 its way into our literature, and a large number of his 
 paintings have been seen in Copenhagen. In connection 
 with this fact, it ought to be mentioned that only too 
 large a number of the paintings which have been seen 
 here were duplicates, which are far inferior to Verest- 
 chagin's originals. When he chooses he is able to do
 
 VERESTCHAGIN KRAMSKOl 167 
 
 great things as a colorist. And among his far too 
 numerous paintings there are not a few which, like his 
 " Field of the Dead," remain ineffaceably impressed upon 
 the memory of the beholder. He who wishes to judge 
 him correctly ought not to be content with studying 
 what he has himself selected for export and international 
 exhibition by electric light, with the accompaniment of 
 hand-organ music, but he should visit the collection of 
 his paintings in Tretiakof's gallery in Moscow. Verest- 
 chagin is a genuine Russian, with his bias towards a 
 rambling life of adventure, and with the extraordinary 
 compound in his art of ultra-realism and symbolical 
 mysticism (the allegory of war, for example). There is 
 a certain connection between him and Tolstoi. He 
 would be in his sphere as an illustrator of Tolstoi's 
 works, and " War and Peace " would be specially 
 adapted to his talents. His conception of war, as De 
 Vogue has correctly felt, is that of the authors who love 
 peace and describe war.^ 
 
 Among the modern artists of Russia there are two who 
 have impressed me above all others, Riepin and Kramskdi. 
 
 The forte of Kramskoi", who died in the spring of 
 1887, was port^-ait-painting. In Tretiakof's gallery there 
 can be seen a whole suggestive series of his vigorously 
 conceived portraits of the great distinguished Russians 
 of his day : Hertzen, Byelinski, Turgenief, Dostoyevski, 
 and others. After his death there was an exhibition of 
 his works in the academy. There were two religious 
 paintings : " Christ in the Desert," emaciated by fasting, 
 oppressed by the weight of his thoughts ; and a huge 
 unfinished picture, "Christ before Pilate," besides five 
 halls full of portraits, the pearl of which, with its 
 peerless expression, is that of the Little-Russian poet 
 1 E. M. de Vogii^: 5ouvenir et Visions, p. 172.
 
 168 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 Chevchenko, who has suffered so much and written so 
 well. 
 
 Kramskoi was born in 1837, in a village in Little 
 Russia, near the town of Ostrogoisk. His father was a 
 petty tradesman; his mother passed her life in the 
 kitchen. The boy received his first education in the 
 parochial school. At the age of seven, he began to 
 model Cossacks in clay ; at thirteen he begged his 
 parents to let him learn the art of painting. Permis- 
 sion was refused, for everybody in the town knew that 
 painters " go barefooted." Having, in the mean time, 
 drawn everything he saw, and cojjied all the images in 
 the church, a year or two later he was sent to Voronezh, 
 to the best sculptor there, but remained with him only 
 three months, being only sent on errands about the town, 
 and having no other amusement or recreation than a 
 flogging. From sixteen to twenty he roamed about 
 Russia, in all directions, touching up pictures for a pho- 
 tographer who came through Ostrogoisk. Duiing this 
 roving life, which brought him an income of two rubles 
 and a half a month, he read everything he could get 
 hold of, and was especially enthusiastic over Gogol and 
 Lermontof. Finally, at twenty years of age, he entered 
 the streets of St. Petersburg, and was so fortunate as to 
 gain admission into the academy. He thought he was 
 standing in the temple of Art. 
 
 His disappointment was great. The instruction was 
 simply horrible. The drawing classes were tolerably 
 good, but the higher the student rose the worse was the 
 teaching. No attention whatever was paid to the indi- 
 viduality of the young men, and there were always the 
 same biblical or antique subjects. It was then just 
 twenty years since Ivanof had suffered a similar disap- 
 pointment in the academy. But it was just in 1858 that
 
 KRAMSKOl 169 
 
 this artist came with his painting to St. Petersburg. 
 Kramskoi was strongly impressed by this special pic- 
 ture ; he felt the force of genius in the conception, and 
 admired the truth of the expression of the faces. In his 
 letters he puts the head of St. John on a level with 
 those of the Venus of *Milo and of the Sistine Madonna, 
 and is scandalized that no one in St. Petersburg has any 
 eye for anything but the mistakes in drawing in this 
 grand painting. 
 
 Kramskoi" had now obtained his first medals, and 
 lacked only one year of being sent abroad at the expense 
 of the academy, when he with fourteen comrades sud- 
 denly left, disgusted at the instruction they received. 
 It is these fifteen men who have extricated Russian art 
 from routine. Kramskoi married early, and his house 
 was the place where the young men met. He himself, 
 who was regarded as the leader of the movement, worked 
 unceasingly, and sought for all sorts of knowledge. His 
 thirst for information and knowledge was so great that 
 it made him regard every student with veneration. His 
 simplicity and kind-heartedness conquered the hearts 
 of all. 
 
 At this time, Riepin became his pupil, and soon his 
 intimate friend. In 1868 he also formed a friendship 
 with a landscape-painter Vasilief, who later exerted 
 considerable influence upon him. Vasilief drove him 
 on to independence of authority of every sort, and 
 Riepin enchanted him by his bold style. From 1868 
 Kramskoi was celebrated. He, the old enemy of the 
 academy, was himself appointed a member of the 
 academy. Gradually he became more and more of a 
 colorist. In 1876 he writes from Paris, that he had 
 hitherto worshipped form alone; that now he was be- 
 ginning to understand what the art of painting is. He
 
 170 IMPRESSIONS OF liUSSIA. 
 
 becomes an idolizer of Velasquez : " Everj'^thing is pale 
 and insignificant in comparison with him. He paints 
 with his nerves. The impression is crushing ; there is 
 no other word for it." 
 
 Kramskoi died in his vocation. While, in 1887, he 
 was painting the portrait of Rauchfuss, the imperial 
 physician in ordinary, he dropped his brush, and, stoop- 
 ing over for it, fell dead on the spot. Ko one else has 
 painted the Russian race in so many different physiogno- 
 mies as he. 
 
 His pupil, Riepin, the greatest living artist of Russia, 
 has gained special reputation by some historical paint- 
 ings : one of the Tsaritsa Sophia after Peter the Great 
 has driven her from the throne, and the much-talked- 
 about Ivan the Terrible, throwing himself broken- 
 hearted over his son, whom he has killed by a blow from 
 his iron-shod cane. The latter is a masterpiece, and 
 admirably painted. You can almost smell the pools of 
 blood. 
 
 Still, these are not the paintings which are the most 
 characteristic of Riepin's talent. They are those in 
 which he has represented his own age. There is a sim- 
 ple strength in them, a profound and genuine earnest- 
 ness, and a fascinating heartiness. He has caught upon 
 his canvas what, in the strict sense of the word, may be 
 called modern Russia. His pictures, on that account, 
 are regarded in certain circles as paintings with a pur- 
 pose, radical paintings. You will find in his works 
 the types of the intelligent young men of the day, of the 
 female students with short hair and wise expression. 
 He has painted the burlaki, who drag the boats on 
 the Volga up against the stream. The expression in 
 the depraved or resigned countenances of these bent, 
 sweating laborers, with the tense muscles under their
 
 THE SCULPTOR ANTOPOLSEL 171 
 
 tatters, is admirable. He is fond of subjects like the 
 departure of the recruits, the simple, every-day scene 
 frequently met with ; the young man's departure from 
 family and home ; or like " The Keturn of the Exile," a 
 picture which never ceases to be thrilling from its very 
 simplicity. The look cannot be forgotten which the 
 mother and sister, astonished and half frightened, not 
 yet glad, cast upon the emaciated young form, in the 
 sorry clothes, which silently glides in through the door. 
 
 The profound sympathy m this art veils the remorse- 
 lessness of the realistic representation. 
 
 There is in Kussia at present only one eminent sculp- 
 tor, who is of equal importance with these painters, and 
 that is Antopolski, one of the few men of Jewish descent 
 who have made themselves known in the history of 
 sculpture. He passed his youth in great poverty, and 
 was learning the trade of shoemaker in St. Petersburg 
 when his talent was brought to light. Baron Giinzberg, 
 the rich and genial banker of St. Petersburg, took an 
 interest in and supported him, until, quickly enough, he 
 was able to support himself by his art. After having 
 been a long time in Eome, he is now a resident of Paris 
 and enjoys a European reputation. 
 
 Antopolski's ''Christ" may, perhaps, be remembered 
 from Julius Lange's "Art of Sculpture." Bound, with 
 his feet joined close together, Christ is presented to the 
 people in a form executed with a melancholy realism, in 
 the costume of the time, with broad sandals under his 
 feet, his hair fast bound to his brow by sweat under the 
 burning sun, an earnest and truly Jewish type. He 
 looks a little down before him, but the look is contem- 
 plative ; he accepts with manly firmness the ignominy 
 that the cry of the populace prefers Barabbas to him. 
 There is a Russian stoicism in this look.
 
 172 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 Another celebrated statue of Antopolski, representing 
 the dying Ivan the Terrible, is not less interesting. The 
 Tsar sits in his arm-chair, awaiting the coming of death. 
 The position has unquestionably been affected by Hou- 
 din's " Voltaire : " the hand which, groping, anchors 
 itself on the arm-chair. There is something in the 
 look as if he saw, in his dying glance, the thirty-five 
 hundred men whom he has condemned to death pass 
 slowly before him. Lange has the phrase, "It is like 
 a soliloquy of Macbeth." 
 
 In Baron Gunzberg's house, rich in works of art, there 
 is a very admirable bust which Antopolski has made of 
 Peter the Great, of large size, idealized into a hero, with 
 royal beauty and the stamp of immense power of will. 
 In the same place, there is also a captivating bust of a 
 lady, the likeness of Baron GUnzberg's deceased wife. 
 Among his other works, a statue of Spinoza, smiling and 
 contemplative, deserves special mention. 
 
 But if the art of sculpture thus has at present only 
 one great name to point to, yet there is, nevertheless, 
 great ability in this field in Kussia, and a great deal of 
 plastic talent finds employment in the service of art 
 industries. It is one of the peculiarities of Kussian 
 society that all the anniversaries, all the jubilees, which 
 fall to the lot of persons of high position are celebrated 
 by the presentation of one or more pieces of silver or 
 gold artistically designed. Not infrequently a jeweller 
 receives an order from a society or corporation with per- 
 mission to go as high as twenty-five thousand rubles, pro- 
 vided he can produce a real work of art. The Russian 
 taste for color is employed in a more pleasing manner in 
 such small works than in large architectural designs. 
 The jewellers in Moscow understand how to combine 
 both high and pale colors with gold and silver matte
 
 INDUSTRIAL ART. 173 
 
 with extraordinary beauty. Unfortunately, the most 
 that we had the opportunity of seeing at the Scandina- 
 vian exhibition in Copenhagen was less characteristic of 
 the Russian people, because the workman in part had 
 often been carried away by French designs and patterns, 
 and in part because, as a whole, this art came rather 
 from the mountaineers of the Caucasus than from the 
 Russian people proper. They seem here to have pre- 
 ferred to work with elegance rather than with individ- 
 uality, and especially to have preferred to present proofs 
 of the talent of the Russians in imitation, rather than 
 their remarkable gifts of compelling the foreigners on 
 their own soil to create artistic effects in the Russian 
 style and spirit.
 
 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIAN LITERATURE.
 
 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIAN 
 LITERATURE. 
 
 Even if the Russians of our day are not the descend- 
 ants of the races which in remote times ruled the 
 countries north of the Black Sea, they are at least their 
 heirs, and he who is much interested in modern Russia 
 gladly turns to the Greek and Roman authors for their 
 descriptions of these countries and their climates, and 
 for their accounts of the people and their manners and 
 customs. 
 
 What made the deepest impression upon the classical 
 authors is without doubt the cold, the eight months' 
 winter, which Herodotus describes (iv. 28), and which is 
 followed by a cool and rainy summer. That whole 
 arms of the sea and broad rivers are frozen, so that 
 people can drive and ride over them, is a terrible prodigy 
 to them. We read in Ovid : " They protect themselves 
 against the cold by skins and sewed trousers, and of 
 the whole form only the face is to be seen. The hair 
 often rattles from the ice which hangs on it, and the 
 beard shines with the frost which covers it. The wine 
 keeps the shape of the bottle, when the bottle is broken 
 in pieces, and they do not pour it out, but divide it up. 
 Why should I say that all the brooks are stiffened by 
 the cold and that they dig water out of the sea that they 
 can break into pieces ? Even the Ister (Danube), which 
 is not less broad than the Nile, and which, through its 
 
 m
 
 178 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 many mouths, mingles its waters with the sea, freezes, 
 when the winds harden its waves, and steals out into 
 the sea under a covering of ice. Where the ships went 
 before, people go on foot. The horse's hoof stamps on 
 the frozen plain, and over these new bridges, above the 
 flowing waves, the Sarmatian oxen drag the barbaric 
 vehicles. You may hardly believe me, but, since I shall 
 gain nothing by telling a falsehood, I ought to be 
 believed : I have seen the immense Black Sea hardened 
 into ice, which like a smooth shell lay upon the immov- 
 able waters. And I have not only seen it, but I have 
 trodden on the hard ocean plain and walked with dry 
 feet over the sea." (Tristia, iii. 10.) 
 
 In the next place, the lack of trees in these regions 
 made a great impression on those who came here from 
 Greece and Italy. Of the covmtry of the Sarmatian s, 
 Herodotus says that it is entirely bare both of cultivated 
 and wild trees; of the Scythians he relates how for 
 want of wood they cook the flesh of their sacrificed 
 animals in the stomachs of the latter, with fire which 
 is made of their bones (iv. 21, 61). Ovid turns back 
 again and again to the melancholy want of vegetation 
 in the region. " No trees, no vines in the Getian land. 
 Rarely in the open fields is there a bush, which even then 
 does not flourish." (Tristia, iii. 12 ; Ux Tonto, iii. 1, 7.) 
 
 In remote times, as is well known, all the races on 
 the plains which became Russia were mingled together 
 under the names of the Scythians, Sarmatians, Getians, 
 and some others. It is impossible now to determine how 
 far they were the ancestors of the Slavs. But that the 
 latter generally had ancestors among them, is evident 
 from the character of the bones which have been found 
 in the old burial mounds (Kurgans) in Southern Scythia.^ 
 1 Elise'e Reclas : Geographic umverselle, v. 299.
 
 IDENTITY OF DIFFERENT MYTHS. 179 
 
 Several places in Herodotus have already drawn our 
 thoughts in this direction. Thus the place (iv. 75) 
 where he relates of the Scythians that they never wash 
 their bodies in water, but use steam baths instead. 
 (Comp. Nestor's Chronicle, v.) But the chapter in 
 Herodotus (iv. 5) where he speaks of their myths is 
 far more remarkable. How Slavic it is even then, that 
 the common ancestor of their race was a son of the 
 supreme God, whom he had from a daughter of the river 
 Borysthenes (Dnieper). Here already is the personifica- 
 tion of the rivers which is so common in the old Slavic 
 epics. But still more surprising is the resemblance 
 between the myths about that Kola-xais, the youngest 
 son of the common father, prince of the ploughshare, and 
 Mikula of the biHnt (the epic poems), the son of the 
 peasant. Herodotus relates that, while Kola-xais and 
 his brothers reigned, there fell a plough, a yoke, an ox, 
 and a bowl, all of gold, down into Scythia from heaven. 
 When the eldest brothers, one after the other, approached, 
 they were burned by the gold and driven back by its 
 glow. But when the youngest came up, the fire was 
 extinguished, and for that reason they gave him the 
 whole kingdom. Also Mikula, the child of a village, 
 the agricultural hero, has a wonderful plough. When 
 Volga, the bold warrior, with his guard, rides from place 
 to place to collect taxes from the Slavic towns, he sud- 
 denly hears out in the country the sound of a plough. 
 He hears the creaking of its woodwork and the grinding 
 of its ploughshare against the stones. Volga and his 
 men take a course in the direction of the ploughman, 
 and ride a whole day without finding any one. Yet the 
 sound of the visionary plough, and the striking of the 
 iron against the stones in the furrows, constantly ring in 
 their ears. Volga rides another day without meeting
 
 180 IMPBESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 any one. As Orestes Miller has remarked, the picture is 
 developed in this direction, so that it assumes huge pro- 
 portions. It becomes a poetic representation of the 
 boundless plain of which the Russian land is made up. 
 The farmer draws his furrow in this plain with such a 
 wonderful skill that they only see in him a divine 
 workman, the representative and protector of Russian 
 agriculture. 
 
 It is only on the morning of the third day that 
 Volga reaches the countryman who is ploughing up the 
 ground with the mighty plough, tearing up the roots of 
 trees and breaking off fragments of rock. He greets 
 him and congratulates him. Mikula tells him, in re- 
 turn, how one day, when people from the neighborhood 
 came to him and demanded taxes, he gave them all taxes 
 with his staff. When Volga begs him to join his body 
 guard (Druzhina), Mikula consents on condition that 
 one of Volga's men shall pull his plough out of the 
 furrow and throw it into a bush. But not five, not 
 even ten, of his brave men can stir the plough from its 
 place. Then Mikula comes up alone, and with one hand 
 seizes the plough and flings it up in the clouds, from 
 which it falls down into a bush.^ 
 
 As we saw, the plough thus fell down from heaven. 
 Over and over again, as ethnographic studies make prog- 
 ress, scholars have occasion to admire the scrupulous 
 trustworthiness of old Herodotus. 
 
 To read Ovid after Herodotus is to be transported five 
 hundred years in time and from one world to another. 
 But the poetical lamentations of the over-educated 
 Roman poet and his letters from Pontus are still one 
 of the oldest sources of our knowledge of how the 
 regions which to-day lie on the southwestern frontier 
 1 A'. Bambaud : La Russie ^pique, p. 39.
 
 OVID'S MISFORTUNES. 181 
 
 of Kussia were inhabited in ancient times, and of their 
 natural conditions. Poor Ovid ! The knowledge we 
 now have was bought by the misfortune which befell 
 him, a misfortune so great and complete that it is 
 incomprehensible how any one has ever been able to 
 speak of his lamentations in a careless tone. No author 
 in the Eoman literature had a more original or bolder 
 talent, and no one met with a more cruel fate. It was 
 so long before the days of the Kussian empire, an actual 
 exile for life to Siberia. The illegal judgment strikes 
 him, the finest, most sensuous, most petted poetic nature 
 of Rome, tears him, even then growing old, out of the 
 pleasures of home life, away from a wife whom he loves 
 with the most heartfelt tenderness, after having been 
 twice unhappily married, away from the circle of his 
 friends and admirers, away from the city of the world 
 which is all m all to him, from his fatherland (nay, from 
 civilization), and drags him over the sea and the salt 
 waves to the end of the known world. He is landed 
 solitary and alone in a place where the air itself is pain- 
 ful to him ; where he can endure neither the drinking 
 water nor the food, cannot protect himself sufficiently 
 against the climate, cannot find a physician when he is 
 ill, nor a single man with whom he can exchange ideas 
 when he is well ; where few understand Greek and none 
 Latin ; where he must live in perpetual fear of attacks 
 from hostile tribes, who swarm about the town and often 
 enough break in, in constant anxiety lest there should 
 be attacks from the inhabitants of the town, who were 
 little less than barbarian ; finally, where he cannot once 
 move outside of the poor strongholds of the town, or own 
 even the least bit of a garden, of which he so bitterly 
 feels the want, because there are no gardens in the town, 
 and personal safety is wholly wanting outside, so that the
 
 182 IMPBESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 land for miles distant remains uncultivated. When the 
 guards on the towers give the alarm, he, the refined for- 
 eigner, lays hold of his weapons. The coast is inhabited 
 by Greeks and Getians mixed together, the latter being 
 the more numerous, and even those who speak Greek 
 have the Getian accent. Getian and Sarmatian horse- 
 men ride through the streets in crowds, clothed in skins, 
 with long and loose trousers, with long beards arid hair 
 which hangs down over their faces, with knives loose in 
 their sheaths, their bows in their hands, and their qiiivers 
 full of poisoned arrows rattling on their backs. The 
 hostile Getians also use only arrrows which they have 
 dipped in poison ; they live by robbery alone, come 
 driving on their horses with the fury of a storm, very 
 little dismayed by the slight walls of the town, and 
 many a time their death-bearing shots fly in over the 
 walls, so that the houses of the town were as if larded 
 with arrows. Grant that there is a little poetic exagger- 
 ation in his description of his continual danger, there is 
 wretchedness enough left. And in this condition Augus- 
 tus and his successor let the most original poet of Eome 
 pine away, year in and year out, always cherishing 
 delusive hopes of a milder place of banishment, sepa- 
 rated from everything he loved and had a taste for, and 
 for a fault which was not a fault ; for having got on the 
 scent of a court secret, which he did not dare to mention, 
 and which is unknown to us. It is no wonder that he, 
 with his gentle and timid character, begs for mercy 
 from the powerful father of the land, with continual 
 humble adulation. But when we read these prayers 
 for liberation we feel an involuntary admiration ris- 
 ing up for the Russian authors who, exiled in our 
 day in similar circumstances, live and die without a 
 prayer or a complaint, much less a word of flattery
 
 NESTOR'S CHRONICLE. 183 
 
 or adulation for him who exiled them, falling from 
 their lips. 
 
 Putting Ovid's "Elegies" back on the shelves, and 
 taking down Nestor's chronicle in its place, we are fully 
 a thousand years later in time. The great national 
 migrations had driven the Slavic races in broad waves 
 in over Eussia. Kingdoms have been founded in Nov- 
 gorod and Kief. Together with legends and naive con- 
 jectures about the more remote times, we have here a 
 history becoming more trustworthy as we approach the 
 period of the narrator's own life, ending with the year 
 1110. And even from a period concerning which Nestor 
 has only exceedingly doubtful traditions to depend upon, 
 he possessed treaties and agreements, genuine documents 
 of the highest importance, which he incorporates in his 
 book. He is Eussia's Saxo-Grammaticus, but a hundred 
 years older than the Danish monk, and his work has the 
 greater literary value, given to it by the use of the 
 mother tongue. 
 
 What especially attracts the attention of the Scandi- 
 navian reader is everything which relates to the rule 
 of the Norsemen in Eussia, the statesmanship of the 
 Varings and their campaign. In the Danish translation 
 of Nestor's chronicle, there are given in learned notes all 
 necessary criticism of the old chronicles and information 
 as to the present condition of investigation. The expla- 
 nation of the Scandinavian words by Gislason, at the 
 end of the book, is also very instructive. 
 
 In historical and psychological respects, a comparison 
 between the style and descriptions of Nestor and of the 
 Icelandic sagas is of great interest, especially in those 
 cases where the chronicles and sagas treat of the same 
 persons and events. An essay by the Russian scholar
 
 184 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 Senkovski on the Icelandic sagas and their relation to 
 Russian history, which has been translated into Danish, 
 awakens the attention and sharpens the reader's capacity 
 to recognize Nestor's peculiarities and limitations.^ 
 Senkovski compares, as an example point by point, 
 Eymundar Saga with the chapters (forty-eighth and 
 following) in Nestor. The worthy monk here falls far 
 behind. The saga was composed from the verbal narra- 
 tive of Icelanders who had been participants in the 
 events described, and have the trustworthiness of eye- 
 witnesses. Nestor, credulously, with many oratorical 
 embellishments and pious remarks, gives an account of 
 martial exploits, victories, and defeats, concerning which 
 he has only an indistinct and unintelligible tradition. 
 The Icelanders had political talent and ability, in addi- 
 tion to the skill of the Vikings in tactics and war. 
 While the monk from the cave-cloister in Kief, without 
 considering the material difficulties of keeping forces in 
 the open field, makes the armies of Yaroslaf and Sviato- 
 polk stand full three months face to face in battle at 
 Liubetch ; and while he, in biblical fashion, reports the 
 threatening speeches of the leaders of the armies to the 
 enemy, and the impatient expressions of the troops at 
 this derision, the saga shortens the time from three 
 months to four days, shows what lot and part Eymund, 
 the chief of the Varings, had in the battle, describes his 
 flank movement, his attack on them at once from front 
 and rear, and gives, without any fabrications, embellish- 
 ments, or pious reflections, an intelligible picture, even 
 if it seems as if the author of the saga had mixed up 
 the reports of two different battles. 
 
 The greatest difference between the cloister spirit and 
 saga style is felt in the account given by Nestor and iu 
 1 Annals of the Society of Northern Antiquities, 1847.
 
 CHRONICLE AND SAGA COMPARED. 185 
 
 the saga of Sviatopolk's (Burisleifs) decisive defeat 
 in the revolt against Brother Yaroslaf (the Jarisleif of 
 the saga). In Nestor it is said, " But towards evening 
 Yaroslaf conquered, and Sviatopolk took flight. And, 
 as he fled, the devil came upon him, and his joints were 
 loosened so that he could not sit on his horse, and they 
 carried him in a litter, and brought him in his flight to 
 Ber^stije. But he said, 'Fly with me, for they are 
 pursuing us.' And his servants sent a messenger back, 
 and said, ' See if any one is coming after us ; ' and there 
 was no one who followed them. And they fled farther 
 with him, and he was then lying in delirium, and started 
 up, and Siaid, ' They are coming after us ! Hasten ! ' He 
 could not stay in one place, and flew through Liachland, 
 pursued by the wrath of God, and came to a desert 
 place between Liacher and Czecher, and there in a piti- 
 able manner he ended his life. The unjust and godless 
 man now had his deserts, when the judgment came upon 
 him, after his exit from this world, given up to torments 
 in the next. This was plainly shown by the mortal 
 pangs which came upon him, and mercilessly drove him 
 to death ; and after death he is suffering everlasting tor- 
 ments in chains. This has God done as a warning to 
 the Russian princes," etc. 
 
 In the saga the extract is less theological. It is told 
 there how the practical Norse chief lays before Yaroslaf 
 the necessity of letting his rebellious brother be slain. 
 " For there will never be any end to this misfortune so 
 long as you both live." When the king gives the answer 
 that he will not call upon people to attack his brcrther, 
 and then afterwards prosecute them in case they killed 
 him, Eymund interpi'ets the answer as it suits him, 
 sallies forth with eleven others, hides himself in a 
 forest, by the borders of which the hostile army is
 
 186 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 encamped, murders the king's brother, and brings to the 
 king his severed head. " See here, my lord, if you know 
 this head." Yaroslaf turns red. " This deed we Norse- 
 men have done," says Eymund, "but now let your 
 brother be buried in a becoming and honorable manner." 
 Yaroslaf answers, " You have done a rash deed, my 
 friends, which weighs heavily upon me. You have 
 killed him ; then bury him also." About condemnation 
 of the event, even on the side of the injured brother, not 
 a word is said. Senkov'ski properly notices the improba- 
 bility of attributing to the Varing-Eussian heroes of that 
 age the aversion of the Christian monk to bloodshed. 
 It was only cowardice that was despicable in their sight. 
 For the perfidious and bold wrong-doer they had a re- 
 spect which was not denied to him even when they were 
 in arms against them. 
 
 The language, as well as the peculiarities of race, of 
 the ruling warrior caste of Scandinavian Russians was 
 speedily absorbed by the great Slavic people, largely be- 
 cause the Varings seldom married any other than native- 
 born wives ; therefore no traces of the Xorse mythology 
 are to be found in Russia. On the other hand, we meet 
 (especially in the only written epic poem of Russia) not 
 a few reminiscences of the old Slavic worship of God 
 and nature. Still, what we know about the mythical 
 beings is very little. The Slavs worshipped the heavens 
 by the name of Svarog. The sons of the heavens were 
 Dazhbog, god of the sun (and Avealth. From dazh day, 
 and boff god), and the god of fire, Ogon (Indian, Agni). 
 The god of the sun had other names besides : Hors and 
 Volos, who like Apollo was god of the flocks and of the 
 poets. Rerun corresponds to Thor as the god of thun- 
 der. Stribog is the god of the winds. In addition they 
 worshipped " the damj) mother earth ; " the spring season,
 
 RUSSIAN EPICS. 187 
 
 Vesna; and Morana, the god of death and of winter. 
 The souls of the dead were called Rusalki. In Russia, 
 as everywhere else, on the introduction of Christianity, 
 the heathen forms and ceremonies were not rooted out, 
 but named anew, and consolidated with the festivals of 
 the Church. Thus, for instance, the holy Elias, with his 
 chariot of fire, appears in place of the thunder-god 
 Perun. There are many songs, which it is the custom 
 and usage to sing on anniversaries, over the whole of 
 Russia, which have a* mythical origin.^ 
 
 But an entirely different, copious and valuable source 
 of knowledge of the old Slavic intellectual life is to be 
 found at the present time in the bilini, which were first 
 collected and published in this century, that is to say, 
 the old Russian epic poems. The first collection of these 
 appeared in 1804, consisting of songs which had been 
 collected among the iron-workmen in the department of 
 Perm. In 1818 a new edition of the collection was pub- 
 lished, with sixty numbers in place of twenty-five. It 
 was then found out that there were a large number of 
 epic songs in circulation among the peasants in Northern 
 Russia. From 1852 to 1856, Sreznevski published htlim, 
 which were recited in these northern departments ; yet 
 it was only in 1859 that the investigations of Rybnikof, 
 in the regions about the Onega Lake, made it plain that 
 Russia had an enormously large unknown national litera- 
 ture in the form of popular poems, which it was simply 
 necessary to collect from the lips of the people. The 
 isolation caused by the severe climate about the Onega 
 Lake, the simple manner of life and naive mode of 
 thought of the inhabitants, the superstition and igno- 
 rance, the inability to read and write, have made these 
 
 1 See Alexander von Reinholdt: Oeschichte der Rtissischen Lit- 
 teratur, bk. 1.
 
 188 IMPBESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 regions a sort of oral Iceland for old Slavic poetry. 
 Rybnikof was followed by Hilferding, who, in the same 
 wild provinces, collected more than three hundred new 
 songs or new variations. Next comes a garland of poems 
 published by Kirievski, collected from almost all parts 
 of Great Russia and Siberia. And in all these songs 
 the same persons appear, the same adventures happen, 
 and the same poetical expressions are found. 
 
 The best of these poems, and the most of them, turn 
 upon the oldest memories of the Slavic countries, and 
 range themselves into two principal circles, the Kief 
 circle and the Novgorod circle. Sometimes they point 
 straight back to the heathen Russia and the oldest 
 Aryan mythology, which lies back of the Slavic reli- 
 gions. Thus they also present points of comparison 
 with the holy books of India, and even several, and for 
 a Scandinavian reader more interesting ones, with the 
 Edda and the Norse myths. 
 
 Maikof succeeded in fixing the eleventh and twelfth 
 centuries as the period of the most important song- 
 circle: the Vladimir cycle, whose centre is Kief. He 
 has proved that in all these poems there is no other 
 Russia known than that which lies about the Dnieper. 
 The capital is Kief; there is no mention of Moscow. 
 The subordinate places are Chernigof, Galitch, Murom, 
 Smolensk, etc. The Russia of the bilini has already 
 been converted to Christianity, and obeys one prince, 
 but is in continual war with the nomads in the south 
 and east. We find ourselves in the period between the 
 introduction of the orthodox faith and the rule of the 
 Tatars. Closer examination gives the circumstance 
 that there is mentioned in the German "Otnit," from 
 the twelfth century, an "Ilias of Riuzen," plainly the 
 Russian national hero Ilia of Murom, and that in like
 
 NORSE AND RUSSIAN MYTHS. 189 
 
 manner in the Icelandic Thidrek saga of the thirteenth 
 century, which is composed from Saxon songs or tradi- 
 tions from the twelfth century, there is mention of a 
 Kussian King, Vladimir, and his brother Jarl Ilia from 
 Greece, which means Russia.^ 
 
 Now and then, as already stated, we hit upon a pas- 
 sage in the bUmi of the Kief circle which call to mind 
 Norse myths and popular traditions. Thus it is said of 
 Sviatogor, one of the oldest heroic figures, a Titan with 
 supernatural strength who is sometimes mixed up Avith 
 the Bible Samson, that when, one day, he was lying 
 stretched out on a mountain. Ilia of Murom, the national 
 hero, the son of a peasant, in whom the saga figure 
 Mikula seems to have been born again, wished to chal- 
 lenge him to single combat. But the most vigorous 
 blows from Ilia's club were hardly able to awaken 
 Sviatogor from his dreams. He thought it was peb- 
 bles that were falling on him. At the third blow, he 
 says to Ilia : " You are strong among men ; remain 
 strong among them ; with me you cannot compare your- 
 self. The ground could not bear me, so I lay down on 
 this mountain." Who does not recall the scene between 
 Thor and the giant who, at the most vigorous blows of 
 the hammer of the god, thinks that he was hit by a fall- 
 ing leaf or acorn ! 
 
 Another adventure also remiiids us of Thor and 
 XJtgardloke. It is an account of how Ilia disappears 
 in the pocket of the sleeping Sviatogor. (The wife of 
 the latter hides him there to escape the anger of the 
 giant.) In just the same way, Thor passes a whole night 
 in Skrymer's glove. Both Ilia and Thor here are the 
 lightning which conceals itself for a long time behind 
 
 1 A von Reinholdt, above cited, p. 49. Rambaud : La Russie 
 ^ique, p. 155.
 
 190 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 the clouds, and very significantly Tlior, immediately 
 after coming out of the glove, strikes the giant on his 
 head with his hammer so that the blood spurts out. 
 
 Among other things, Ilia also fights with the robber 
 Solovei, who blocks his way to the mountain of the Sun- 
 prince. This Solovei has a face of a bird and utters a 
 horrible bird-cry, whose shriek works such destruction 
 that the roofs in Vladimir's palaces fall in. He is, there- 
 fore, the spirit of bad weather and storm, and by his 
 bird-form calls to mind that giant in the guise of an 
 eagle who, in Vafthrudnismal, sitting at the end of 
 heaven, with, his wings which are those of an eagle, sets 
 the winds in motion ; or the giant Thiasse, who, in the 
 guise of an eagle, carries aAvay, conceals, and later pur- 
 sues Idun, until he meets his death in the fire which was 
 kindled for him behind Asgaard's wall. Bird-forms 
 everywhere are symbols of storms and bad weather. 
 
 There is still another little incident of Ilia's battle 
 with the giant which recalls a Norse tradition. As Ilia 
 finds gold and silver in great quantity in Solovei's nest, 
 so Sigurd finds the red gold under the dragon Fafner. It 
 is one and the same symbol of the shining beams which 
 the dark clouds hide under or behind them. 
 
 Among Sviatogor's adventures, in the next place, is one 
 which greatly reminds us of Thor's when the giant plays 
 a trick upon him, and lets him drink out of the horn the 
 other end of which is in the sea, raises a cat which is the 
 Midgaard-serpent, and is troubled by an old woman who 
 is old age. When the giant Sviatogor one day is riding 
 over the plains, he meets an old man who asks him to 
 help him put his sack on his back. The hero would lift 
 the sack with the end of his whip, with his finger-tip, 
 with his strong hand, he cannot do it. Then he alights 
 from his horse and tries with both hands, with tremen-
 
 ILIA OF MUROM. 191 
 
 dous efforts, to lift the sack which is so heavy, while the 
 sweat drops from his forehead. Finally, he thinks he 
 has got it up to his knee ; but it is he himself who has 
 sunk down to the knees in the ground. In the little 
 sack, God had put the weight of the whole earth. 
 
 We finally find a characteristic incident, which reminds 
 us of one of our national traditions, where Sviatogor and 
 Ilia, after having formed a foster-brotherhood, visit Svia- 
 togor's old father together. The old man is blind and 
 apparently impotent. He asks to be allowed to press 
 Ilia's hand to see if the Russian hogatyrs (the generic 
 name of the national heroes) still have strong limbs and 
 warm blood. At a nod from his friend, Ilia grabs a huge 
 iron bar glowing in the fire and hands it to the old man. 
 " Good ! " says he to the young hero. " I feel that you 
 have a strong hand and hot blood." This is the story of 
 Holger Danske and the peasant.^ 
 
 There is no one among the heroes of these hiUni who 
 is more characteristic and typical than this Ilia of Murom. 
 He belongs to the cycle which has Vladimir, the heantlful 
 sun, for its centre ; but he is treated by the poets as the 
 son of a peasant, with even more sympathy than the 
 prince. Eegular geological layers can be found in all 
 the epic poems of Russia ; we can see, more or less 
 plainly, how certain conceptions of nature which are 
 common to all Aryan peoples about the eleventh century 
 began to assume a constantly more decided Slavic stamp. 
 The mythical heroes, which were at first like those of 
 other countries, like those of the old North, for instance, 
 become decidedly Russian and decidedly Greek-orthodox. 
 They are born in a definite Russian village ; they are 
 slain on a definite Russian field. The celestial moun- 
 tains, streams, and seas, which, in the oldest mythological 
 1 Bambaud: La Russie pique, pp. 41, 50, 111, and following.
 
 192 IMPRESSIONS OF It US SI A. 
 
 language, indicated clouds, rain, and air, become Russian 
 mountains like the Ural, Russian rivers like the Dnieper, 
 and Russian seas like the Caspian Sea. In like manner, 
 we see Ilia also individualized. It is related of him that, 
 before he makes his appearance as Bogatyr, he sits for 
 thirty years (the constant expression for a very long 
 time) immovable and lame. Then two celestial old men 
 who come to Murom call him up from his sleep of death. 
 It is in vain that he answers that he can move neither 
 hand nor foot. When they call to him again, he is able 
 to raise himself and open the door to them. They give 
 him a strengthening drink, and he feels an immense 
 power suddenly rippling through his limbs. Here Ilia 
 is evidently the same thing as nature, which is awa- 
 kened from its long winter sleep. 
 
 Ilia is thus roused to action, and his first exploit is to 
 cultivate the Russian soil; with superhuman strength 
 he tears up a whole oak forest and tranforms it to arable 
 land. After that he sallies forth to free peasants, as a 
 hero of the fields to protect this Russian earth against 
 monsters, robbers, and heathens. We have seen how in 
 these conflicts he appears as the God of Thunder. He 
 shoots an arrow from his bow against an oak, and the 
 oak is entirely split to pieces as if struck by lightning ; 
 he swings the club like Rerun, the hammer like Thor. 
 
 But then we see him like a true Russian hero travel- 
 ling from Murom to Tchernigof to free the land from 
 robbers who were exhausting it. We see him reject the 
 money and the sovereignty which the muzhiks of Tcher- 
 nigof would confer upon him, and hasten to Kief to 
 Vladimir, to aid the national prince against his many 
 enemies. And he becomes chief Ataman over Vladi- 
 mir's forces. In some of the hilini, at this point, he 
 develops in entire consistency with the popular ideal.
 
 ILIA A CHRISTIAN KNIGHT. 193 
 
 When Vladimir, one day, offers him an insult, he gives 
 his men a sound thrashing, runs down into the court- 
 yard, batters the gold tiles down from the roof of the 
 palace and the gold crosses from the churches, and with 
 the gold he entertains all the muzhiks and beggars of the 
 region at a feast, where mead and spirits flow freely. In 
 other bilim he is suspected by Vladimir, because he is 
 slandered by the Prince of the Boyars at his court, 
 and he is thrown into prison to starve to death. He 
 remains there for three years, secretly supported by 
 Vladimir's young daughter. When Kief was attacked 
 by a huge Tatar host, and Ilia was bitterly missed, 
 Vladimir, led by the advice of his daughter, finds in the 
 underground prison the hero, " the old Cossack," who is 
 sitting at a plain table, reading the Evangelists. Vladi- 
 mir, on his knees, begs him for help, not for himself, but 
 for the' churches of the Blessed Virgin, and for the 
 widows and the fatherless in the holy Russia. Then 
 Ilia discloses himself as the Christian knight, who pro- 
 tects the defenceless and has the churches near to his 
 heart. Nay, he travels straight to Constantinople 
 (Tsargrad) and liberates the Tsar from the heathen 
 army. 
 
 It is now peculiarly Russian that, before this great mil- 
 itary hero starts out into the wide world, he makes the 
 vow that he will never soil his hands with blood. The 
 few incidents of wildness that are met with in liis his- 
 tory are plainly mythical elements, as when he kills the 
 robber Solovei, and afterwards the terrible Amazon or 
 Polenitsa (who at last shows herself to be his daughter), 
 tearing them both into small pieces, and scattering these 
 upon the earth to make it fertile. Otherwise he per- 
 forms all his exploits with the greatest calmness, and, 
 while he despises danger, he is fond of making deri-
 
 194 nrpRESSjojsfs of bussia. 
 
 sive jokes after the manner of the Russian peasants. 
 Like a good son of a peasant he began by helping his 
 old parents. Everywhere, as at Vladimir's table, he 
 compels the persons of position to give place to those of 
 low degree. Like a genuine muzhik he sometimes drinks 
 deeply and sleeps out his drunkenness ; but he is open- 
 hearted towards his prince to the last degree, and when 
 the latter has taken it ill and punished him cruelly for 
 it, he is ready to forget the injury as soon as he hears 
 that there is any question about the cause of the defence- 
 less. He never brags of his victories, wishes that honors 
 may redound to the glory of Russia, and, m his aversion 
 to soiling his hands with blood, spares his enemies when 
 he can do so, and sets his captives free. 
 
 It is a very remarkable instance of Russian imagina- 
 tion that a well-known bilina, with the title "Why there 
 are no more heroes in holy Russia," for the purpose of 
 increasing the impression of the power there is in this 
 national hero, represents Ilia of Murom as stronger 
 than Fate itself, to which this people otherwise so 
 patiently submit, and which conquers all the other 
 heroes. 
 
 Ilia had become fully three hundred and fifty years 
 old, but his powers were less impaired than Stserkodder's 
 as an old man, when, one day, while riding through a 
 forest, he read on a stone the inscription, " If you go to 
 the right you will become rich, if you take the middle 
 road you will be married, if you go to the left you will 
 be killed.'' The old Cossack, as he is called here, after 
 considering it, concludes that it does not become his age 
 now to seek for wealth or marriage. It is more becom- 
 ing for him to ride in the road in which death is found. 
 After riding a short distance he meets with a band of 
 robbers, but disperses them, turns back and writes upon
 
 ILIA'S SELF-SACRIFICE. 195 
 
 the stone, " I rode to the left and was not killed." By 
 the middle road he comes to a splendid castle. A king's 
 daughter, dazzlingly beautiful, first waits upon him, and 
 then asks him to share her couch on a bed of silk and 
 eider down. But the old hero, suspecting treachery, 
 declares that in his country it is the custom for women 
 to lie down first, seizes the princess by her belt and 
 throws her on the bed, and then rushes down into the 
 vaults of the palace. He liberates the forty princes she 
 has held imprisoned there, causes the enchantress to be 
 broken on the wheel, and writes a second time on the 
 guide-board at the cross-roads, "I rode by the middle 
 way and was not married." By the road to the right he 
 finally finds an iron cross and under it a great treasure. 
 He divides it into three parts and builds three churches 
 with the gold : one for the merciful Saviour, one for St. 
 Nicholas from Mozhaisk, and one for the bold St. George, 
 so he can properly write on the stone : " I rode to the 
 right and did not become rich." 
 
 From this htlina we can perhaps best learn with what 
 strength the Kussian imagination has felt obliged to 
 endow its heroes. His most extraordinary trait of char- 
 acter, nevertheless, is in the exhibition of self-sacrifice. 
 He does not, like the heroes of the West, perform the 
 act from a feudal devotion to his prince nor from a feel- 
 ing of duty to him; still less, like the Norse heroes, 
 from ambition, but from a magnanimous tenderness for 
 children and the abandoned, or to protect the country 
 and its religion. It is the common weal, not the happi- 
 ness of the prince or his own honor, which lies near to 
 his heart. While Achilles never pardons Agamemnon 
 for the insult he received from the king, Ilia forgets on 
 the spot what Vladimir has done to him. On that 
 account the Russian scholars, like Orestes Miller, seek
 
 196 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 to show that Ilia's feeling of duty is conclusively sig- 
 nificant in relation to the idea of community, which 
 is the Eussian fundamental idea for the Slavophiles. 
 They see in Ilia's indifference towards mere personality, 
 and his willingness to serve the common cause, a symbol 
 of the original tendency of the Eussian spirit to com- 
 munity in family, society, and state. ^ 
 
 Besides this popular epic poem, moreover, the Eus- 
 sian literature possesses in " The Story of Igor's Cam- 
 paign " an old epic of art of very high rank, corresponding 
 to what the " Song of Eoland " is for the French, and 
 the Nlehelungenlied for the Germans, but which, never- 
 theless, has the fault, which would be very serious in 
 the eyes of the Germans, of being much shorter. 
 
 This was written a very short time after the event 
 which it describes : the campaign which Igor Sviatosla- 
 vitch, one of the princes from Novgorod-Sieversk, in 
 1155, undertook against the pagan Polovtsians, a nomadic 
 tribe of Turco-Finnish descent, who lived on the banks 
 of the Don and were continually attacking the careless 
 Eussians. Igor was a cousin of the Prince Imperial of 
 Kief, who the year before, with other princes, had con- 
 ducted a victorious expedition against the Polovtsians. 
 Now, for his own part, he wished to cover himself with 
 honor, and therefore sallied forth with his brother 
 Vsevolod, "the wild bull," to whom he was greatly 
 attached, and his son Vladimir. But his expedition 
 was unfortunate ; he was himself taken prisoner and 
 with great difficulty escaped from captivity by the aid of 
 a trusty esquire. We have the same incident related in 
 the old Eussian chronicle of the monk Ipat, one of those 
 
 1 Rambaud, above cited, 62, 113. A. von Reinholdt, above cited, 
 p. 69. Reinholdt has extracts from the bilini translated in the origi- 
 nal metres.
 
 STOBY OF IGOR. 197 
 
 who wrote a continuation of the chronicle of Nestor, 
 and we can see from that the endeavor of the unknown 
 poet to confine himself to the historic truth. It is quite 
 true that we find in the " Story of Igor " many tradi- 
 tions or mythical stories incorporated with the principal 
 event, while the monk who is the author of the chron- 
 icle has carefully eliminated every heathen expression 
 and element, but still there is a more evident attempt in 
 the chronicler to endow the heroes with fine qualities. 
 When the battle is lost the princes are advised to fly. 
 In the chronicle they refuse to do so; they will not 
 desert their men, their common soldiers, but will live or 
 die with them. The story has nothing of this. And 
 when Igor is taken prisoner according to the chronicle 
 he refuses for a long time to escape from captivity, 
 because he has given his word to the princes of the 
 Polovtsians, until at last the regard for Russia, now so 
 exposed to the enemy, moves him. In the story he is 
 at once ready for flight. 
 
 When we mentally compare the " Story of Igor " with 
 the heroic lays of the Edda, which are probably of 
 greater antiquity and, at any rate, describe a rougher 
 and Avilder form of national life, the Russian poem, no 
 doubt (in contradistinction to the Niebelungennot), has 
 the inequality and lyrical form as well as the predilec- 
 tion for a vivid dramatic representation in common with 
 the Norse poems, but the essential feature of the Slavic 
 epic is still entirely distinct. In the first place, the lat- 
 ter possesses an individuality. We do not know the 
 author's name, but his entity stands out very distinctly 
 before the reader, rich as it is in enthusiasm and piety. 
 He speaks in his own name, stands as an individual 
 responsible for his words, is conscious of a personal style 
 of composition which is less flighty and fantastic than
 
 198 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 the style of the older seers and bards, -whom he in other 
 respects admires. In the next place, you feel that his 
 love for the poetic art is not less strong than his admira- 
 tion for the deeds of the princes of his day. He is an 
 enthusiast for poetry. It is, as he expresses it, his inten- 
 tion to free himself from the poetic traditions ; he does 
 not wish to borrow from his predecessors " the old words.'' 
 From the bUint we can see what he meant by this. 
 There is found in them, just as in the Homeric poems, 
 a standing supply of descriptive epithets. The moun- 
 tains are always grar/, the sea always blue, the sun 
 always red. The earth is our mother, the damp earth. 
 They always run on their swift feet, always take another 
 by his ivhite hand, etc. The unknown poet has plainly' 
 wished to adopt as little of that as possible. Neverthe- 
 less, we meet in him certain constantly recurring expres- 
 sions which are evidently inherited, as, to drink the Don 
 dry with his helmet, to set ten falcons on a flock of 
 swans, to sow the earth with human bones, and certain 
 constantly recurring epithets, as, Vsevolod, the wild bull, 
 the falcon Igor, and his son the young falcon, and others. 
 As a man, the author of " Igor's Campaign " is far milder 
 in his emotions than the author of even the mildest of 
 the heroic poems of the Edda, " The Songs of Helge." 
 The style in which, in his poem, Yaroslavna expresses 
 her longing for Igor during his absence in the war, and 
 her fear for the life of her lover, is more like Ingeborg's 
 languishing lamentations in Tegner's poem than it is to 
 Sigrun's loss of Helge in the Edda. And the whole life 
 of emotion and nature, which the nameless poet has 
 spread out before us, makes an entirely characteristic 
 impression, by the grand, childlike simplicity with which 
 the association between man and nature is interpreted 
 and described. The whole of nature is alarmed when
 
 LAMENTATION FOR DEFEAT. 199 
 
 Igor starts upon his unfortunate ride to the Don : the 
 sun is darkened, the night groans, the beasts howl in 
 anticipation of the impending danger. Both Yaroslavna 
 and Igor, on their part, address winds and streams as 
 if they Avere men ; nay, give them titles and compli- 
 mentary words just as plainly as it is done in the Iliad 
 two thousand years before. And the river Donyets gives 
 Igor an answer. The living naturalism, the transfer of 
 human qualities and emotions to nature, is so prominent 
 here that it is noticed as the expressive personal naivete 
 of the characteristic poet. 
 
 Finally, the patriotism of this epic and of its author is 
 characteristic in the highest degree. Patriotism per- 
 meates and constitutes its motive ; a love for the Rus- 
 sian land, which breaks forth not only in mourning over 
 the triumph of the heathen Polovtsians, but even more 
 vehemently in wrath and laments on account of the dis- 
 cord between the Russian princes who, at the close of 
 this pregnant period, rent the land asunder with civil war. 
 When the defeat is sustained, the singer exclaims : 
 
 " The grass bowed down in pain. The crowns of the 
 trees bowed down to the earth in sorrow. For the cheer- 
 less time was already come, brothers, when it was void 
 of power, when injustice spread itself in the ranks of 
 the descendants of Dazhbog [princely power]. Quiet, 
 like a young girl, it stole into our land, and, as if with 
 the wings of a swan, dabbled in the waters of the Don 
 and of the blue sea. It awakened the hours of disaster. 
 Then the contests of the princes against the heathen 
 were broken off ; brother said to brother, ' This is mine, 
 even this also is mine.' And the princes began to say 
 about small things, 'This is great.' But the heathens 
 from all sides fell down upon the Russian land." 
 
 The old poet is a skilful battle-painter. Like the
 
 200 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 authors of the old Northern ballads, he embellishes his 
 poems by descriptions of many battles which he has 
 seen or in which he has participated ; for example : 
 
 " The Russians fenced round the wide field with their 
 purple-colored shields, sought honor for themselves and 
 glory for their princes. At daybreak on Friday, they 
 crushed the heathen host of the Polovtsians under their 
 feet, carried the beautiful Polovtsian girls away with 
 them, and with them gold and veils and costly velvet 
 garments. With the ribbons and capes and furs and 
 finery of all sorts they began to build bridges over pools 
 and swamps. But the red standards, the white banners, 
 and the spears with the silver points fell to the lot of 
 the brave Sviatoslavitch." 
 
 Or read the description of the battle on the following 
 day : 
 
 "On the next day the blood-red light very early 
 heralded the dawn. Black clouds swept in from the 
 sea; they would cover the four suns [the four Russian 
 leaders of the army], and the blue lightning trembled 
 in them. There was heavy thunder. The arrows flew 
 like rain from the great Don. Then the spears were 
 splintered ; then the swords struck against the helmets 
 of the Polovtsians by the river, by Kayala, near the 
 great Don. Russian land ! thou art still protected. 
 But behold the winds, Stribog's offspring ; they blow a 
 sea of arrows against Igor's brave warriors. The earth 
 trembles ; sadly flow the rivers ; the field is covered 
 with dust ; the banners rustle ; the Polovtsians come 
 from the Don and from the sea, and from all sides 
 surround the Russian army ; the children of the devil 
 beset the shrieking battle-field ; still the brave Russians 
 enclose it with their purple-colored shields." 
 
 But the pearl of the poem is Yaroslavna's lamentation 
 and Igor's flight.
 
 TAEOSLAVNA'S LAMENT. 201 
 
 " Listen, the voice of Yaroslavna ! Like a cuckoo she 
 complaius alone early in the morning. ' I will fly,' 
 she says, ' like a cuckoo over the Danube ; will plunge 
 my beaver-skin sleeves in the Kayala's stream ; will dry 
 the prince's bloody wounds on his stiffening limbs.' 
 Yaroslavna weeps early in the morning on the wall at 
 Putivl, and thus she speaks : ' wind, thou mighty 
 wind, why, oh. Lord ! dost thou blow so hard ? Why dost 
 thou bear Chanen's arrows on thy light wings against my 
 lover's men ? Was it not enough for thee to blow the 
 mountain waves out from under the clouds when thou 
 didst rock the ships on the blue sea ? Why does the 
 breath of thy spirit waft my joy away over the grass of 
 the plains ? ' Yaroslavna weeps early in the morning on 
 the walls at Putivl, and thus she speaks : * O Dnieper, 
 the famous ! thou hast broken through the rocks in the 
 country of the Polovtsians, hast rocked Sviatolaf's ships 
 against Kobyak's i hosts. Lord, bring my lover back to 
 me, so that I no longer shall send him my tears over 
 the sea ! ' Yaroslavna weeps on the wall at Putivl, and 
 thus she speaks : ' Thou clear and thrice clear sun ! thou 
 art warm and beautiful for all. Why dost thou aim thy 
 burning beams on my lover's men ? Why hast thou in 
 the arid desert dried their bows together in their hands ? 
 Why hast thou tortured them with thirst, so that the 
 quiver became heavy on their backs ? ' 
 
 " Towards midnight the sea became disturbed ; whirl- 
 winds raised themselves among the fogs. God shows 
 Prince Igor a way out of the country of the Polovtsians 
 to the Russian land, to his father's golden throne. The 
 glow of the evening is extinguished. Does Igor sleep ? 
 No, he is awake ; he measures in his mind the plains 
 from the great Don to the little Donyets. Listen I the 
 1 Prince of the Polovtsiipis.
 
 202 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 sound of his horse at midnight. Ovlur whistles on this 
 side of the river, gives information to the prince : Igor 
 must not remain longer. The earth roars, the grass 
 whistle^ the guards of the Polovtsians draw near. 
 Then Igor leaps up like a weasel in the rushes ; like a 
 white sea-duck, he leaps into the water. He jumps on 
 his fleet horse. Soon after he leaps down again, and, 
 like a wolf, with light steps he hastens to the meadows 
 of the Donyets ; flies like a falcon in the fog, killing 
 geese and swans for his meals morning, noon, and night. 
 While Prince Igor flies like a falcon, Ovlur runs like a wolf, 
 both dripping with cold dew in the grass of the steppes. 
 For they have broken the wind of their fleet horses. 
 
 " Donyets said, ' Prince Igor, thou shalt have no little 
 honor now, and Kontchak no little wrath, and the 
 Russian land no little joy.' Igor answers, ' Donyets ! 
 no little honor hast thou now, thou who borest the prince 
 on thy billows, made him a bed on the green grass on 
 thy banks, and covered him with warm fog in the shade 
 of green trees ; thou who causedst him to be guarded by 
 the sea-duclt on the water, by the gull on the rivers, by 
 the wild-duck in the air ! Xot such,' said he, ' is the 
 river Stugna, whose stream is so dangerous when it has 
 swallowed foreign brooks, and which has broken our barks 
 against the roots of the trees on its shore. Nor is the 
 Dnieper such a river. That thrust our young prince 
 Rostislav back from its sombre banks. Rostislav's 
 mother now weeps over the young prince. The flowers 
 wither, consumed by grief ; the tree bowed its crown 
 down to the earth in sorrow.' " ^ 
 
 1 "Wenceslatis Hanka: Ic/oi- Sratoslnvitch. Prag, 1821. (Text, 
 Bohemian and German translation.) Wolfsohn: Die Scfidmoixsen- 
 schaftliche lAtteratvr tier Riisscn. Leipzig, 1843, pp. 182-226 (the best 
 translation in German). Rambaud, above cited, pp. 192-223.
 
 TUE WRITTEN EPIC ABlSTOCRATlC. 203 
 
 From these extracts we can form a conception of the 
 style and tone of the Russian epic. We see that they 
 are very different from those of the heroic poems of the 
 Edda. This written epic is unique in Russian literature. 
 It differs from the btlini of the Kief-circle by its purely 
 historical character, since none of its leading actors are 
 demi-gods, but all the heroes who figure there are men, 
 who conquer or suffer in a purely human manner. In 
 the next place, this epic is characteristic from its stamp 
 of aristocratic culture, since it was evidently written 
 with the purpose in view, like the old Norse laudatory 
 poems, of being recited before the body guard of a 
 prince. Therefore it does not extol the masses in the 
 person of a popular hero, but sings of the chiefs and 
 leaders of the army as the leading men. Still, however 
 patriotic the poem is, it is nevertheless inspired by the 
 patriotism of the princely power and of the highest 
 culture.
 
 n. 
 
 The Russian national literature, like the Danish, 
 dates from the eighteenth century, and it is even a 
 little younger than the latter. The foundation was 
 laid by Lomonosof, thirty years after Holberg became 
 the founder of ours. But between the ancient literature 
 written in the Church Slavic togetlier with the hilim, 
 which date from a period before the reign of the Tatars, 
 and the modern Russian book-world there lie the popular 
 ballads, the short lyrical poems, Little Russian as well 
 as Great Russian, rich and attractive from their tender- 
 ness and their sadness. 
 
 Little-Russian and Great-Russian popular ballads, each 
 written in its own dialect, sung by widely different peo- 
 ple, belong, in fact, to two different literatures, of Avhich 
 one, in later times, by despotic command, has been sup- 
 pressed ; but, in spite of tl^e differences, the two groups 
 present so many points of resemblance that they influ- 
 ence the mind in a cognate manner. 
 
 The Little-RuSsian ballads treat exclusively of the 
 life of the Cossack people in older and later times. The 
 Ukraine steppes are the theatre of this life, but the bal- 
 lads also follow the Cossack in all his bold excursions 
 away from home for centuries. They present picture 
 after picture of the dangers in the martial life on horse- 
 back, in eternal conflicts with enemies in the east and 
 west. There is the mortal hour of the wounded Cossack 
 longing for home in a foreign land ; the corpse Avhich is 
 
 204
 
 POPULAR BALLADS. 205 
 
 washed by the cold rain and whose eyes are picked out 
 by the birds of prey ; the lamentation of the Cossack 
 girl when the signal for the departure is given, and her 
 lover rides away ; her ardent regret for him when lie is 
 absent on a military expedition in a foreign land ; the 
 lamentation of the old Cossack over the young men who 
 have disappeared ; the young Cossack's self-reliance and 
 confidence in victory; the sorrow of the lovers at the 
 gossip about them, and the ignominy Avhich they who 
 would separate them heajo upon the loved girl, all this 
 in short lyrical poems different from the more narrative 
 form of the Cossack dunia, which is fond of describing a 
 definite historical person or exploit.^ 
 
 The Great-Russian ballads are of several kinds : partly 
 being the more stereotyped wedding and Christmas 
 verses; partly the so-called ballads of men of adven- 
 ture, that is, of highwaymen, the semi-pathetic, semi- 
 humorous, always humble ballads of those who are under 
 sentence of death, which open the perspective to the 
 gallows, and to that extent have a certain resemblance 
 to several poems of Francois Villon ; and partly (the 
 great bulk) of genuine popular ballads, nearly all of 
 which are about the longing and sorrows of lovers.^ 
 
 The Little-Russian and Great-Russian popiilar ballads 
 agree in two principal features : in the comparison be- 
 tween a display of nature and a mental condition, which 
 is continually evoked by companionship with nature and 
 a poetic view thereof, and in the richness of expression 
 for the most varied moods and shades of a love upon 
 whose multifarious sorrows they dwell with ineffable 
 sadness. 
 
 1 Comp. Fr. Bodenstedt: Die poetische Ukraine, Sammbmc/ Klein- 
 ruBsischer Volkslicder. See G. Brandes: Indtrykfra Polen, 220, 227. 
 
 2 See the poems in Wolfsohn: Die schdnwissenscha/tliche Litter- 
 atur der Russen, 227-272.
 
 206 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 The natural parallel is of this sort : 
 
 Little Russian : " A hop vine alone in the garden 
 hurled itself down to the earth. A young little girl 
 among men wept very bitterly. '0 green, blossoming 
 hop, say Avhy do you not twine?' 'Oh, dear young 
 girl, why do you grieve over your fate ? ' " etc. 
 
 Great Russian : " Between two mountains, two high 
 mountains, grew up a slim white birch tree a slim 
 birch tree, a branching where the sun warmed it not, 
 and the moon and the starry host shed not their light, 
 where only the blasts shook it, where only violent tor- 
 rents of rain fell upon it so among our neighbors 
 grew up a sweet little girl, praised for her beauty and 
 neatness, her slenderness and plumpness and dainti- 
 ness," etc. 
 
 So far as richness in expressions of love is concerned, 
 it may be regarded as scientifically proved that, of all 
 living and dead languages, there is none so rich in 
 expression as the Russian in both of its dialects. The 
 philologist Carl Abel has Avritten an essay which gives 
 a vivid impression of the peculiarity of the Russian lan- 
 guage in this respect, (''The Conception of Love in 
 some Ancient and Modern Languages.") They have, for 
 the expression of love as a pure, simple emotion, as an 
 involuntary attraction, the noun Imhov and the verb liubity 
 and the adjectives liubezni, liuheni, linho'i, Hub (loved for 
 superiority, by voluntary choice, by taste, from interest) ; 
 next, zaznoha,^ which indicates the growing love with its 
 sweet apprehensions and its tender hopes. Milost is 
 the active love in endless shades : preference, good will, 
 partiality, grace. Blagost is especially grace in all its 
 goodness, warmth, and inexhaustibility. The study of 
 languages shows that, while love among the Romans in 
 
 * Passiou, " flame."
 
 RUSSIAN PET-NAMES. 207 
 
 particular was love for the family, for kinsmen, and 
 regarded as a duty, among the Hebrews love for the 
 whole tribe, and, at the highest point, love for the whole 
 of mankind, and Avas regarded as a religion ; the Russian 
 sentiment, according to the derivation of the words, is 
 caressing and full of charm, exclusively a natural instinct, 
 far less conscious, circumspect, and trustworthy, always 
 wholly involuntary. 
 
 The domain of Russian love is the tender flattery 
 which expresses itself in iijnumerable ingratiating dimin- 
 utives. Of liuhoo, love, as a woman's name, the common 
 people make use of the names Liuba, Liubka, Liubkascha, 
 Liubaschenka, Liubashetchka, Liubotchka, Liubutchka, 
 Liubushenka, Liubushetchka, Liubenka, and even many 
 others, each Avith its different shade of tenderness and 
 caressing. And, however numerous the linguistic ex- 
 pressions for the sentiments and moods of love are, 
 naturally just as numerous are the sentiments and 
 moods themselves.^ 
 
 Here is a short erotic poem, which is typical : 
 
 " Thou ash tree, oh, thou full of branches ! when 
 didst thou sprout, when didst thou grow up ? Thou 
 ash tree, oh, thou full of branches ! when wast thou in 
 blossom, and when didst thou ripen ? " 
 
 "I sprouted in spring, shot up in summer I was in 
 blossom in the spring, became a tree in the summer." 
 
 " Under thee there grows, under thee, thou Ash ! no 
 poppy flowers and no grass, there grows no grass, there 
 burns no tire. There burns no tire, yet a heart so warm. 
 Yet the heart so warm in a youth's breast it burns, 
 burns, nay, boils like pitch boils in longing for my 
 little swan my swan, my dove, my little soul, my 
 charming dove, my dearly beloved. 
 
 1 See Carl Abel: Liuguistio Essays, pp. 23-78.
 
 208 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 " Oh, thou soul, my soul, my beautiful maid in the 
 hour of daybreak, when tlie morning was red when 
 the shining sun rose up in the heavens without leave 
 of thy father and mother without even once seeing 
 thy friend thou left life, thou went away from here. 
 
 " Oh, ye winds, ye warm winds, ye ! warm winds, ye 
 who waft towards autumn blow ye not here, I need 
 ye not. But come only thou storm, oh, thou roaring ! 
 From the regions of the ^S^orth fly only thou hither ! 
 Split only Avith thy breath the, moist earth split the 
 wide field, split the broad field ! Oh, open for me, 
 storm ! open for me here my grave. And ah, let me, 
 let me for the last time here take leave of my loved 
 friend of my loved friend, of my dearly beloved. 
 Only a tear-kiss amid weeping so bitter! Then I expire 
 and die with her." 
 
 When from these tones of nature you come to the 
 lyrical in the founder of the later Russian literature, the 
 transition is abrupt, so abrupt that for a man of the 
 present day it demands a very great interest in the his- 
 torical development of a great jieople, not to put Lonion- 
 osof aside with disgust. For he, who, moreover, was a far 
 greater philosopher than poet, belongs absolutely to that 
 tendency of taste in the eighteenth century for which 
 the inartistic poetry of the people was no poetry at all, 
 and which saAV the end and aim of lyric poetry in the 
 strained pathos of the style of the ode and its artistic 
 form of regular combination. The modern artistic poem, 
 in various parts of the comitry, begins in this eighteenth 
 century by separating itself as far as possible from the 
 ballads of the people and from everything which belongs 
 to them, so as for the first time at the beginning of the 
 new century to seek backwards for simplicity, unity, 
 and nature.
 
 BOYHOOD OF LOMONOSOF. 209 
 
 Lomouosof, whom Byelinski has called the " Peter the 
 Great of Russian literature," was obliged to shape the 
 modern Russian language, as a literary language, entirely 
 anew. Before the time of Peter the Great they wrote 
 in Church Slavic, after that a mixture of Church Slavic 
 and Russian. As a boy, Lomondsof had drawn the lan- 
 guage of the people from the purest fountain, had heard 
 it as it fell from the lips of the Russian fishermen in 
 Archangel, but he had studied Slavic at an early age in 
 the old church books. He was thus able to mould his 
 language with the confidence of a man of intellect, and 
 created the newer prose style and the Russian metre and 
 wrote the first sonorous verse existing in Russian, com- 
 posed by any poet whose name is known. 
 
 Lomonosof 's importance for Russia is, as already stated, 
 closely akin to that of Holberg for Norway and Den- 
 mark. He had a wonderfully many-sided genius, devel- 
 oped by a career which is almost marvellous. Mikhail 
 Vasilyevitch Lomondsof was born in 1711, in a village in 
 the department of Archangel. His father was a royal 
 serf, who earned his living as a fisherman, and who used 
 to take the boy with him out in his boat. From his 
 tenth to his sixteenth year the intelligent boy thus 
 sailed about every summer over the White Sea and the 
 Arctic Ocean, receiving impressions of a great and wild 
 nature, experiencing the poor man's hard fight for bread, 
 seeing salt-works, cloisters, religious meetings, and among 
 the people of the region he acquired a knowledge of the 
 character of the Russian people in its purity. He 
 learned to read and write from the village priest, devoured 
 one or two old church books, which were the only read- 
 ing available to him, discovered that Latin must be learned 
 in order to acquire knowledge of a wider scope, and 
 therefore ran away from home at the age of seventeen
 
 210 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 and went ten miles on foot to catch a wagon-train of 
 frozen fish which was going from Archangel to Moscow. 
 There he was dropped in the market-place, and by the 
 accidental kindness of a monk a few days later was taken 
 to a cloister school, which indeed only received the sons 
 of the nobility, but where his ancestry was overlooked. 
 Here, and for a short time in Kief, his progress in Latin 
 and Greek, in the Slavic language, in philosophy, 
 physics, and mathematics, is that of a genius. When 
 he had completed his courses at Moscow and Kief, he 
 obtained the privilege of being sent to the Academy at 
 St. Petersburg and to Germany, where at Marburg he 
 attended Chr. Wolf's lectures on philosophy, and at 
 Friburg he studied practical metallurgy and mining. 
 
 He had previously made attempts at writing verse in 
 St. Petersburg, and now he showed his enthusiasm for 
 the poet Johann Christian Gunther, forgotten in our 
 time outside of Germany, by transferring his metres to 
 the Russian language. His first ode to the Tsaritsa 
 Anna, a memorial ode celebrating the conquest of 
 Chotin, is an exact imitation of a poem by Gunther 
 in honor of Prince Eugene. Lomondsof, perhaps, sur- 
 passes his German model in spirit, and is possibly his 
 equal in the domain of the ode in bombast ; but he does 
 not at all succeed, like Gunther, in writing bold and 
 audacious verses about his personal experiences or his 
 erotic inclinations. 
 
 In 1740 he is secretly married to the daughter of a 
 poor tailor in Marburg, runs in debt, and, when he is 
 threatened with the debtor's prison, flies secretly from 
 the town without even telling his wife, and begins to 
 beg his way on foot with the intention of getting to 
 Holland. On the way he falls in with a Prussian re- 
 cruiting officer with recruits, who gets him drunk, gives
 
 lomon6sof as scientist. 211 
 
 him the bounty money, and receives his promise. The 
 next morning Lomonosof wakes up in uniform, and, in 
 spite of all his prayers and protestations, is a Prussian 
 cavalry soldier. He is taken to the fortress at Wesel. 
 He deserts, hotly pursued, amid dangers and anxieties, 
 crossing the Westphalian boundaries, and arrives at Am- 
 sterdam, representing himself to be a poor student from 
 Saxony. In Holland the Russian minister takes charge 
 of him, and sends him back to St. Petersburg. 
 
 From the Hague he wrote to his wife for the first 
 time since his flight; but in St. Petersburg, where he 
 did not feel that he was in a situation to suppoi-t his 
 wife and the child slio had brought to him, he allowed 
 two whole years to pass without any communication, 
 until she, through the Eussian minister at the Hague, 
 finally learned where he was, and with his consent came 
 to him. 
 
 From 1745 Lomonosof labored at St. Petersburg as 
 professor of chemistry and experimental physics, and 
 from 1755 began to advocate a plan for the re-organiza- 
 tion of the Scientific Society, in which he fought against 
 the encroachments of the Germans, hitherto the sole 
 masters of the situation ; and, as the passionate, nay, 
 fanatical exponent of Russian nationality, was soon 
 guilty of no less scientific and personal encroachments. 
 
 Here at home he developed his whole genius as a 
 scientist. He was the first Russian naturalist who, on 
 the foundation of the scientific results of Western 
 Europe, which he laid before his pupils, was an inde- 
 pendent inventor of machines and apparatus, and an 
 independent discoverer of hitherto unknown laws of 
 nature. The great mathematician Euler gave the most 
 appreciative praise to his work on the phenomena of 
 electricity, light, and air. Euler publicly declared that
 
 212 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 " this talented man did honor to the academy and the 
 whole people." In physics, Lomonosof, independent of 
 Franklin, explained the principles of electricity in the 
 air and of the Northern Lights, which accords in many 
 points with Franklin's, and in some other respects he 
 is even more advanced. In mineralogy he was the first 
 to point oiit the vegetable origin of amber and the pro- 
 duction of coal from peaty soil under the influence of 
 subterranean gases. In astronomy he was the discov- 
 erer of the atmosphere of Venus. Finally, as a chemist 
 and geologist, he distinguished himself by his popular 
 descriptive powers. 
 
 His studies in the Russian language, literature, and 
 history made an epoch. His Russian grammar has con- 
 trolled education in his native land for half a century. 
 He wrote books about Russian style, rhetoric, and metres 
 at the same time that he himself was working as a poet 
 and orator. Finally, he is Russia's pioneer in mosaic 
 art. There still exist from his hand a well executed 
 portrait in mosaic of Peter the Great, and a large work 
 representing the battle at Poltava. 
 
 It is this man of genius who, for the first time since 
 the introduction into Russia of the intellectual and in 
 some directions material foreign ascendency by the Tsar 
 Peter, gave an organ to the old Russian national feeling, 
 while he at the same time made himself its poetical 
 exponent and its practical champion, the latter being 
 carried out to the most infatuated chauvinism. His 
 great reputation in this generation, when his poetry is 
 no longer read, depends on the fact that it was he 
 who gave the first impulse towards the liberation of 
 the Russian intellectual life and of Russian science, 
 then just dawning, from the foreign and especially from 
 the Crerman yoke,
 
 PLAN OF THE ACADEMY. 213 
 
 When Lomonosof was admitted to the Academy of 
 St. Petersburg, there were two illustrious Germans, Ger- 
 hard Miiller and A. L. von Schlozer, who had laid the 
 foundation for all historical investigation in Russia, who 
 were the influential persons in the Academy, where, 
 moreover, they found themselves surrounded almost 
 exclusively by their countrymen. At the request of 
 the Tsar Peter, the founder of the Academy, Leibnitz, 
 had prepared a plan therefor, expressly designed to 
 "bring the culture of the west into Russia, and to be 
 instrumental in teaching the Russians to know and 
 appreciate it, and in thus causing them to cease to be 
 regarded as barbarians." It was in his spirit that only 
 books of instruction of the Academy were printed in 
 Russian, while the purely scientific publications, which, 
 moreover, would not have found many readers if printed 
 in Russian, were issued in German or French. But, nat- 
 urally, this condition, when the national feeling first 
 grew strong, could not long continue. 
 
 In 1741, Elizabeth, by the aid of the party of the 
 native nobility, annulled the rule which Munnich, 
 Ostermann, and some other aristocrats of German 
 birth in the regency of Aiina Leopoldovna, had estab- 
 lished for the minority of Ivan VI. Elizabeth had ban- 
 ished Munnich and Ostermann, "bravery and wisdom," 
 from her empire, and was now everywhere greeted as 
 the person Avho was to bring about an age of reform in 
 Russia, only on account of the agitation in the direction 
 opposite to that which was due to her great father. 
 She had inherited Peter's sensuous instincts, but not 
 his genius. In the mean time, simply that she dreamed 
 about again making Moscow the capital of the empire, 
 that she had only native-born Russians about her and 
 continually took the part of protectress of the orthodox
 
 214 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 clergy, who had long been repressed, was enough to make 
 her generally regarded as the liberator of the people 
 from the oppression of Western Europe. She was espe- 
 cially so regarded by Lomonosof, whose lyrical poems 
 have hardly any other subject than his sovereign ; and 
 she was celebrated as " the Astraea who had brought back 
 a golden age," " the Moses who had brought Kussia out 
 of the darkness of Egyptian thraldom," etc. Under 
 her guidance, Russia was to show that, without foreign 
 teachers, it Avas in a situation to bring forward ''pro- 
 found Platos and intellectually endowed Newtons " a 
 manner of speech which sounds strangely in the mouth 
 of Lomonosof, who had himself been so thoroughly 
 grounded in the schools of foreign lands, and who, 
 without the instruction in Marburg and Friburg, never 
 would have attained the level of the European culture of 
 his day. 
 
 His general enthusiasm for science was beyond all 
 doubt, but in the domain of history and language the 
 rabid national feeling handicapped him as to the results 
 within reach. In his contests with Miiller and Schldzer 
 he maintains, for example, that they derived the Rus- 
 sian word kniaz (prince) from the German word knecht 
 to dishonor the Russian people and stamp them as a 
 nation of thralls. (Kniaz seems to be cognate not only 
 to the word knecht, but also to the English word knight, 
 and other appellations of rank of the highest repute. 
 Nevertheless, the comparison, by Auatole Leroy Beau- 
 lieu, of kniaz with king [La Russie, i. 214] is certainly 
 misleading.) An address of Miiller, which was to be 
 delivered on the name-day of the Tsaritsa, " About the 
 Scandinavian Origin of the Russian Race and Name," 
 struck Lomonosof as insulting to the honor and prestige 
 of the Russian people, He was so reckless in his pas-
 
 LOMONdsOF'S POEMS. 215 
 
 sion that one day he burst into the audience-room of the 
 German professor, and began to scold and abuse him. 
 When he was summoned before the consistory in regard 
 to it, he fell upon his associates with such abusive terms 
 that they refused to place them upon the record. He 
 was condemned to be punished with the knout for this, 
 but, " out of consideration for his services as a scholar, 
 and his superior intellectual qualities," the sentence was 
 commuted to a reduction of his salary. 
 
 At this time it became established as an article of 
 faith that the intention of Peter the Great had been to 
 drive foreign culture out of the land as soon as it had 
 done its work; and as they now contended that its 
 mission was already accomplished, they succeeded in 
 being able to honor Peter also among the great national 
 rulers. Lomondsof, therefore, compares him in his 
 speeches with God himself. To the speaker's servility 
 to Elizabeth, one of whose favorites he was, there is 
 naturally even less limit. 
 
 Lomonosof's lyrical poems were at first didactic, like 
 the antiquated, naive " About the Use of Glass," which, 
 on account of the insight of the author into the natural 
 sciences, stands a little above the didactic poems of this 
 kind of the eighteenth century, and rather reminds us 
 of the cognate poems of Hans Christian Oersted. In 
 the next place he wrote religious poems, observations on 
 the greatness of God and on similar themes, in the same 
 style as Johannes Ewald among us, and finally hymns 
 in laudation of Elizabeth and her husband, which remind 
 us in the highest degree of the flights in the first ode 
 of Victor Hugo in Odes et Ballades.^ 
 
 1 About LomontJsof, see "Wolfsohn, above cited, 305-340, with ex- 
 cellent metrical translations; Reinholdt, above cited, 304 and follow- 
 ing, with translations by Bellinghausen; and the anonymous work, 
 Aus der Petersburger Oesellschaft, Neue Folge : Wassily Oatrov und 
 die Akademie der Wiasenscha/ten, pp. 194-246.
 
 216 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 The strongest impression which the foreigner receives 
 of this great figure, planted at the entrance to Russian 
 literature, is its typical Russian stamp. We notice, 
 in the next place, its quality of appropriating the 
 results of a foreign civilization, with such remarka- 
 ble rapidity and in so many different directions, and 
 how the imitative tendency has taken root and become 
 productive. We remark the universality which reminds 
 us of Peter the Great, and which, as in the case of the 
 latter, takes its starting-point in mechanics and technics. 
 Lomonosof is a real muzhiJc, the ingenious serf who, 
 in the space of one generation, goes through the devel- 
 opment which we trace back to the natural gifts of the 
 Russian peasant in the main, but which his class of 
 society as a whole will take a thousand years to travel 
 through. Lomonosof is a genuine Slav by nature, 
 flighty and gentle. Several yea^s in succession he van- 
 ishes from his wife's range of vision without sending 
 a word to her ; but when she reminds him of her exist- 
 ence and of his child, he bursts into tears, and exclaims 
 to the man who brings him the letter, " My God ! how 
 could I have left her ! Circumstances have prevented 
 me from calling her to me. Now I will send her a hun- 
 dred rubles for the journey." Like a genuine Slav, he 
 is above everything else, at the same time, a rationalist 
 and mystic. On his journey back to Russia he had seen 
 in a dream his father's corpse cast up by the waves 
 on an uninhabited island in the Arctic Ocean. The 
 strong mathematician could not escape from this vision. 
 He had scarcely reached home before he inquired of peo- 
 ple from Archangel about his father's fate, and learned 
 that now for four months after he had gone out a-fishing 
 on the Arctic Ocean, nothing had been heard from him. 
 He then sent his brother with a letter to the fishermen
 
 BERZHAVIN. 211 
 
 of the region, and directed them to seek for his father's 
 body on the island seen in his dreams, whose situation 
 he exactly described; and, since the body was found, 
 was for the rest of his life obstinately convinced that 
 it was found exactly on the spot shown to him in his 
 dream. 
 
 Finally Lomonosof is Kussian in his rambling propen- 
 sity, and his thirst for foreign knowledge ; very Eussian 
 in his adoration of the Tsaritsa ; Russian in his coarse- 
 ness and violence towards his foreign colleagues ; but 
 Russian especially iii the way in which, a pupil of the 
 Germans, he goes to the end of his 7'ope in his hatred 
 of and opposition to the intellectual sway of the 
 foreigner. 
 
 From Lomonosof it is a direct descent through Der- 
 zhavin and Zhukovski down to Pushkin and Lermontof, 
 the literary geniuses of this century. 
 
 Derzhavin (1743-1816) represents in lyrics the period 
 of Catherine II., as Lomonosof does that of Elizabeth. 
 He was born at Kazan, learned German early, read 
 G^Uert and Hagedorn, Herder and Klopstock, was com- 
 pelled to pass twelve hard years from 1762 as a soldier of 
 the guard. The day when Catherine ascended the throne, 
 he stood as a soldier of nineteen on guard at the Winter 
 Palace. No one could then have imagined that in the 
 future his name would be mentioned in connection with 
 hers. 
 
 In 1773 he took part in the campaign against Puga- 
 tchef on the Volga, which he afterwards tried to describe 
 in verse. In 1777 he published his first collection of 
 poems, which contained among others a translation of a 
 number of the poems of Frederick the Great. He ob- 
 tained a civil appointment by his well-known " Ode to
 
 218 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 Feliza, Tsaritsa of the Kirgiz-Cossacks " (viz., Catherine). 
 He attracted the attention of the Tsaritsa, received a 
 snuff-box and some ducats for his poem, and then one 
 important office after the other, since on account of his 
 passionate, fiery temperament, which was strangely united 
 with the most methodical pedantry, he was generally 
 very soon obliged to leave his posts. His ode on the occa- 
 sion of the taking of Izmail by storm inspired Catherine 
 anew just when his affairs were at a low ebb. In 1791 he 
 was appointed private secretary to the Tsaritsa, but tired 
 her excessively in this capacity. Under Paul he became 
 the leading officer in the home department of the empire, 
 and under Alexander minister of justice, without being 
 of any use in either of these offices. He was obliged 
 to leave the former on account of " licentious language ; " 
 in the latter he showed himself to be ultra-reactionary, 
 and, among other things, set himself with might and 
 main against the plan, which had even then been pro- 
 posed, of emancipating the serfs. Derzhavin had some 
 other traits as an official ; he was disagreeable and 
 pedantic, and at the same time possessed a vigorous 
 conscience, a combination which reminds a Dane of 
 Schack Staffeldt. 
 
 He passed that part of his life which fell to the nine- 
 teenth century almost wholly as a private man, sur- 
 rounded by the admiration and piety of the rising 
 literary generation. His figure inspired veneration, his 
 eye was full of fire, and the expression of his counte- 
 nance was mild. When, a year before his death, he was 
 present at the final examination of a grammar school in 
 Tsarskoye-Sielo, a pupil recited a poem composed by 
 himself. This pupil was Alexander Pushkin, and his 
 verses made such an impression on the old poet, that, 
 after having heard them, he exclaimed : " My time is
 
 DEEZnAVlN'S ODES. 219 
 
 past you will now be a second Derzhavin." Pushkin, 
 in his Yevgeni Onyegin (viii. 2), recalls, with emotion, 
 these encouraging words which his predecessor in the 
 poetic art gave him by the way. 
 
 Derzhavin began as the imitator of Lomondsof's bom- 
 bastic style with the broad, cold pathos. His ode 
 " God," admired and celebrated in its time, corresponds 
 to the import of the religious odes of Baggesen in the 
 Danish literature. It must be owing to the subject that 
 the poem has been translated into a great many different 
 tongues, and last of all into the Japanese. It contains 
 everything which such a hymn must contain of gratitude 
 and humility, on the part of the very small towards the 
 eternal greatness, but no genuine emotion and not an 
 idea. The long-winded poem which won Catherine's 
 favor is far better. It surprises us agreeably on coming 
 from the Klopstock bombast of earlier days. It keeps 
 to the earth, is jocular and sportive, adopts a tone like 
 that which Horace assumed towards Maecenas, in the 
 broad description of the worldly-minded laziness of the 
 poet in comparison with the life full of responsibility 
 of the regent. The poem " The Great " has no longer 
 any poetic, but a historic and psychological interest, 
 because, without mentioning any names, it contains a 
 disparaging description of Potemkin (pronounced Patydm- 
 kin) in contrast to other unappreciated but really great 
 Russians. Our respect for the poet is, however, some- 
 what diminished, from the fact that he himself was in- 
 debted to Potemkin's energetic protection for his escape 
 in a lawsuit brought against him by some bitter enemies, 
 so that gratitude ought to have restrained him from giv- 
 ing utterance to his ill humor. He also, at a later period, 
 commemorated Potemkin's solitary death in the middle 
 of the steppes in his poem " The Waterfall."
 
 220 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 Constantly changing influences from Western and 
 Southern Europe, from the contemporary age and from 
 the past, had their effect upon this poetry, which just 
 escaped mediocrity. The influence of Horace and the 
 Anacreontics, perhaps through the influence of the 
 Gottingen lyric, follows that of Klopstock. When 
 the ballad style prevails, Derzhavin begins to write 
 ballads and to imitate, at second-hand (after Zhukovski), 
 Burger's " Leonore." At the close of his poetic career 
 he was influenced by Ossian, who was then making an 
 impression everywhere. 
 
 The influence which Ludwig Holberg exerted even 
 here in distant Russia at this period is specially inter- 
 esting to a Dane. The author who laid the foundation 
 of Eussian comedy, Denis von Wi'zin (1742-1792), re- 
 ceived the impulse to his dramatic attempts from Hol- 
 berg, French and German companies had found an 
 audience in Russia before the Russian theatre was estab- 
 lished, and it was a German manager, the distinguished 
 actor Ackerman, who, so to speak, introduced the entire 
 comedy of Holberg into Russia. When a permanent 
 Russian stage was opened in St. Petersburg and Moscow 
 (1756-57), a long list of plays of the favorite Danish 
 author, translated from the German into Russian, was 
 produced upon it. " Don Ranudo " and " Henry and 
 Pernilla " gave the most satisfaction, yet they could not 
 compete in power of attraction with the lyrical tragedy 
 of Metastasio, " Artaxerxes," translated by Holberg, 
 which was regarded as an original production of Holberg 
 and always filled the house to the last place. 
 
 Von Wizin saw " Henry and Pernilla " in St. Peters- 
 burg when he was a student, and felt, to use his own 
 expression, " an indescribable fascination " in this 
 comedy. His first celebrated comedy, "The Brigadier-
 
 VON wfziN'S BRIGADIER-GENERAL. 221 
 
 Greneral," is greatly influenced by Holberg, especially 
 by " Jean de France." The General's son Ivan (that is, 
 Jean), who has been educated in a boarding-house of a 
 French coachman, has returned from his journey to 
 Paris with the " Francomania." How great the resem- 
 blance is between this figure and the Hans Frandsen of 
 Holberg, a brief extract will make plain. 
 
 The General : " Listen, Ivan, I have seldom blushed 
 since I got out of leading-strings ; but to-day, in spite of 
 my gray hair, I was so ashamed of you that my cheeks 
 burned." 
 
 Ivan : "3fon cher pere f Can it be agreeable to me to 
 be told that I must marry a Russian girl ? " 
 
 The General : " Are you a Frenchman, then ? I 
 thought you were bom in Russia." 
 
 Ivdn : " My body was born in Russia ; that is true. 
 But my spirit belongs to the French crown." 
 
 The General : " Then you owe Russia more than 
 France, for there is more coherence in your body than 
 there is in your spirit." 
 
 Ivdn : " See here, papa, now you are beginning to say 
 civil things to me, since you understand that you cannot 
 make any progress by severity." 
 
 The General : " You are a regular fool ! I have called 
 you a blockhead, and you think that I am paying you 
 compliments. What an ass ! " 
 
 Ivdn : "Ass ! II ne me flatte pas. I repeat to you, 
 papa, je vous le I'epete, that my ears are not accustomed 
 to such expressions." 
 
 It is no slight honor for Denmark that the man who 
 laid the foundation of our national literature and 
 created the Danish stage has also been instrumental 
 in the foundation of the Russian theatre. He died 
 without seeing anything of this ; he certainly never
 
 222 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 suspected how large a portion of the world his genius 
 would affect ; but it is a curious idea that even in the 
 last years of Holberg's life, when his countrymen were 
 turning their backs upon him, the inhabitants of St. 
 Petersburg and Moscow were jubilant over his comedies, 
 and that only ten years after his death his influence 
 could be traced as predominant in the first Russian com- 
 edies that gave any pleasure to their hearers.^ 
 
 VonWizin, "the Russian Moliere," was also influenced 
 by several other foreign authors besides Holberg. But, 
 upon the whole, down to the present time, it has been a 
 law of Russian literature and intellectual life that no 
 progress and no new form of development has been 
 attained except on a foundation of foreign influence in 
 its most emphatic and unequivocal form. 
 
 This is again to be seen in the author who shows the 
 next advance, and who, in Russia, is regarded as the 
 Columbus of romanticism ; namely, Vasi'ly Zhukovski 
 (1783-1852). A man of subtile talent ; a character ten- 
 der as a woman, but pure, with A. W. Schlegel's gifts as 
 a translator, but without Schlegel's wealth of ideas, 
 an honest visionary and upright lover of the good, the 
 beautiful, and the true, as three venerable, conservative 
 powers, well fitted to develop as court poet under the 
 Tsar Nicholas, and to end, as Slavic men of talent like 
 to end, in mystic pietism. He is the author of the Rus- 
 sian national song, the hymn to the Tsar. 
 
 Zhukovski was the illegitimate son of an elderly Russian 
 country nobleman by the name of Bunin and a young Turk- 
 ish woman whom Bunin had brought home to his residence 
 as booty after the conquest of Bender. The boy grew 
 
 1 See Alexis "Wesselofsky : Deutsche EinflUsse auf das alte Rxis- 
 stsehe Theater, von 1673-1758, p. 107. Reinholdt, cited above, p. 358 
 and following.
 
 znuKorsKL 223 
 
 up with Bunin's legitimate daughters, who were much 
 older; early developed, aud spoiled in a purely feminine 
 atmosphere. While yet young, he read Diderot, Voltaire, 
 Young, Burger, Herder, Wieland, and Schiller. At the 
 age of nineteen, he translated Schiller's " William Tell ; " 
 some years later, " Don ^Quixote ; " also wrote original 
 epic poems, ballads, and tales, yet without close connec- 
 tion with the Eussiaix popular spirit, because, in almost 
 every one of his poems, you can point out the foreign 
 models. 
 
 In 1812 he participated with distinction, as an officer, 
 in the , campaign against the army of Napoleon, and 
 became celebrated by the poem, "The Singer in the 
 Russian Camp," and by a metrical homage addressed 
 to the Tsar Alexander from Paris, which for the first 
 time brought him in contact with the ladies of the impe- 
 rial family. He suffered the heartache of youth when 
 some one, on grounds of orthodoxy, refused to give him 
 his niece in marriage. In order to enjoy the j^oung girl's 
 society, he accompanied the family to Dorpat, passed an 
 instructive year in the little university town, and then, 
 in 1816, in St. Petersburg, joined the literary society 
 "Artasamas," composed of persons similarly educated, 
 of. which Pushkin, Nicholas Turgenief, and the later 
 re-actionists, Minister Bludof and Uvarof, were mem- 
 bers ; a society which, as a league of the Phosphorists 
 in Sweden of that time, started the opposition of the 
 new century against the French classicism. 
 
 The romanticism which the society advocated as an 
 offset did not and could not have that relation to the 
 past, especially to the Middle Ages, possessed by the 
 German romanticism, of which it was a product. For 
 the Russian antiquity and Middle Ages were, at that 
 time, still a sealed book. They only brought forward
 
 224 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 a new and, in its essence, a tolerably inexact sesthetic 
 doctrine : fantasy should have freer flight than before ; 
 deeper psychological insight is of more account than 
 local color. Still, like all other nationalities during the 
 reign of Napoleon and after his fall, the Russian nation 
 turned its attention to its national peculiarity, and the 
 problem of describing the nature of the Russian land and 
 people, and of representing the domestic world in poetry, 
 was now presented for the first time, and for the first 
 time solved by Pushkin in his way. Here, as everywhere 
 else, Shakespeare made his influence felt on the nascent 
 romanticism, and here, as in Poland, Byron soon became 
 the poet of the romancing youth. 
 
 The little circle of romanticists was broken as soon 
 as the political question entered it. On account of his 
 liberal tendencies, Pushkin was sent for a six years' 
 exile to Southern Russia. Bludof became a legation 
 attache. Zhukovski, after 1817, became a courtier, be- 
 cause he was commissioned to supervise the instruction 
 in the Russian language and literature of Alexandra, 
 the German-born wife of the Prince Imperial Nicholas. 
 Very soon also the Tsaritsa Elizabeth, the somewhat 
 neglected, sentimental, and fragile consort of the Tsar 
 Alexander, became interested in the gentle, bland poet, 
 and dipped alternately into his elegies and into Tiedge's 
 " Urania." From this time Zhukovski assumed a posi- 
 tion which for Hans Christian Andersen would have 
 been the realization of the ideal of happiness. He read 
 aloud with never-failing applause his ballads and odes, 
 his poems on grand birthdays and on the occasion of 
 the birth of little princes and princesses of the royal 
 family, in a circle of ladies of the family of the Tsar 
 and of the court, whose real life he neither understood 
 nor wished to understand, but who to him were super-
 
 ZHUKOVSKI'S TRANSLATIONS. 225 
 
 natural beings, " angels," " guiding stars," as he called 
 them in his festal poems. 
 
 As he had already translated a number of notable 
 European poems, among them Gray's " Elegy in a Coun- 
 try Churchyard," existing in all languages, and Btirger's 
 " Leonore " (Liudmila), he now displayed to this circle 
 of hearers an incredible productiveness as a translator : 
 a large number of the poems of Goethe and Schiller, 
 whole plays of the latter, like Die Jungfrau von Orleans, 
 Byron's "Prisoner of Chillon," Moore's "Lalla Rookh," 
 the Indian poem, "Nal and Damasjanti," Fouque's 
 "Undine," and Rebel's Allemanic poems. Homer's 
 " Odyssey," and Eilckert's " Eusten and Sohrab," all 
 these different kinds of poetry with his subtile talent 
 he transmuted into flowing Russian verse. 
 
 In 1821, on a journey to Germany, he contracted a 
 friendship with Justinus Korner, whom he resembled 
 in superstitious mysticism, and made a visit to Goethe, 
 but without winning any favor from the old man. He 
 was more agreeable to "the romanticist on the throne," 
 Frederick William IV., who introduced him to Tieck, 
 and also to other leaders of the German romanticism. 
 Some years after his return to Russia, a re-action towards 
 all the youthful desires of Alexander I. for an enlight- 
 ened despotism in the aid of progress ascended the 
 throne in the person of Nicholas. Soon the tender 
 Zhukovski, with painful astonishment, saw the best of 
 the friends of his youth banished ; others, less promi- 
 nent, but still strong characters, leave the vicinity of 
 the court, and isolate themselves in obscure silence on 
 their estates. Nevertheless, when at this time a genius 
 of Pushkin's rank turned around and extolled the vic- 
 tories of Nicholas over unhappy Poland, it will not 
 astonish any one that Zhukovski issued from this crisis
 
 226 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 with firm faith that whatever the Tsar regarded as right 
 is right. 
 
 After Pushkin's early death (1837), Zhukovski occu- 
 pied the position of Russia's leading poet, distinguished 
 at the imperial court in every manner, even appointed 
 as the civil tutor of the Prince Imperial Alexander 
 (afterwards Alexander II.). If he is now remembered 
 with gratitude in Russia, it is, significantly enough, 
 more on account of the humane influence he exerted on 
 the young prince, who was admirably endowed by nature, 
 than on account of his literary services. He dared to 
 put in a word for many a political offender, whom a man 
 who was not in so good standing or less courageous would 
 never have dared to name, and he thereby accomplished 
 a great deal of good. We see from Alexander Herzen's 
 " Reminiscences," that he procured a considerable diminu- 
 tion of the burdens of exile for this great man, who as 
 a youth was languishing in Viatka.^ When Zhukovski, 
 after 1840, took up his residence in Germany, where at 
 the age of fifty-seven he married a girl of nineteen, who 
 worshipped his talent, he had the afiliction of finding 
 out how the rule of his dear native country was hated 
 and despised by all thinking men in the foreign land. 
 The intellectual agitations of young Germany, and still 
 more the revolution of 1848, shook him fearfully, and 
 gave him the most melancholy pietism in all its force. 
 He lived in Frankfort for some time in company with 
 Gogol, in whom the re-action had already been accom- 
 plished which converted him from the wittiest and most 
 caustic mocker of the Russian situation to a poor, sick 
 admii-er of absolute power and a mystic obscurantist, 
 who lay for whole days prostrate before shrines. The 
 
 1 Le Monde Ritsse et la Revolution. Memoires de A. Hertzen, ii. 
 154.
 
 MYSTICISM THE END. 227 
 
 two men constantly filled each other more and more with 
 universal hatred of liberty and the personal feeling of 
 their boundless sinfulness. They both ended as insane 
 mystics.^ 
 
 Zhukovski's life spans the whole of that of the epoch- 
 making Eussian national poet. He prepares the way for 
 Pushkin, becomes his friend, and ascends his vacant 
 throne without being able to cause his predecessor to 
 be forgotten. Zhukovski was sixteen years older than 
 Pushkin, whom he survives for fifteen years. His im- 
 portance vanishes by the side of the younger man, who 
 began life as his and Derzhavin's imitator. 
 
 A^is der Petersbiirger Gesellschaft. Nene Folge, p. 106 and follow- 
 ing: Litteratur und Presse unter dem Kaiser Nikolaua.
 
 III. 
 
 With Alexander Sergeyevitch Pushkin, Russian poe- 
 try becomes an independent power, just as it is with 
 Goethe, Oelenschlager, or Victor Hugo. It no longer does 
 duty for inculcating noble emotions or useful instruc- 
 tion ; it is in principle, at least the handmaid neither 
 of morals nor of patriotism. It stands erect, wild, and 
 free. 
 
 Like the other leading Slavic poets of this period, 
 Pushkin was greatly influenced by Byron, and had to go 
 through this experience in order to become himself. He 
 is very peculiar from the beginning from his violent tem- 
 perament. He descends, on his mother's side, from the 
 negro Hannibal, whom Peter the Great bought and edu- 
 cated in France as a civil engineer, and who died with 
 the rank of general, possessing a good landed estate. 
 The face of the author as well as his poetry plainly 
 betrays the African blood in his veins. His father was 
 a man of the world, educated in France, who had never 
 spoken any other language than French, and who, in the 
 fashion of the aristocracy, also caused his son to learn 
 that language. Pushkin was indebted to his nurse alone, 
 a good Russian peasant woman, for his early and so fruit- 
 ful acquaintance with popular ballads, hilini, and fairy 
 tales of Russia. 
 
 Precocious, dissolute at an early age, and then and for 
 a long time a " dandy," he belongs to the not small num- 
 ber of artistic geniuses from the beginning of the cen- 
 
 228
 
 PUSHKIN'S YOUTH. 229 
 
 tury, whom an inner power, which no depravity destroys, 
 preserved sound and capable of production in circum- 
 stances which would undermine and shatter weaker 
 minds. What harm he suffered in his soul did not 
 come from the wildness and irregularity in his life, but 
 from the pressure of the political situation when his 
 character was not developed, and even from the personal 
 attempts of the Tsar Nicholas to win him, which the 
 young aristocrat could not resist. 
 
 When he was anly ten years old, Pushkin had devoured 
 his father's French library, including Voltaire, Rousseau, 
 and the Encyclopedists. From his twelfth to his eigh- 
 teenth year, he went to the imperial school in Tsarskoye- 
 Sielo, where the instruction and spirit were French even 
 the French language was taught to the pupils by Marat's 
 own brother where the instruction was very bad, and 
 where the older students saw their ideals in the lieuten- 
 ants of the Guard in the garrison, after whose example 
 they kept mistresses, gambled, and played mad pranks. 
 The young Pushkin was regarded as one of the worst mad- 
 caps of the school, but at the same time enjoyed a certain 
 reputation for erotic and epigrammatic verses. In 1817 
 he got a position in the office of the Minister of Foreign 
 Affairs, which he neglected, and plunged headlong into 
 the whirlpool of St. Petersburg social life, apparently 
 desiring no other honor than that of being a fully devel- 
 oped man of the world and aristocratic lion. How much 
 importance, almost to his last days, he attached to the re- 
 finements of foppery is best seen in the description which 
 he has given of himself under the name of Tcharsky, 
 in his posthumous novel, "The Egyptian Nights." Like 
 Byron, he did not wish in any manner to be regarded as 
 a poet "by trade," very reluctantly spoke of literature, 
 and, on the other hand, with great pleasure of horses,
 
 230 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 cards, and dinners, " although he could not tell a moun- 
 tain horse from the Arabian, never remembered what 
 was trumps, and, at heart, preferred fried potatoes to all 
 the dishes of the French cook" ("Egyptian Nights"). 
 
 In spite of all his dissipations, in 1820 he published 
 his first poem, "Ruslan and Liudmila," which made 
 an unusual sensation, although this fairy tale in verse, 
 founded on a Russian legend, reminds one of Ariosto, of 
 Wieland, and of Zhukovski, and has no other originality 
 than that which depends on great skill in story-telling 
 and careful composition. The poem passed for pure 
 romance ; it was interesting from a certain archness 
 in its tone and a strong sensuousness in its color, but 
 was otherwise without any psychological interest. 
 
 At this time, Pushkin fell into disgrace for the first 
 time. As a young man, he had been a political revolu- 
 tionary poet. An ode written by him, " To the Dagger," 
 was sung in all the garvision towns of Russia, but prob- 
 ably without knowledge of the author's name. He de- 
 tested the despotism which they were compelled to 
 endure at the close of the reign of Alexander I., hated 
 the idiotic censorship, which then weighed heavily upon 
 poetry, and the rough rule of the police, to whose arbi- 
 trariness the young men beheld their welfare intrusted ; 
 and, witty as he was and with cutting sarcasm, he pierced 
 the ruling persons and prevailing conditions with epi- 
 grams which circulated through the land. In 1820 
 the Governor-General of St. Petersburg complained of 
 him to the Tsar for an " Ode to Freedom ; " but Alexan- 
 der read it without indignation, and only asked the 
 young poet to let all his other manuscripts be laid 
 before him. Unfortunately, among them there was a 
 lampoon of the Tsar's favorite, Arakcheyef ; and, indig- 
 nant at this scornful treatment of a man whom he had
 
 PUSHKIN'S EXILE AND PARDON. 231 
 
 treated with distinguished consideration, Alexander exiled 
 the sinner first to Siberia, and then, on the intercession 
 of many, to Kishenef in Southern Russia, as assistant 
 secretary of the general-governor there. During his so- 
 journ here, after an illness, Pushkin obtained leave to 
 visit the Caucasus and the Crimea. The epoch-making 
 impression of its natural scenery is plainly visible in 
 his poetry. In the Caucasus, he became acquainted with 
 Byron's poetry, and the impression of it became fused in 
 his youthful mind with the impressions of the Caucasus, 
 and the Byronic impression was even the more radical of 
 the two. In Kishenef and Odessa, he gave offence by 
 his wild life and his Byronic manners, and was already 
 in bad odor with his superiors, when a private letter 
 from him to St. Petersburg was intercepted, which 
 described a young Englishman, a friend of Shelley's, 
 with whom he had become acquainted, and in which he 
 defended Shelley's so-called atheism. The result was a 
 new exile. Pushkin was directed, under the supervision 
 of the police, to reside on his estate Mikhailovskoye, in 
 the department of Pskof. 
 
 As is well known, the six years' exile from St. Peters- 
 burg saved Pushkin's life. He would, no doubt, have 
 taken part in the revolt of December, 1825, on the acces- 
 sion of Nicholas to the throne, if he had been on the 
 spot. After the fearful result of the revolution and the 
 annihilation of his nearest friends, when he resolved to 
 petition the Tsar for the termination of his exile, he 
 nevertheless humbled himself no more than to admit, in 
 answer to the direct question of the Tsar, that his sym- 
 pathies, on the 2 5th of December, had been on the side 
 of the rebels. Among the few points of the Russian lit- 
 erary history which have become public property is the 
 poet's promise of future loyalty to the Tsar, the embrace
 
 232 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 with which the Tsar responded to the pledge, and his 
 own promise to Pushkin that he would protect him from 
 the stupidity and chicanery of the censorship by being 
 himself his censor in the future. Pushkin, who was con- 
 fronted with the choice between reconciliation with the 
 Tsar and his system or a lifelong persecution and exile, 
 had not the strength of character that would have made 
 compromise impossible. 
 
 His position in society as well as in the literary world 
 was soon assured. The Tsar gave him a pension of six 
 thousand rubles a year, with the task, which bore lightly 
 on the poet, of writing the history of Peter the Great, 
 and, at the same time, appointed him gentleman of the 
 imperial bed-chamber. This appointment was regarded 
 as very slight honor by the poet, who thought the title 
 absurd and degrading for a man of his importance and 
 reputation. He took part anew with brio in the " high 
 life " of St. Petersburg, but was, in fact, secretly and 
 heartily ashamed of the court favor he enjoyed while 
 the friends of his youth were languishing in the case- 
 mates of fortresses and in Siberian mines, or living in 
 exile in foreign capitals. 
 
 He stupefied this sentiment by taking refuge in the 
 feeling of pride at the extent of Russia and its strength 
 as a military power, which is not uncommon among emi- 
 nent Russians. The former radical enjoyed the presen- 
 tation of the Russian power of beating down resistance of 
 every kind which came from the Poles, who had rebelled 
 from their longing for independence, or from tlie nations 
 of the West who sympathized with them in their love 
 for freedom. It is thus that his " Ode to the Slanderer 
 of Russia," written in 1831, must be understood. 
 
 However, he was too unlike his worldly-minded asso- 
 ciates, among whom he was placed, too thoroughly origi-
 
 HIS RANK AS A POET. 233 
 
 nal, too peculiar, proud, and sarcastic, too much admired 
 and appreciated by those who understood his genius, not 
 to live environed by irritated envy and hate. It was 
 this hate which gratified itself by defending the ad- 
 vances of the Franco-Dutch adventurer Dantes de Hech- 
 eren to his wife, and which thus drove Pushkin to an 
 early death. The outburst of anger was, therefore, jus- 
 tifiable, with which the younger generation in Russia, 
 through the voice of Lermontof, greeted the tidings of 
 Pushkin's death in the well-known duel. 
 
 Pushkin is the first modern person in Russian poetry ; 
 or, as it could also be expressed, the first illustrious man 
 in Russia who had the courage to express his personality 
 fully in poetry. In contrast to his predecessors, he at 
 once makes his appearance while a youth, asserting 
 himself without respect for tradition and authority in 
 literature, and he has, even when young, the stamp of 
 greatness on his forehead, style and power in his aspect 
 as a poet, which compel his contemporaries to greet him 
 as a chief. There is something manly about him, which 
 even his opponents do not fail to recognize. He belongs 
 to the number of those who are vituperated, assailed, 
 envied, and hated, but whom no one puts in the second 
 rank. The combination of power and grace in his lan- 
 guage surpassed, in a very high degree, anything that 
 had been known before. 
 
 To a foreigner, much of his poetry now seems anti- 
 quated. The overwhelming influence of Byron, under 
 which he ripened, can be seen too plainly in his shorter 
 epic poems. Of the four which he wrote between 1821 and 
 1824, "The Prisoner in the Caucasus," "The Fountain in 
 Bakhchisarai," " The Brigand-Brothers," and " The Gyp- 
 sies," the first is the most pleasing from its pictures of na- 
 ture, the next two from a genuineness in the poet's personal
 
 234 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 emotions, whicli is not affected by the close imitation of 
 Byron's " Giaour," " The Prisoner of Chillon," and " The 
 Corsair." Pushkin's brigands certainly do not feel at all 
 like real brigands, but he has naively allowed his emo- 
 tional life to find free expression through them. " The 
 Gypsies " stands the highest. The fresh wildness with 
 which the figure of the gypsy girl appears makes a very 
 strong impression in comparison with the lack of moral 
 force in Alyeko, who flies from civilization and brings 
 one of its most disgusting vices with him : jealousy 
 which regards another being whom it has once loved as 
 its own property. Probably, this fine poem has given 
 Prosper Merimee, who has translated it, the idea of his 
 masterpiece, " Carmen." 
 
 Like the Prisoner in the Caucasus, Alyeko suffers from 
 the Byronic spleen and scepticism. The poem " Count 
 Nulin," which assumes a lighter, more frivolous tone, 
 again reminds us of Byron, especially of " Beppo." In 
 1823, Pushkin, entirely under the influence of the Eng- 
 lish poet's " Don Juan," began his chief work, " Yevgeni 
 Onyegin," without any plan ; and to it he constantly 
 returned for seven years, in order to express there a 
 constantly more characteristic poetical delineation of 
 himself, and, above all, a far more complete autobiog- 
 raphy than is found in his other poems. Finally, his 
 great epic poem, "Poltava," is evidently inspired by 
 Byron's " Mazeppa," although, regarded in and of itself, 
 it far surpasses the youthful poem of Byron in its 
 power of picturesque description, and in the historically 
 correct representation of the appalling character of the 
 old hetman, which forms a striking contrast to the 
 romantic stamp Byron has given to the figure. 
 
 With the exception of short lyrical poems and prose 
 novels, in which Pushkin stands independent, hardly a
 
 PUSHKIN'S POETRY. 235 
 
 poem of his can be named for which he did not have 
 a model. His tales in verse in the popular style, like 
 the " Song of Oleg " (pronounced Aleeokh) and his fairy- 
 tales are modernized bilini. Pushkin was one of the 
 first in Kussia who made collections from the epic songs 
 of the people. His only great drama, " Bon's Gudundf," 
 treated in such a masterly manner as to give great prom- 
 ise, is an imitation of Shakespeare's historical plays, 
 especially of Kichard III. and Macbeth. That this play 
 is widely celebrated and greatly admired, while Prosper 
 Merimee's Les debuts d'un Aventurier, which with infi- 
 nitely more originality and truth treats the same theme, 
 the rebellion of the false Dmitri, is almost wholly 
 unknown, shows with how little justice literary fame is 
 often awarded. Finally, so far as Pushkin's ballads 
 are concerned, they are not only strongly inspired by 
 Mickiewicz, but two of the best known and most fre- 
 quently translated, "The Three Budrysses" and "Voye- 
 vods," are verbal translations from the Polish poet, 
 without expressly naming the latter. It may possibly 
 have been stated in some of the earlier editions of 
 Pushkin's works, but in the edition for the people it is 
 not mentioned, and in Bodenstedt's translation of 1855 
 the ballads are treated as Pushkin's, as a matter of 
 course. 
 
 Necessarily a vigorous independence permeates the 
 best of these metrical works, and even more the prose 
 novels in which Pushkin took up and developed the 
 Russian prose style created by the great historian Ka- 
 ramzi'n. In so far as Pushkin, himself sick, attains the 
 high point of presenting the healthy, he possesses, in 
 an extraordinary degree, the characteristic of a great 
 artist. The artist is generally an outlaw, a living irregu- 
 larity, a watch which goes now too fast and now too
 
 236 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 slow, this may even be said of Shakespeare and Moliere, 
 but his surprising quality therefore is that the prod- 
 uct is healthy, obedient to law, a watch which goes right. 
 So it is with Pushkin. As a man, he was only in too 
 high a degree a child of the St. Petersburg civilization, 
 a victim of society culture, a slave of fashion. As a 
 poet, the more he is developed, constantly the more 
 plainly does he show the nascent Slavic re-action against 
 St. Petersburg and the hatred of all society culture; as 
 well as of the foolish dominion of fashion which forms 
 the fundamental passion in " Yevgeni Onyegin," and 
 which has its clearest expression when Onyegin kills 
 his best friend, the young Lensky, in a duel demanded 
 by the conventionalities of society. 
 
 Intellectually Pushkin is far behind Byron, in whom 
 no satiety exhausts the glowing enthusiasm for freedom, 
 which was his life, and which led him to death, while 
 Pushkin's youthful faith in freedom, when he came to 
 man's estate, surrendered to a brutal patriotism. But 
 he surpasses Byron in his ability to draw figures. His 
 fine historical tale, "The Captain's Daughter," is the 
 precursor of Gogol's " Taras Bulba ; " and his admirable 
 novels pave the way for the realistic representations of 
 the coming generation in what is called by a Russian 
 critic " the sentimental, naturalistic style." 
 
 How much nearer to my heart is Pushkin's successor, 
 Mikhail Yuryevitch Lermontof ! How much deeper, 
 more intensively, does he act on a receptive mind ! 
 Never shall I forget the impression his " Hero of Our 
 Time," in Marmier's French translation, made upon me 
 as a schoolboy. It was Byronism in its strongest, most 
 delicate essence, the greatness in this Caucasus to which 
 Lermontof was again and again banished, greatness
 
 LERMONTOF. 237 
 
 in nature, greatness and frigidity in the hero's soul. It 
 was the Prometheus of the newer time, chained to the 
 rocks of the Caucasus. It was courage, modesty, thirst 
 for pleasure, feeling of superiority, bound up in ban- 
 ishment, tortured by the eagle's beak of a world-weary 
 passion for scepticism.^ How I loved and admired this 
 book, the first which I understood as a grown-up man ! 
 How I sympathized with the poor Tscherkesserine 
 Bela, with the passionate and morbid Viera, and with 
 the little Princess Mary, all those women who love 
 the hard and proud Petchorin ; and, in the next place, 
 with the good old Captain Maxim Maximitch, whose 
 admiring attachment Petchorin rewards with correspond- 
 ing coldness ! And in the preface to the book, the 
 admirable poem contributed by Marmier, which is so 
 descriptive of Lermontof. 
 
 " Je te rends grdces, O Seigneur! 
 Du tableau varie d'un monde plein de charmes, 
 Du feu des passions et du vide du coeur, 
 Du poison des baisers, de I'acretd des lannes, 
 De la liaine qui tue et de 1' amour qui ment, 
 De nos reves tioinpeurs perdus dans les espaces, 
 De tout, enfin, Mon Dieu! Puise-je seulement 
 Ne pas longtemps te rendre graces! " 
 
 Bodenstedt has given a description of Lermontof as 
 he saw him, the winter before his death, in a restaurant 
 in Moscow : " A young officer of middle height, with a 
 stately, unconstrained demeanor, and unusual elasticity 
 in all his movements. He had his neckcloth carelessly 
 tied about the neck, his uniform was not wholly buttoned 
 up nor wholly new, but under it dazzling white linen 
 could be seen." He stooped down to pick up something 
 which he had dropped, says Bodenstedt, " with a supple- 
 1 Comp. Oeo. Brandes : Soeren Kierkegaard, p. 120.
 
 238 IMPBESSIOXS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 ness as if all tlie bones in his body were broken, although 
 from his breast and shoulders you would conclude that 
 he had a reasonably strong frame." And he describes 
 the contrast between the great, sedate, expressive eye, 
 and the mocking expression about the finely cut mouth, 
 paints his cynicism in the use of language, his pleasure 
 in showing himself superior to those present, and his 
 sincere desire for reconciliation when he had offended 
 any one. 
 
 What we admire in this description is that it not 
 only vividly recalls Lermontof's own description of the 
 "Hero of our Time," but that every single expression 
 and turn corresponds to the place where Petchdrin 
 is introduced in the section, Maxim Maximitch. It 
 reads thus : " He was of middle height, elegant and 
 delicate ; but his broad shoulders augured a strong frame, 
 and, when you observed, you readily saw that nature 
 had furnished him with power to endure the toils of a 
 roving life, the influences of varied climates, the whirl- 
 winds of life in the world, and the storms of the soul. 
 His velvet jacket, carelessly buttoned, betrayed perfectly 
 white linen, one of the criterions of a man of good 
 taste. . . . "When he sat down on a bench, it seemed as 
 if his frame folded itself up, just as if he had no back- 
 bone. His whole bearing thus showed a kind of nervous 
 weakness." 
 
 This parallel shows in what a high degree Lermontof 
 had himself in mind in the representation of the person 
 of Petchorin, and any one familiar with the whole work 
 will easily see how much of Petchorin there is also 
 found in the distracted leading characters in his two 
 greatest poems, " The Demon " and " Ismael-Bey." 
 
 Lermontof ^ was born in Moscow. While yet a boy, he 
 1 Of the Scotch family of Learmont originally.
 
 EXILED FOR ELEGY ON PUSHKIN. 239 
 
 visited the wild, picturesque mountain regions of the 
 Caucasus, absorbed Byronism, studied at the university 
 in his native city, went through the school for gentle- 
 men's sons at St. Petersburg, and left it as cornet in the 
 hussar regiment, and while only a young officer was 
 already known for wanton and indecent verse. The 
 poem Hadji- Abrek, written in his early youth, is strong 
 and harsh as a fantasy of Merimee written in verse. 
 In 1837 the twenty-three-years-old poet was for the first 
 time exiled to the Caucasus and for a reason possible 
 only in Russia, for his elegy on Pushkin's death, which 
 simply expressed what everybody felt, the Tsar included, 
 but in which Lermontof had shown the boldness to call 
 on Nicholas for vengeance on the murderer, who was 
 one of the favorites of the Imperial Court as he after- 
 wards in the reign of Napoleon III. was one of the cour- 
 tiers, best known for his shameless appearance in the 
 Senate as the leader of Orthodoxy against Sainte-Beuve. 
 
 At the end of a year Lermontof was pardoned, and 
 then lived for some time in St. Petersburg, where he was 
 already highly esteemed as a poet. He published his 
 " Song of the Tsar Ivan Vasilyevitch, of his young chief 
 of the life guard, and the bold merchant Kalashnikof." 
 Pushkin had already tried his hand at giving the keynote 
 of the old htlim, yet only in purely romantic poems. 
 Lermontof reproduced the spirit of the historical and 
 heroic btlini in a graceful little epic, sustained in the 
 most correct style, which breathes the whole spirit of the 
 age of Ivan III., expressed with pure native simplicity. 
 What an artist he was, this demon in human form, who 
 as a boy was man, and who died in his youth after having 
 produced works of undying importance. 
 
 And at the same time he wrote a host of short lyrical 
 poems, in which his proud soul unreservedly exposes
 
 240 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 his stubbornness. Pushkin could yield, allow himself to 
 be won over, compromise, become a patriot of brutality, 
 he, never ! Kis friends disappointed and betrayed 
 him. He continued faithful in friendship. Others were 
 reconciled to what they hated. He continued faithful 
 to himself in his hate. The greatness and elevation of 
 his inner being exposed him ever and again to a fall. 
 He continued to experience great emotions and to think 
 freely. He was surrounded by spies, suspected when 
 he was silent, accused when he spoke, denounced, slan- 
 dered, hated, abandoned. He was always far greater 
 and stronger than his fate. He never bowed the knee 
 to Baal. 
 
 They reviled him for being a poor patriot. He an- 
 swered: "I do indeed love my fatherland, but I can 
 feel no enthusiasm for barbarity. I do not value that 
 fame which is bought with blood, nor that proud confi- 
 dence which relies on bayonets, and least of all in the 
 glory of the heroes of antiquity." (The poem "My 
 Fatherland.") And a similar outburst of contempt and 
 disgust for bloody honor ends the masterly battle-piece 
 " Valerik." How conventional does not Pushkin appear 
 in comparison ! 
 
 The most hidden emotions of Lermontof are re- 
 vealed in the collection " Little Conceits and Fancies." 
 " They tortured him because he dared to think, stoned 
 him because he dared to speak ; they could make no 
 answer, and that was the sole cause of their frenzy." 
 " But he did not envy them their decorations, nor their 
 servility by which they Avere won. They robbed him of 
 everything except his pride and his courage. He was 
 on fire for the beautiful, fought for the true. The 
 others found that to be bad and dangerous. When 
 liberty is taken from him, long, solitary contemplation
 
 LERMONTOF'S DEATH. 241 
 
 changed his hate to boundless contempt. He knew that 
 a single prayer for mercy, a single repentant word, would 
 open to him all paths, but he would rather fall down in 
 his chains than say the one lying word which could save 
 him. He does not grudge the others their pleasures ; he 
 allows the others to deplore his condition ; he would 
 rather suffer everything than be like them." 
 
 In 1840 Lermontof was a second time banished to the 
 Caucasus, for a duel with a son of the French minister, 
 the historian of literature, Barante. In principle he was 
 opposed to duels, but, as a nobleman and an officer, he 
 could not free himself from the laws of society which 
 were honored about him. Shortly after he left the capi- 
 tal, his romance, "The Hero of Our Time," appeared. 
 In this book several characters are found, the prototypes 
 of which could be found in the higher ranks of society 
 of his day. A comrade of Lermontof, Martynof, felt 
 that he was insulted in several places in the book. 
 Probably he thought himself portrayed in the person 
 of Gruzhnitski. When the poet, one day, made a joke 
 about him, the latter embraced the opportunity for a 
 challenge. In the duel which followed, Lermontof was 
 killed, on July 15, 1841, pierced through the heart. A 
 memorial to him was raised at Pyatigorsk, in the 
 vicinity of which he fell. 
 
 There was a demon in him, a ruling spirit, hot and 
 cold, good and cruel, wild and tender ; cherishing inde- 
 pendence in defiance of everything above him, and to 
 emancipation from everything which would cling to him. 
 Young as Lermontof was, he was often obliged to ask 
 himself if he was not possessed of an evil spirit, one 
 which gained him women, who soon became a burden to 
 him ; one which laughed disdainfully at him, and mocked 
 him, where others were moved pathetically. If he had
 
 242 MPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 lived more than the twenty-seven years which were 
 vouchsafed to him, this question would not have troubled 
 him more. He would then have felt that his powers 
 were sound, his right secure, his nature rich and great, 
 and that the source of his being was situated beyond 
 the' contrast between good and evil. 
 
 We have from him only the above peerless prose 
 romance and several volumes of poems, in which there 
 are several erasures, which are real gaps, made by the 
 censor.^ Of his " Stories for Children," we see that 
 what we, for example, possess of the " Demon " this 
 poem which is so popular in Eussia that the illustra- 
 tions to it are to be seen on every wall, and that Eubin- 
 stein has made it the text of one of his operas is in 
 reality so little that, in the opinion of the poet, " there 
 is not left a trace of the demoniac nature of the spirit." 
 Nevertheless, how high does not this ''Demon" stand 
 above De Vigny's celebrated " Eloa." 
 
 The whole romance of the Caucasian country lives in 
 this poetry, nature and man saturated with a wild, 
 heroic spirit, illuminated by youthful defiance, like light- 
 ning in lightning. No one describes so fascinatingly as 
 Lermontof the solitary ride of a young Circassian prince 
 through the mountain-paths of the Caucasus. No one 
 like him has pictured a battle between the Cossacks and 
 the Caucasians. Pushkin's battle picture in "Poltava" 
 is powerful and pompous : it is a poet's fantastic recon- 
 struction of a past. In Lermontof's " Valerick " every 
 little trait has been experienced, seen, and reproduced 
 in so striking and admirable a manner, that no other 
 poem brings us nearer to him. We see him by himself, 
 
 The same imbecile censor who forbade all representations of 
 women in statuary which " were not fully dressed, that is, from the 
 chin to the knees."
 
 HIS DESCRIPTIVE POETRY. 24S 
 
 as he lies there before the battle begins, with the white 
 tents of the camp stretched out before his eyes, while 
 the Cossack horses, small and thin, stand with hanging 
 heads by his side. We feel the sun burn, catch a glimpse 
 of the Cossack sentinels, two by two, in the distance, 
 hear the first bullets and the first cries. And the more 
 thoroughly we become acquainted with Lermontof as a 
 man and as an author, the dearer he becomes to us. 
 
 It is emblematical that his life was a series of slights 
 and exiles in a land where, as he himself has somewhere 
 said, " no one comes forward, except those who go back- 
 Avard." His poetry produces its effect by its strong per- 
 sonal originality. He began, like all Russian authors, 
 under foreign influences, particularly the German roman- 
 ticism of terror, a work of his youth has the title 
 Menschen und Leidenschaften ; afterwards, like the Poles 
 and Pushkin, he looks up to Byron as the great poet of 
 the age ; but, although he dies so very young, younger 
 even than Shelley, his manly and proud face stands out 
 before us with pure and distinct features. 
 
 He was too much occupied with his own thoughts and 
 his own affairs to be able to unfold the broad Russia to 
 our gaze ; he was a revolutionary romanticist, but still 
 a romanticist. Shortly after him, or at the same time 
 with him, new influences had begun to exert a force in 
 Russian literature and intellectual life, which were 
 destined to displace him and Pushkin.
 
 IV. 
 
 With Gogol a new inspiration came to Europe from 
 Russia. With him, authors ceased to describe themselves. 
 He was wholly absorbed by his subject, and the reader no 
 longer received the impression of the spiritual life of a man 
 of the world and a cosmopolite, but of the national pecul- 
 iarities of the subject as it was displayed in the soul of 
 a genuine Russian. Gogol possessed an extraordinarily 
 artistic talent, which two or three times rose to genius, 
 but which speedily declined, because it was a genius 
 without moral views, which was supported neither by 
 culture nor character. 
 
 Nikolai Vasilyevitch Gogol (1809-1852) was by birth a 
 Little Russian, and as a child grew up in the midst of tra- 
 ditions of the bold and eventful Cossack troopers in the 
 Ukraine. His father, an impoverished landed proprie- 
 tor, possessed no mean capacities as a narrator and actor, 
 which the son inherited from him. As a boy, he had 
 already displayed a considerable power of observation of 
 human stupidity and weakness. 
 
 In St. Petersburg, he tried without success the career 
 of an actor, and then that of a government official, when, 
 by the aid of Pushkin, he obtained a position as professor 
 of history in the university. He utterly failed in this, 
 on account of a lack of preparatory knowledge and defec- 
 tive education, and abandoned it for the profession of an 
 author. 
 
 He made his dehut as a humorist, a strong and confi- 
 244
 
 GOGOVS SHORTEE STORIES. 245 
 
 dent humorist, who used his talent on subjects of small 
 compass, taken at first from the country life of Little 
 Russia, which he knew so thoroughly, and then from the 
 lower, poorer, gay, disorderly life in St. Petersburg. In 
 these tales, he weaves into his pictures of real life a 
 free imagination. That he starts from romanticism is 
 shown by such tales as " King of the Spirits of Earth," 
 " Notes of a Lunatic," or " The Nose." This last story, 
 which is essentially a study after E. T. A. Hoffman, is 
 the wildest capriccio on the theme : a suddenly lost and 
 then regained nose, an ingenious and humorous story 
 for children of an older growth, but without any deeper 
 meaning. The celebrated history of the "Quarrel be- 
 tween Ivan Ivanovitch and Ivan Nikif orovitch " is a 
 humorous, amusing story, well carried through in style, 
 on the all-consuming spirit of frivolity and conceit in 
 Little Russia, written in much the same style as Gott- 
 fried Keller later wrote his humorous stories about the 
 faults and vices of the Swiss. 
 
 With the historical romance " Taras Bulba," which, in 
 Russia, is of repute as an heroic epic, Gogol entered upon 
 a new path. The narrative describes the heroic period 
 in the Cossack world during the struggles for liberty 
 against the Poles. But in spite of the greatness of the 
 style and the realism with which this picture of a wild, 
 extinct past is painted, the book has the common defects 
 of historical romances. The idealism which, as a rule, 
 has dictated them weakens their elfect. That which is 
 most beautiful in them is not true ; we feel behind the 
 whole description that he started out with the intention 
 of glorification ; we notice how the author puts opportu- 
 nities in the way of this heroism, which in the middle of 
 the battle displays itself in a single combat, and fastens 
 upon it the gaze of all.
 
 246 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 Among the longer and shorter stories in the first three 
 volumes of Gogol there is not one which is out and out 
 worthy of admiration, except "The Cloak." It is the 
 simple story of a poor St. Petersburg official who 
 through half his life has needed a Spanish cloak, which 
 he finally obtains, and from whom it is stolen, De 
 Vogue quotes a saying of a Eussian author, ''We have 
 all grown out of Gogol's 'cloak.'" There is this truth 
 in it, that the whole of the modern emotional Russian 
 naturalism descends in a direct line from this little story. 
 Dostoyevski's first book, " Poor Folk," may be named as 
 having had its germ here. 
 
 Nevertheless, even this classical story does not give to 
 the "Western European reader the standard of Gogol's high 
 rank as a modern author. That is done only by his play, 
 "The Reviser," and the first part of the romance, "Dead 
 Souls." It is the stinging satire and the bold fidelity to 
 nature, expressed in a vigorous style, which here first 
 betrayed Gogol's great superiority to the circumstances 
 in which he was born, and which showed that Russian 
 literature was ready to launch out into an entirely new 
 field, which demanded boldness and originality to enter, 
 and which this literature silently, as it were, pointed out 
 to that of several other countries lost in romanticism, 
 as the path which alone emerges from the world of 
 dreams. 
 
 However Aristophanic the satire is in "Dead Souls," 
 the theories on which this comic epic rests are so pecul- 
 iar that they appear to the foreign reader like a story 
 from another part of the world or from a remote age. 
 Outside of Russia, even the cunning conceit about which 
 everything in the story revolves can hardly be under- 
 stood : the idea of the audacious speculator, of buying 
 up dead serfs, who were still nominally counted as liv-
 
 ''THE REVISER'' AND "DEAD SOULS." 247 
 
 ing, carrying them to a worthless tract of land, and then 
 mortgaging them to a bank. 
 
 The drama, " The Reviser," on the other hand, is per- 
 fectly intelligible everywhere, and is as pointed as it is 
 simple in its plot. More than twenty-five years were 
 demanded to raise the Norse drama, under Henrick 
 Ibsen, to this height ; the German drama has not yet 
 attained it. 
 
 It is said that it was Pushkin who gave Gogol the 
 idea of "The Reviser." If so, he deserves just as much 
 honor for it as for any finished work of his own of any 
 kind whatever. For there is hardly a single play in 
 modem literature which can compare with it in wit. 
 But it is improbable that Gogol is greatly indebted to 
 Pushkin for this. For a careful examination shows that 
 his two great modern works, " The Reviser " and " Dead 
 Souls," notwithstanding all the differences required by 
 the forms of drama and romance, are alike in all essen- 
 tial points. In both, the fundamental defects of differ- 
 ent ranks and types of a whole community are subjected 
 to a test, in which all these men are brought in connec- 
 tion with a single person, a rather common but shameless 
 sort of a being, before whom they stand as before a mys- 
 tery they are not sure of having penetrated. In the 
 play, this person makes, directly or indirectly, unusual 
 claims upon them, because he is regarded by them as a 
 superior officer sent by the government to inquire into 
 their conduct, and whom, with their guilty consciences, 
 they meet with bent backs and full hands. In the 
 novel, this person makes an unusual proposal to them, 
 because he offers them a bargain never heard of before, 
 the disposal of their dead souls ; but in both cases he 
 compels them to unveil their true characters and dis- 
 close their weakest points.
 
 248 IMPRJESSIONS OF liUSSIA. 
 
 Nowhere else in the comic literature known to me is 
 there found a more vigorous comic denouement than that 
 which is presented just after the disappearance of 
 Khlestyakof with all the spoils he has secured and the 
 recollections of the favors he has enjoyed from the 
 ladies, when the coming of the real reviser is announced, 
 and we feel that a day of judgment is breaking in upon 
 the sinners who have just bought their freedom in the 
 wrong place. 
 
 As is well known, the government had serious misgiv- 
 ings about allowing " The Reviser " to appear. Finally 
 Nicholas gave his consent, and at the first performance 
 burst into such laughter that he called the author to his 
 box and said to him : " I have never laughed before as 
 I have this evening." "I had really aimed at another 
 effect," was Gogol's manly answer. 
 
 And yet he did not himself comprehend the scope of 
 his comedy ; it was the product of a satirical genius, not 
 of a conviction. With his deficient culture he was a 
 Russian patriot in the sense that all the Russian institu- 
 tions and peculiarities were good, viz. : absolute power, 
 bureaucracy, suppression of all individual independence, 
 and above all Greek Orthodoxy. When he became 
 melancholy with his advancing years, it came over him 
 that his principal satirical works were wicked, traitorous 
 to his fatherland, and he bitterly repented of them. In 
 1846 he surprised the Russian reading world by the 
 publication of his " Selected Correspondence," in which 
 he declared war against the civilization of Western 
 Europe, glorified re-action and obscurantism, nay, fur- 
 nished a defence for serfdom. 
 
 In this condition of mind, to make amends for the 
 first part of " Dead Souls," he wrote an unreadable 
 second part, with purely virtuous persons. He became
 
 GOGOL'S DEATH. 249 
 
 absorbed in theological meditations. His friends in vain 
 sent him abroad to travel to liberate him from his con- 
 ceptions of the decadence of the heathen Western Europe. 
 He journeyed from St. Petersburg to Wiesbaden, from 
 Wiesbaden to Paris and Rome, and undertook a pilgrim- 
 age from Rome to Jerusalem. The revolution of 1848 
 finally made him an unconditional supporter and admirer 
 of the system of government of the Tsar Nicholas and 
 brought him to the highest degree of Orthodox fanat- 
 icism. Four years after he was found one winter day in 
 Moscow, starved to death before a shrine, before which 
 he was accustomed to lie for days in silent prayer.^ 
 
 We pay little heed to the fact that a man like Gogol 
 was a Little Russian. The reason for this is that, as 
 soon as his son manifested a turn for poetry, his father 
 gave him the decided advice to write only in Great Rus- 
 sian, and that Gogol followed his advice. Almost all 
 the authors born in Little Russia, in view of the con- 
 tempt with which their language has been treated as a 
 peasant tongue, good for common people, in which they 
 could only address themselves to a public of school- 
 teachers and popes, have written in one of the great 
 neighboring languages, Russian or Polish. The Little 
 Russians Padura, Tch^ikovski, Groza, have thus in the 
 beginning only written in their mother tongue and later 
 in Polish. The same thing is also true of Bogdan Zabski.'* 
 For, however much the Polish language is set aside and 
 suppressed, the suppression it endures is not like that 
 which is used towards the Little-Russian tongue, against 
 
 1 "Taras Bulba," "Dead Souls," "St. John's Eve and Other 
 Stories," including "The Cloak," have been translated by Isabel F. 
 Hapgood. (T. Y. Crowell & Co., N.Y.) Prosper Me'rime'e has made 
 a masterly translation of " The Reviser" in French. 
 
 2 See G. Brandes: Indtrykfra Polcn, pp. 227.
 
 250 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 which a real war of extermination has by degrees been 
 finally reached. 
 
 No single person has been hit harder in this war than 
 Gogol's contemporary Taras Grigorovitch Shevtchenko 
 (1814-1861), the greatest poet whom the Little-Eussian 
 people have ever produced. While the other poets in 
 the Little-Eussian dialect have built wholly upon the 
 popular ballads of the Ukraine, appropriated them and 
 carried them farther by adding individual personality, 
 European culture, and artistic style, Shevtchenko alone, 
 although he is poet of the people above everything, has 
 raised himself high above the level hitherto attained by 
 the Little-Eussian literature. 
 
 Shevtchenko was born in a village in the department 
 of Kief, and was the son of a serf peasant who belonged 
 to a rude German landed proprietor, Engelhard. At the 
 age of eight he had a stepmother who tormented him, 
 and at eleven he lost his father. He was sent to school 
 to the parish clerk, a drunken scamp, who flogged the 
 boy and treated him cruelly, for fear that he, by his 
 rapid progress, would soon outshine him in knowledge 
 and deprive him of his bread. The boy ran away, 
 roamed about homeless for some time, and then came a 
 second time under instruction, this time under a servant 
 of the church who painted shrines, in order to learn the 
 art from him. This one also whipped him so inhumanly 
 that he ran away and took a place as a swineherd in 
 the village where he was born. Here his master's atten- 
 tion was drawn to the remarkable swineherd who could 
 read and draw, and he took him into his personal service 
 as bootblack and pipe-cleaner. When he was caught 
 copying pictures with a stolen pencil, on paper also 
 stolen, Engelhard had him punished with the knout; 
 that was at least suitable for a serf. Nevertheless, when
 
 SHEVTCnENKO. 251 
 
 it became certain in many ways that the boy had talent, 
 he sent him to a painting master in St. Petersburg, in 
 hopes of getting the money he laid out on him richly 
 repaid in due time. Here Shevtchenko began to draw 
 with his own hand, awakened the interest of an artist, 
 who recommended him to Zhukovski. The latter, ready 
 and humane as he always was, took the young man's 
 cause in hand. The first thing to be done was to buy his 
 freedom. Engelhard asked twenty-five hundred rubles 
 for this " soul.-' Zhukovski had his portrait, which the 
 court-painter Brylof, who has been previously spoken of, 
 was going to paint, sold by lottery and obtained the sum 
 needed. In 1838 the emancipated serf began his studies 
 in the Academy, and, having served his time, left it in 
 1844 to go to Little Russia to find there subjects for 
 pictures and poems. 
 
 In the mean time, he had begun to write verse. In 
 1840 he had already published his first collection of 
 poems, Khobzar (The Singer), lyrical tendency poems, 
 which with deep national feeling dwelt on the heroic 
 memories of the Little-Russian people, their suffer- 
 ings in the past and their hopes for the future. His 
 anxiety for everything which could operate for the 
 breaking-up of the monotony in the empire, manifested 
 in this collection of poems, made the government with- 
 draw all support from Shevtchenko, and place him under 
 the supervision of the police. The year after, he pub- 
 lished his largest work, the Little-Russian epic poem, 
 "The Haidamaks," and still later several different smaller 
 poems in the almanacs. In a poem called " Caucasus," 
 he commemorated an unfortunate friend of his. Count 
 Balmen, who on account of his liberal views had been 
 sent as a common soldier to the Caucasian army. For 
 this imprudence Shevtchenko, in spite of his reputation,
 
 252 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 was condemned in 1847 to be whipped, and, after the 
 execution of that sentence, to go as a common soldier to 
 Orenburg. He was also most strictly forbidden to write. 
 
 At first he remained for some time in Orenburg itself, 
 then in the fortress of Orsk ; then he took part in an 
 expedition to Lake Aral, and at last he was transferred 
 to fort Nev-Petrovsk on the Asiatic shore of the Caspian 
 Sea. 
 
 While still in Orenburg, he had again followed his 
 irresistible impulse to write. Thousands of copies of 
 his poems of freedom and vengeance, which then issued 
 from his pen, were distributed in the Ukraine, and, 
 during the time of the revolt in 1848, were printed in 
 Galicia. A second time he was punished by the lash. 
 It did not crush him. But in Nev-Petrovsk, whither he 
 was last taken, and where the garrison was made up of 
 the most worthless dregs of society, while the duty was 
 the most arduous that can be imagined, and where 
 neither a human being in whom the poet could confide, 
 nor even a book or newspaper, could be found, he sick- 
 ened, and slowly grew stupid. 
 
 When, after the lapse of seven years (1857), his 
 admirers in St. Petersburg, especially Countess Alexis 
 Tolstoi, at last obtained his discharge from the military 
 service, the commander of the fort was able to support 
 the petition by the statement, " The man is harmless." 
 He went to St. Petersburg, and there wrote, with powers 
 flaming up anew, a bitterly scornful poem, "The Brothers' 
 Mission," against Russian Panslavism, which would free 
 other people, but cruelly oppress the Slavic races in 
 Kussia, published several works anonymously, and wrote 
 a short autobiography. 
 
 He was cui-ed of the uncritical enthusiasm of his 
 youth for the Cossack part of the Ukraine. " Hetman-
 
 " THE HAIDAMAKS." 253 
 
 ship " had lost its romantic halo for him. Against the 
 traditions of its nobility he now placed the idea of the 
 amelioration of the peasants ; and against the literary 
 world of the Slavophiles, he proposed what they forgot 
 or overlooked, the severe distress of the people of 
 Little Russia, the misery which thraldom and ignorance 
 has brought upon them. 
 
 He died in St. Petersburg in February, 1861, and, 
 according to his wish, he was buried in Kaniof in the 
 Ukraine. However much ill he had personally suffered, 
 however great was the persecution of the Little-Russian 
 nationality to which he had been a witness, still he did 
 not live to see what would have afflicted him more than 
 any personal torture to which he had been subjected, 
 the prohibition issued in 1875, and constantly enforced 
 down to the present time, against printing or publishing 
 in the Russian Empire any kind of a book or newspaper 
 in the Little-Russian language. 
 
 Shevtchenko's poetry is thus not only the highest and 
 richest expression which the race to which he belongs 
 has attained in literature, but it is for the present its last 
 expression. His gifts are varied ; he wrote political 
 lyrics, idylls, love poems, short sketches of society in 
 verse, and a great historical epic in the spirit of the 
 elder Dumas, which among the modern Slavic epics 
 is surpassed only by Mickiowicz's incomparable "Pan 
 Tadeusz." " The Haidamaks " (that is, the Cossack war- 
 riors) treats of the last independent revolt of the Little- 
 Russian popular spirit, the Cossack insurrection of 1770 
 under Gonta. It was directed against the nobility of 
 Poland, who in those days oppressed the Ukraine in a 
 cruel manner, and who, when it came to the point, were 
 too imbecile and disorganized to defend themselves. 
 But the Russian government, which was alarmed lest the
 
 254 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 disturbances should spread within the confines of Kussia, 
 determined to interfere. The leader of the Russian 
 army, Romanzov, proposed to Gonta an alliance against 
 the Poles, lured him and the officer next in command 
 into an ambush, and immediately delivered them to their 
 enemies. Then the Cossack army, which had been de- 
 prived of its leaders, was surrounded, captured, and 
 fully eight thousand men were divided in crowds among 
 the cities of Poland for execution. Gonta and the other 
 chiefs were broken alive on the wheel, and all the com- 
 mon men without exception were executed in different 
 ways. They generally preferred suffocation to hanging, 
 on account of its convenience, and to save the trees. 
 This is the subject which Shevtchenko, without going 
 out of his way for horrors, has presented, describing the 
 cruelties the oppressed were guilty of as fully as those 
 which were inflicted upon them, even to the extent that 
 this historic scene furnishes the background for the fate 
 of a pair of lovers. 
 
 His little pictures of society, which are usually idyllic 
 and emotional, are not wanting in marks of an energy 
 which sees life as it is at its worst. In one of the best, 
 " The Drowned," he tells the story of a mother and 
 daughter who lived in a country village, and whose 
 ghosts now on moonlight nights are seen hovering to 
 and fro over the steppes along the banks of the streams. 
 The mother Avas a Russian, proud and sensual, rich and 
 beautiful, a young widow, who held a court for her 
 admirers. She gave birth to the daughter secretly, and 
 put her out to nurse in a poor Little-Russian peasant 
 family. The daughter grew up, became an extraordinary 
 beauty, and when the mother finally took her home, she 
 received more attention in the rich house than the 
 mother. When the latter became possessed with jealous
 
 ALEXANDER IvXnOVITCU UEliZEN. 255 
 
 hate, she gave her daughter poison, and when the poison 
 did not result in death, she went with her to take a bath, 
 seized her by her long braids of hair, and hurled her out 
 into the eddies of the stream, where she met with death. 
 There runs through this poem the attempt to show the 
 coarse and cruel traits of character in the Great-Russian 
 race, without sparing the poet's own countrymen. But 
 the vices he upbraids them for are the vices of the 
 oppressed : self-abandonment and cowardice. Thus in 
 the poem, "Taras's Night," the singer narrates for the 
 Little-Russian youth of the country the achievements of 
 the great hetman, Taras Triasylo. The circle listen 
 with tears in their eyes. But immediately after the lis- 
 teners begin to sing and dance with happy recklessness. 
 Then the singer shouts to them, " Lie behind the stove ; 
 it is warm and safe ! I will go to the inn and make 
 jokes about the Poles and Muskovites. Will you go 
 with me ? That you can still do. But you can no 
 longer have any spirit." ^ 
 
 The history of Russian literature counts martyrs and 
 apostles in great number. The life of Shevtchenko is a 
 prolonged martyrdom ; among the other great men of 
 Russia who bore their part of the martyrdom is the 
 apostle of activity who first attracted the attention of 
 posterity. A long time imprisoned, twice exiled, and 
 hnally banished, Alexander Ivdnovitch Herzen (1812- 
 1870) is the apostle of the new times for Russia. 
 
 He is, as a spirit, among the Russians of this century, 
 what the year 1848 is among the years of the century. 
 He is the year 1848 in human form, an incarnation of all 
 
 1 Pypin: Geschichte der Slavischen Litteratvren,i. i80. K. E. Fran- 
 zos: Von Don zur Donau, 1.85-120. Selected pieces of Shevtchenko 
 have been translated into German by J. G. Obiest.
 
 256 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 the ideas which that year came to the front, and of all the 
 noble struggles for liberty which were then set in motion. 
 
 Herzen's father was a rich Russian grand seigneur, 
 Yakovlef, a retired captain of the Guard, with a colossal 
 fortune, who had received his whole culture from his 
 journeys in Western Europe, a disciple of Voltaire, who 
 read only French and spoke it better than Russian. His 
 mother was a young lady, the daughter of a tradesman, 
 Louise Herzen, from Stuttgart, who, at the age of seven- 
 teen, consented to accompany the rich Russian gentleman' 
 who had won her heart to his home in Moscow, and who 
 was always treated as his wife, although no marriage cer- 
 emony had taken place between them. The son was born 
 a few months before the French troops marched into 
 Moscow, and it was the great event in his father's life 
 that Napoleon, who was in want of a messenger to the 
 Tsar, sent for the Russian nobleman, who was of old 
 known to his Marshal Mortier, and gave him a letter, 
 "To my brother, the Tsar Alexander," and gave him 
 safe conduct out of the burning city. 
 
 His father developed constantly more and more into 
 a bitter, reserved, aristocratic eccentricity, wholly ab- 
 sorbed in a boundless contempt for the human race. 
 His mother was an unhappy, solitary creature, with 
 intellect and heart. In the son, the qualities of parents 
 and ancestors were so mingled as to amount to genius. 
 
 He has written his life, reminiscences in three vol- 
 umes, and this work ought not to be neglected by any 
 one who takes an interest in the struggle for the devel- 
 opment of modern Russia. There is no better insight 
 accessible to us. With artistic clearness, with the unre- 
 servedness of an author of memoirs, Herzen has told, not 
 only the life of his boyhood and youth to his tliirty-fifth 
 year, but he has given the description of a superior, inci-
 
 HERZEN'S REMINISCENCES. 257 
 
 sive, and penetrating observer of the social, political, and 
 literary conditions of Russia between 1812 and 1847, and 
 especially of the reign of Nicholas. The observer of the 
 conditions is also the victim of them ; yet he has no pity 
 for himself, and when he can he uncovers the humorous 
 side of his misfortunes. But with withering scorn, with 
 an indignant, harrowing contempt for the throne, with a 
 heart which moans and bleeds, he spreads before the eye 
 of the reader the heartrending cruelty which proceeded 
 from the throne of the Tsar, and all that spirit of thral- 
 dom, corruption, and stupidity which made such a rule 
 possible. 
 
 He never dwells upon the horrible, and yet it is a 
 question if even Dostoyevski's Recollections of the 
 Dead House in Siberia contain pictures which fill one 
 with a deeper sense of terror. (See, for example, about 
 the torture in the prisons.)^ 
 
 With Herzen and his friends, modern knowledge and 
 modern philosophy force their way into the Russian 
 Empire. He and his fellow-students were first inspired 
 by the languid liberalism of Lafayette and Benjamin 
 Constant, and then, after the suppression of the Polish 
 revolt of 1831, went through a rigorous course of Saint- 
 Simonism. At the age of fifty, Herzen writes in his 
 reminiscences on this subject, "A new age knocked at 
 the door ; our souls, our hearts were opened to its com- 
 ing, Saint-Simonism laid the foundation for our con- 
 victions, and constitutes, even at the present time, an 
 essential part of them." The young men were inspired 
 by the two fundamental ideas : the calling of woman to 
 share in the common duties, and what they at that time 
 called " the justification or the honorable satisfaction of 
 the flesh." An idea, says Herzen, to which people with 
 1 fiUmoires de Herzen, i. 290 aud following.
 
 258 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 an imagination which reminds one of the imagination of 
 lewd monks have wanted to give a low and cynical inter- 
 pretation, but which, in reality, only means dethrone- 
 ment of Christianity, the religion of beauty and life, 
 which supplanted the religion of asceticism and death.^ 
 From the fact that some other students, with whom 
 this group of young men had no connection, late one 
 evening, at the instance of a member of the secret police, 
 had sung a song in which some abusive language could 
 be taken as pointing at the Tsar, Herzen. his friend and 
 late companion-in-arms the poet Ogaref , and many others 
 equally innocent, were first kept in prison for months, 
 and then sent away. Herzen was first exiled to Vyatka, 
 on the Siberian frontier, where he happened to fall under 
 a governor by the name of Tiufayef, who most resem- 
 bled a wild and malignant beast, and afterwards to Vla- 
 dimir, only a day's journey from Moscow. On the way to 
 his exile, he became thoroughly acquainted with the 
 Kussian situation in its worst aspects, among other 
 things falling in with a convoy of eight wagon-loads 
 of small Jewish boys, the most of them between eight 
 and ten years of age, who were sent to military colonies; 
 a third part of them had already died on the way.'-^ 
 From Vladimir, Herzen eloped with his young cousin* 
 whom he had loved for many years, and whom they had 
 endeavored to prevent from marrying him. In her so- 
 ciety, he passed the fifth and last year of his exile, and 
 lived happily for many years, until their marriage rela- 
 tions came to a tragic end in London. George Herwegh 
 here, for a short time, won the heart of the young Rus- 
 sian ; but she died of a broken heart in consequence of 
 her infidelity to her first and, in reality, her only love. 
 
 1 M^moires de Herzen, i. 236. 
 
 2 Comp. G. Brandes: Indtryk fra Polen, p. 67.
 
 EERZEN'S DEVELOPMENT. 259 
 
 A letter of Turgenief to Saltykof, dated January 19, 
 1876, shows that there exists an unprinted account, writ- 
 ten by Herzen, of the bitterest catastrophe of his life. 
 
 On his return to Moscow, Herzen found the youth 
 filled with Hegel's philosophy. When he saw that he 
 was regarded as outside of agitations, he devoted himself 
 to the encyclopaedia, logic, the science of phenomena, 
 aesthetics ; studied and canvassed them paragraph by 
 paragraph ; at last, he devoured every single Hegelian 
 writing he could obtain, from the nearest disciples of 
 Hegel to the liberal Hegelian Arnold Kuges. Herzen 
 interpreted the teachings of the master entirely in the 
 spirit of the young Hegelians. While others, as, for 
 instance, the great critic Byelinski, Herzen's intimate 
 friend, accepted in a purely conservative spirit the well- 
 known sentence from the preface to the " Philosophy of 
 the Eight," " That which is reasonable is real, and that 
 which is real is reasonable," so that they only found in 
 it the justification of the Russian absolute power, with 
 all the crimes which flourished in its bosom, Herzen saw 
 in it only the simple expression of the principle of the 
 adequate cause, broke with Byelinski, until he for that 
 matter very soon gave up his quietism, and, on his 
 side, found in Hegel's philosophy an algebra of revolu- 
 tion, which freed the spirit by not leaving one stone 
 upon another of the Christian world of tradition. And 
 when Ogaref brought him Feuerbach's " Spirit of Chris- 
 tianity," on reading this work, he felt himself at once 
 wholly emancipated. And in his first philosophical 
 enthusiasm he wrote the series of articles which he 
 published in 1842, with the title, "Dilettantism in 
 Knowledge," by Iskander (that is, Alexander). 
 
 Shortly before Herzen's return from exile, Tschaad- 
 ayef had published the celebrated "Philosophical Let-
 
 260 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 ters" about the insignificance of Russia to European 
 culture, its everlasting coming too late. To punish him 
 for this, he was declared and treated as insane by the 
 Tsar. Byelingki, "the Lessing of Russia," already far 
 gone in consumption, which carried him off when only 
 thirty-eight years old, now began his impassioned lit- 
 erary campaign with the official world and the official 
 literature. When "The Annals of our Fatherland," 
 appeared on the 25th of each month, the whole cul- 
 tured youth were in a fever to get hold of the thick 
 volume. They were continually asking during the whole 
 forenoon, in the cafes, if the number had come ; as soon 
 as it arrived, they tore it open with the question, "Is 
 there anything of Byelinski's in it ? " If only one page 
 was found of his, it was devoured eagerly and debated in 
 endless discussions. 
 
 His fire, his sarcasm, his sneers, his unmaskings 
 enchained all, and people flocked together where he 
 swung his whip, as if to see an execution. Almost on 
 his death-bed, he attacked his disciple Gogol for his 
 back-sliding. As the disciple of the culture of Western 
 Europe, he cut down pedants and Slavophiles. 
 
 When he died, his friends were forbidden to place an 
 epitaph at his grave. The newspapers were forbidden to 
 mention his name, and the prohibition has remained in 
 force for full eighteen years. 
 
 It fell to Herzen's lot to carry Byelinski's literary 
 purification and reformation into the political arena. 
 He was admirably constituted for such a contest, which 
 was to endure for many years. He was not spindling 
 and weak like his friend, but large and broad-shouldered, 
 a powerful frame, and not poor and therefore dependent, 
 but after his father's death he was in possession of what, 
 even by Russian standards, would be regarded as a large
 
 EERZEN'S LITERARY WORK. 261 
 
 fortune. Thus, all that was needed was that he should 
 obtain leave to pass over the Russian frontier, so that, 
 with solid ground under his feet, he could use his great 
 talent as a writer in shaking up Russia in all its joints. 
 
 He was the creator of a public sentiment in the Rus- 
 sian Empire. 
 
 In Paris, where he first took refuge, he formed a 
 league with the party of the French socialists and the 
 Polish emigrants. What he felt when the great storm 
 of insurrection burst over Europe, and when one popu- 
 lar revolt after another was suppressed, all the promises 
 of kings and pope were broken, and contra-revolutions 
 were victorious along the whole line, is shown by his 
 two books, written in the most fascinating style, " From 
 the Other Side of the Stream," and " Letters from Italy 
 and France." They were published anonymously in 
 1850, and first in German, having been translated by 
 Frederick Kapp, who subsequently became the well 
 known Grerman- American historian, and who at that time 
 was a tutor in Herzen's house. It is sixteen years since 
 I read these books, and they are not now at hand, but 
 the impression is as vivid now as when I first read them. 
 Never has manly political enthusiasm found a more ele- 
 gant or more lucid expression, and never have disappoint- 
 ment and contempt spoken in more energetic language. 
 
 From Paris Herzen went to London, and there, during 
 the Crimean War, established his liberal " Russian 
 Press," and published in London from 1857 to 1865, and 
 in Geneva from 1865 to 1869, his celebrated weekly paper, 
 Kolokol, whose overwhelming influence in Russia has 
 lieen previously spoken of, as well as the manner in 
 which this influence was destroyed by Katkdf. 
 
 The same year in which Alexander Herzen went into 
 exile, he published a novel, which is still worth reading,
 
 262 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 less for its literary value than on account of the move- 
 ments to which it gave rise in Russia. It is the romance 
 "Who is to Blame?" (1847), an indirect attack on 
 marriage as an institution, dedicated to the author's 
 wife " with hearty devotion." The book is written with- 
 out any regular plot, with a long-winded introductory 
 historical sketch, several digressions, and without style ; 
 but the characters are living as in the better novels of 
 George Sand. The theme is substantially as follows : 
 The peaceful, happy marriage between the calm and ami- 
 able teacher Kruziferski and his elegant wife Liubonka 
 is disturbed when the young, talented but idle man of 
 the world, Beltof, comes within the sphere of these two 
 married people. Without any guilt on the part of either, 
 Beltof and Liubonka are irresistibly attracted to each 
 other, understand each other, need each other, and can- 
 not do without each other. They strive to conquer their 
 passion, but Beltof tears himself away in vain ; he 
 drags himself off on journeys to no purpose, Liubonka 
 wastes away, Kruziferski takes to drink and is ruined.^ 
 
 The idea embodied in this book grew luxuriantly, 
 since, in 1863, the man who may be regarded as Herzen's 
 great intellectual heir, and for a time as inheritor of his 
 influence, published his celebrated novel, "What is to 
 be done ? " 
 
 Nikolai Gravrilovitch Tchernuishevski was born in 1829, 
 the son of a pope in Saratof on the Volga, and was first 
 destined for the clergy, but soon gave up theology for 
 the study of ancient and modern languages, and, in 
 1846, began his career as a philologist in the university 
 of St. Petersburg. After passing his examinations, he 
 became Professer of Literature in the Cadet School in 
 
 1 Vom andern Ufer; Brief e aus Italien tind Frankreich, Hamburg, 
 1850. Wer ist Schuldf Reclam's Bihliothek.
 
 TCHERNUISHEVSKI. 263 
 
 St. Petersburg, but soon after, at the desire of his 
 mother, who could not bear to be separated from him, 
 he accepted a position as teacher in the grammar school 
 in his native town. Here he was married at the age of 
 twenty-two. After his mother's death in 1853, he re- 
 turned to the capital, wrote a thesis on the relations of 
 art to nature, but in his oral defence gave utterance to 
 such radical ideas that the minister of education refused 
 him his diploma. 
 
 From 1853 to 1862 he wrote for Niekrasof's newspaper, 
 Sovremennik, a large number of articles and discus- 
 sions of an economical, critical, and historical character, 
 which, from their way of treating the problems, and by 
 their ironic, satirical tone, awakened the greatest atten- 
 tion. Tchernuishevaki presented and criticised John 
 Stuart Mill's " Political Economy," the aesthetic criticism 
 of the Gogolian period, the party quarrels in France 
 during the Restoration, Lessing and his age, etc., treated 
 with the same superiority subjects of widely different 
 kinds, but had his principal interests centred on the 
 solution of certain great social problems, the arrange- 
 ment of the relations between the sexes, the abolition 
 of serfdom, the abrogation of all individual property in 
 land for the good of the community. 
 
 Everything that he wrote was passed by the censor. 
 But in July, 1862, to the astonishment of all, Tchernui- 
 shevski was arrested, and kept in custody in the Petro- 
 Pavlovsk prison, on the island of Neva, until May, 1864. 
 
 On the 24th of May, 1864, about eight o'clock in the 
 morning, in a pouring rain, a great crowd of men was 
 collected in St. Petersburg around a scaffold with a pil- 
 lory surrounded by soldiers in a hollow square. Pres- 
 ently the wagon which was expected drove up, escorted 
 by gendarmes on horseback, and out of it alighted first
 
 264 IMPRESSIONS OF liUSSIA. 
 
 a general and then a pale man, dressed as a civilian. 
 The latter ascended the scaffold, where two men with 
 red caps took him by the arms, hung a black plate over 
 his neck, on which his sentence was written in white 
 letters. Then one of the executioners took his hat off 
 his head so that he should listen reverently to what was 
 to be read to him. 
 
 It was his indictment. It was long enough ; closely 
 printed, it fills over six hundred lines ; it took more 
 than an hour to read. But it would be difficult to find 
 a legal document with less foundation for its charges. 
 
 " Several circumstances," it says, " have pointed out 
 to the government the said Tchernuishevski as an agitator 
 dangerous to the State." These circumstances are : 
 first, an anonymous letter sent to the Third Section (the 
 secret police). This letter, which is quoted at length 
 with all its vulgarity and stupidity, calls upon the gov- 
 ernment to free the people from Tchernuishevski. In 
 the second place, an intercepted letter from the exile 
 Alexander Herzen, in which is found, " We intend to 
 publish Sovremennik here or in London with Tcher- 
 nuishevski." For these two things Tchernuishevski was 
 imprisoned. Now follows in the indictment the list of 
 the papers " belonging to the case," that is, a letter from 
 the accused to his wife, in which he says that they both 
 belong to history, so that their names will be known for 
 centuries, and the production of a newspaper article 
 from 1853, which was now in 1862 found to be dan- 
 gerous. 
 
 In all this, however, there is no foundation for any 
 legal proceedings. But while the accused is in prison, 
 in March, 1863, they were fortunate enough in the Third 
 Section to obtain possession of a letter from a certain 
 Kostomarof to one of his friends, in which it is said
 
 TCnEENUISHEVSKr S INDICTMENT. 265 
 
 that " Tchernuishevski had written the appeal to the 
 serfs." As proof of the truth of this contention, a note 
 found in the pocket of Kostomarof is read, which, 
 observe, was when he had already been a long time in 
 prison, sentenced, ready to be sent away to exile, and 
 in which he is asked to correct a misprint. The note is 
 signed *' Tcher." The secretaries of the Senate, before 
 whom this letter was laid, were not able, it is true, to 
 find any resemblance to Tchemuishevski's handwriting 
 as a whole, even admitting that, when the letters are 
 taken separately, twelve of the twenty-five letters resem- 
 ble his to a certain extent ; but the Senate inpleno found 
 the resemblance striking. With incredible ease it is 
 said, in the next place, that a copy of Tchemuishevski's 
 proclamation to the peasants has been found in the 
 possession of Kostomarof, although no original is forth- 
 coming, and although the style bears no resemblance to 
 that of the great author. And, in conclusion, a letter 
 IS read, full of scratches and erasures, which comes from 
 the Third Section, and which is presumed to be from 
 the accused, since it is signed " Tsch," and directed to 
 one Alexis Nikolayevitch, who is presumed to be the 
 poet Pleshcheyef, whose Christian name has the same 
 sound. Tchernuishevski firmly denied having written 
 this letter, which, moreover, would have been entirely 
 innocent in any other place than Russia and modern 
 Germany. Pleshcheyef denied before the court not less 
 firmly that he had received it ; but they were not 
 believed. It was regarded as a proof of the attempt of 
 the accused to stir up the serfs, and his culpability is 
 increased by his obstinate denial. 
 
 "As guilty of participation in a conspiracy for the 
 destruction of the present political arrangements, N. G. 
 Tchernuishevski, thirty-five years old, is sentenced to
 
 266 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 fourteen years hard labor in the mines, and then to 
 exile to Siberia for life." 
 
 Immediately after it was announced to him that the 
 Tsar in his mercy has commuted the fourteen years hard 
 labor to seven. Then he received an order to kneel 
 down. They broke a sword over his head, and chained 
 him for some minutes to the pillory. A bouquet of 
 flowers falls down at his feet. The bouquets which 
 follow are thrown into the air by the police. He is 
 taken to the wagon, and vanishes. . . . * 
 
 He vanished, never more to be seen among those who 
 admired him, and who were indebted to him for the best 
 part of their intellectual culture. He passed his seven 
 years among the criminals in the mines underground, 
 then fifteen years more in solitary exile in one of the 
 most distant points of Siberia, without books, without 
 men with whom he could exchange ideas, cut off from 
 all communion with Europe. A year or two since they 
 at last found the prisoner sufficiently subdued by his 
 martyrdom of more than twenty years. They trans- 
 ferred him to a milder place of banishment, and allowed 
 him to occupy himself in a harmless manner by transla- 
 tions and similar things. 
 
 He is now and then visited there by some faithful 
 admirers, who dare to expose themselves to the odium 
 which follows upon such visits ; and I know of nothing 
 more significant of the contentment into which public 
 opinion has sunk in Russia, than the satisfaction with 
 which those who have seen him express their impres- 
 sions on their return : " Tchernuishevski is well," they 
 say generally; "he is not entirely broken down intel- 
 
 ^ L'economie politique jug^e par le science. Critique des principes 
 d'economie politique, de John Stuart Mill par N. Tschemuischevski. 
 Bruxelles, 1874, i.-xxxvi.
 
 A VITAL QUESTION. 267 
 
 lectually ; he translates from the German" It has gone 
 so far in Russia that when a genius, who was the honor 
 of the nation and the pride of the youth, after having 
 been abused for a quarter of a century with the coarsest 
 cruelty, has, nevertheless, not become an idiot, they then 
 do not think much more of what has happened ; they 
 feel entirely satisfied with the result, feel about as if 
 they had made a bet with the government, and, in all 
 probability, had won it. 
 
 Even one who is not competent to judge of the value of 
 Tchernuishevski's economical work will read with pleas- 
 ure his critical treatise on Mill's " Political Economy." 
 The urbanity of the tone, the crystal clearness of his 
 description, and the richness of his pertinent psycho- 
 logical observations, enchain an outsider. But the three- 
 volume novel of Tchernuishevski, which was written in 
 prison (finished April 4, 1863), "What is to be done?" 
 has had a far more important influence.^ 
 
 It is not that the book is a fine poetical production, 
 nor even poetical at all in the true sense of the word. 
 It is highly intellectual and liberal, a thorough and free 
 development of the man's views of life, so far as he 
 could develop them in a manuscript which must pass 
 under the inspection of the prison authorities and of the 
 censor before it could reach the printing-office. 
 
 Strange as it may seem to the reader, a radiant good 
 humor pervades the book, which only towards the end 
 becomes long-winded and tiresome, partly because every- 
 thing must be expressed so indirectly, frequently in a 
 far-fetched manner, partly because the poor prisoner at 
 the last felt far too great need of light and air and free- 
 dom and men. 
 
 1 In French, Que Faircf In German, Was Thvn? (Brockhaos, 
 1883). In English, " A Vital Question " (T. Y. Crcwell & Co.).
 
 268 IMPBESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 The work was intended and was received as a gospel 
 for the modern Russia. It was intended to point the 
 way out of the conflicts which are occasioned in one 
 direction by the regulation of the sexual relations, and 
 in another direction by the whole economical disorder of 
 society. " What is to be done ? " is a sort of a bastard 
 between a novel and a treatise on political economy ; it 
 descends on the female side from George Sand and on 
 the male from Karl Marx. 
 
 Books of this kind have apparently been written 
 before. In tendency it has a resemblance to the 
 '*' Jacques " of George Sand, in its story it also reminds 
 one strongly of a much older romance, namely Jean 
 Paul Richter's Leben, Tod und Ehrestand des Armenadvo- 
 katen Slebenkds. But still there is no book of this 
 kind in the literature of the world, and no work in the 
 whole Russian literature is more Russian, 
 
 The argument can be stated in a few lines : The medi- 
 cal student Lopukhof marries Viera Pavlovna for love. 
 They live happily together for a long time. After the 
 lapse of some years she falls in love with his comrade, 
 Kirsanof. Lopukhdf, with whose notions it does not 
 agree to stand in the way of two lovers, apparently com- 
 mits suicide and disappears ; he travels under another 
 name to America, returns home some years later, marries 
 another woman, and continues to live in friendly rela- 
 tions to his former wife and her husband. 
 
 There are many most excellently drawn subsidiary 
 characters, who take part in the story, who are grouped 
 around the leading persons. The form of the narrative 
 is personal to the highest degree. Every moment the 
 author addresses himself directly to the reader, humor- 
 ously makes the ordinary excitement of a novel impos- 
 sible, by telling far in advance everything which is going
 
 A TREATISE ON SOCIALISM. 269 
 
 to happen, pokes fun at the reader's consternation at the 
 immorality of the narrator, telling him that it is even 
 far greater than it appears to be. But in truth this is 
 not at all a story, but is in all respects a treatise on 
 social morals. Much which wearies a modern reader, 
 the description of Viera's sewing establishment, where 
 every sewing-girl shares in the receipts, and much more 
 of the same kind, is for Tchernuishevski only the means 
 of proclaiming that socialism which he regards as right 
 and promising for the future. He cannot proclaim his 
 ideals directly. A careful reading will show that all the 
 Kussian ideas of progress and all the Russian Utopias 
 are contained in this book. 
 
 On a hasty reading one understands nothing at all of 
 this. The book was not written for the superficial 
 reader. By an artistic circumlocution the poor prisoner 
 must inform the reader of his ideas of how the world of 
 the future will come to look. Wlien he cannot do it 
 any other way, he lets his heroine fall asleep and tells us 
 her dreams in regular dream pictures, Avith symbolical 
 meaning in great poetical visions, the description of 
 which sometimes fills over thirty pages in succession. 
 
 Thus everything is combined in this book which is 
 most thoroughly characteristic of Russia: the broadly 
 constituted nature, the proud frankness, and the radical 
 disposition to go to the end of tlie rope ; strong influ- 
 ences from foreign lands, and independent originality, 
 lively sense of reality down to the dry prose and pene- 
 trating fanatical mysticism. 
 
 When the foreigner in Russia, after repeatedly asking 
 if this or that person is prominent, gifted, remarkably 
 interesting, or the like, and after continually receiving 
 a negative answer, at last demands impatiently, " Who, 
 then, in the whole world is gifted ? " then it will happen
 
 270 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 to him again and again to receive from the most differ- 
 ent directions the melancholy answer, " Tchernuishevski 
 was." 
 
 He will understand this answer when he has read 
 attentively all that is accessible from the pen of this 
 great man, whose name they do not even dare to print 
 in Russia.
 
 V. 
 
 October 28, 1818, there was born in the department 
 of Orel, in an old noble (originally Tatar) family, the 
 man to whom, down to the very latest time, the cultured 
 classes in the German and Latin countries are indebted 
 for almost all they know of the inner life of the Slavic 
 races of our day. 
 
 No earlier Russian author has been read in Europe 
 like Ivan Sergeyevitch Turgenief ; he is to be regarded 
 rather as a cosmopolitan than as a Russian author. 
 
 He opened up to the European public a new world of 
 subjects, but he did not need the collateral interest which 
 his work gained for him thereby ; for it is the artist and 
 not the describer of culture which Europe has admired 
 in him. Although he has hardly been read out of his 
 own country in his own language, he has everywhere, 
 even in those countries which possess the most taste, 
 been placed on a level with the best authors of the land. 
 He has been read everywhere in translations, which 
 necessarily distort or diminish the impression of his supe- 
 riority ; but the perfection of his originality asserted 
 itself so strongly in the various more or less happy forms 
 in which his books were cast that any want of delicacy 
 and clearness was overlooked. Great authors, as a rule, 
 work most effectively through their style, because by 
 this they come into personal contact with the reader. 
 Turgenief made a very deep impression, although the 
 reader who was not a Russian could appreciate only the 
 
 271
 
 272 IMPItESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 coarser qualities of his style, and could scarcely imagine 
 with what elegance he was wont to express himself, and 
 would be just as far from understanding his allusions as 
 from being able to compare his interpretation and de- 
 scription of persons and ways of thinking in Russia with 
 the reality from which they were taken. Turgenief con- 
 quered in the artistic race, although he was heavily 
 handicapped ; he was triumphant in the great arena, 
 although he wielded a sword without a point. 
 
 For the cultured people of Western Europe, he has 
 peopled the great empire of the East with human beings 
 of the present time. Thanks to him, we know the spir- 
 itual characteristics of its men and women. Although 
 in the vigor of his age he left Russia, never again to 
 dwell in his native land, he has never described anything 
 else than the inhabitants of this country, and Germans 
 and Frenchmen only as half Russianized or even only in 
 contact with Russians. He only presents to us beings 
 with whose peculiarities he was familiar from his youth. 
 That gradually, during his long exile and the estrange- 
 ment which existed between the Slavophile and Euro- 
 pean Russians, it came to be regarded as proper, in 
 certain Russian circles, to depreciate his knowledge of 
 his fatherland, and treat him as a kind of Western 
 European, was natural. But, if he had been a degree 
 less cosmopolitan, he certainly Avould never have made 
 his way into the whole civilized world as he has done. 
 
 He has given pictures from the forest and the steppes, 
 from spring and autumn, from all ranks and classes of 
 society, and all grades of culture, in Russia. He has 
 drawn the serf and the princess, the peasant and the 
 proprietor, and the student ; the young girl who is pure 
 soul, endowed with the finest Slavic charms, and the 
 cold, beautiful, egotistical coquette, who in his hands
 
 TUBGENIEF ARTIST AND POET. 27S 
 
 seems to be more irresponsible in her heartlessness than 
 anywhere else. He has given a rich psychology of a 
 whole human race, and has given it with a mind greatly 
 excited, but yet so that his mental agitations do not in 
 any way distm-b the transparent clearness of the descrip- 
 tions. 
 
 Of all the prose writers of Russia, Turgenief is the 
 greatest artist. Possibly, it depends upon the fact that 
 he is the one of those who has lived most in foreign 
 lands ; for if his long residence in France has not in- 
 creased the stock of poetry which he brought with him 
 from his home, yet he has plainly learned there the art 
 of setting his pictures in frame and glass. 
 
 A broad, deep wave of melancholy flows through 
 Turgeniefs thoughts, and therefore also through his 
 books. However sober and impersonal his style is, and 
 although he hardly ever inserts poems in his novels 
 and romances, still his general narrative makes a lyrical 
 impression. There is so much feeling condensed in 
 them, and this feeling is invariably sadness, a peculiar, 
 wonderful sadness without a touch of sentimentality. 
 Turgenief never expresses himself wholly emotionally ; 
 he works with restrained emotion ; but no Western Euro- 
 pean is sad as he is. The great melancholy authors of the 
 Latin races, like Leopardi or Flaubert, have harsh, firm 
 outlines in their style ; the German sadness is glaringly 
 humorous or pathetic or sentimental. The melancholy 
 of Turgenief is, in its general form, that of the Slavic 
 races in their weakness and sorrow, which comes in a 
 direct line from the melancholy in the Slavic popular 
 ballads. 
 
 All the later Russian poets of rank are melancholy. 
 But with Turgenief it is the melancholy of the tliinker 
 who has understood that all the ideals of the human
 
 274 IMPRESSIOIVS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 race justice, reason, supreme goodness, happiness 
 are a matter of indifference to nature, and never assert 
 themselves by their own spiritual power. In " Senilia," 
 he has represented Nature as a woman, sitting clad in 
 wide green kirtle, in the middle of a hall in the depths 
 of the earth, lost in meditation. 
 
 "' Oh, our common mother !' he asks, 'what art thou 
 thinking of? Is it on the future fate of the human 
 race ? Is it on the necessary conditions for its reach- 
 ing the highest possible perfection, the greatest possible 
 happiness ? ' 
 
 " The woman slowly turns her dark, piercing, dreadful 
 eyes towards me ; her lips half opened and I heard a 
 voice which rang as when iron comes in contact with 
 iron. 
 
 " ' I am thinking how I can give the muscles of the 
 flea greater power so that it can more easily escape 
 from the persecutions of its enemies. There is no equi- 
 librium between the attack and defence : it must be 
 restored.' 
 
 " ' What ! ' stammered I, ' is it that you are thinking 
 of ? But we, the human race, are we not your chil- 
 dren ? ' 
 
 *' She wrinkled her eyebrows imperceptibly. 
 
 " * All animals are my children,' said she ; ' I care 
 equally for them all, and I exterminate them all in the 
 same manner.' " 
 
 Here you have his character of melancholy. When 
 Gogol is melancholy, it is because he is indignant ; when 
 Dostoyevski is so, it depends upon the fact that he is 
 dissolved in sympathy with the ignorant and the obscure, 
 with the saint-like, noble, and pure of heart, and almost 
 even more with sinners both male and female ; Tolstoi's 
 melancholy has its root in his religious fatalism. Tur- 
 genief alone is a philosopher.
 
 niS FREEDOM FROM MYSTICISM. 275 
 
 It will also be found that the other great poets have 
 had a turning-point in their lives when they have been 
 seized by a religious excitement which has given a new 
 stamp to their career, according to their own interpreta- 
 tion a new consecration and a new earnestness, but 
 which also operates greatly to hamper and diminish 
 their poetic descriptive powers, nay, generally a little 
 sooner or later it entirely destroys their poetic gifts. 
 This turning-point comes in some cases from an inde- 
 pendent conversion, and in others when they are filled 
 with a national or a national religious mysticism. The 
 disposition to such mysticism makes its appearance in 
 this century as a common Slavic trait. It attacked in 
 the Polish literature, in the forties, Mickiewicz, Slowacki, 
 Krasinski, Zaleski, and others when Towianski and other 
 dreamers made their influence felt. It has prevailed 
 in Russian literature, in different forms, with men of so 
 great ability as Gogol and Dostoyevski, and manifests 
 itself, last of all, with Tolstoi as it would seem, under 
 the influence of Zhutayef. 
 
 Only for Turgenief, with his quiet contemplation, 
 even religious enthusiasm is a theme like any other, 
 although he, too, in "Clara Militch" and "The Love 
 Song of the Conquering Lovers," pays his tribute to the 
 mystical. He treats religious enthusiasm without losing 
 his equilibrium. We recall, for instance, his Sophie 
 Vladimirovna from "A Strange Story," the young girl 
 of good family, who accompanies a wandering saint out 
 into the wide world. 
 
 His melancholy, therefore, is less religious than philo- 
 sophical ; but it is that of the patriot who has become a 
 pessimist. In spite of all his seeming cosmopolitanism, 
 he was a patriot, but a patriot who mourned over his 
 fatherland and despaired of it. He was attacked for
 
 276 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 this. Dostoyevski tried to make him ridiculous in the 
 figure of Karmasinof in " The Possessed." He did not, 
 indeed, lack confidence in the future of his fatherland ; 
 he admired its language and certain parts of its litera- 
 ture so much that he inferred therefrom "what abilities 
 the people must possess who had produced such results. 
 But he did not share in the enthusiasm of his more sim- 
 ple and ignorant countrymen for the Russian people as 
 such. He did not find their past history great. 
 
 Turgenief somewhere describes his dejection when at 
 one of the great world's exhibitions he got an exact 
 perception of how insignificant Russia's contribution 
 was to industrial inventions, and he added bitterly, 
 "We have invented nothing but the knout." His 
 career as an author shows that the history of the more 
 recent development of his country was far from inspiring 
 him with confidence. 
 
 Ivan Turgenief lost his father early (1834), Col. Sergei 
 Nikolayevitch (of that Turgenief family which had 
 already given two distinguished men to Russia), and 
 suffered from the imperious and cold-hearted rule of 
 his mother. But he was brought up in country quiet, 
 on the family estate Spasskoye, and at an early age felt 
 the most vital love for nature as well as the most pas- 
 sionate hatred to serfdom, whose unhappy results were 
 constantly before him. 
 
 He studied first at the University of Moscow and 
 then at that of St. Petersburg, travelled in 1838 to 
 Germany and like Katkdf and Bakunin listened to lec- 
 ures on philosophy and history at the University of 
 Berlin (by Michelet, Werder, Ranke, and others). After 
 several years' residence in foreign lands he returned 
 home as a supporter of Western European liberal 
 thought, was given a position in the department of
 
 ''RECOLLECTIONS OF A HUNTSMAN." 277 
 
 the Minister of the Interior, but retired from the office 
 at the end of a year, to live the free life of a Russian 
 landed proprietor and huntsman. 
 
 He published his first hunting stories in 1847 ; then 
 followed from 1847 to 1851 the others, which in 1852 ap- 
 peared collected as " Recollections of a Huntsman," and 
 created an epoch-making sensation. He at first began 
 with things in verse like Byronisms and romanticisms, 
 unsuccessful and without originality. It was in this 
 first period that Alexander Herzen, as has been told me 
 by an eye-witness, called him so affected that he could 
 not eat without affectation. Byelinski tore him loose 
 from Byron, Heine, and the romanticists, and brought 
 him into the right path. 
 
 He expressed what he knew thoroughly : Russian 
 nature and the life of the Russian people, and gave 
 his hatred of serfdom expression in the forms which 
 the censor would allow. This certainly had a beneficial 
 effect on his talent, developed, necessarily, everything 
 that was pre-eminent, aristocratic, and discreet in it. If 
 he sometimes, in his early youth, had an inclination to 
 the pathetic, to declamation, to glaring effects, pro- 
 nounced it could have been under no circumstances, 
 then the relation to the censor must have suppressed it. 
 To awaken a sympathy for the serfs, to show the lawless- 
 ness in which they passed their lives, and give pictures 
 of the roughness which abused them even to death, 
 and that without making use of the whip or knout, he 
 relates incidents in his life as a sportsman, visits to the 
 landed proprietors or to the physicians, and among these, 
 now and then, little stories : of the miller's wife who, as 
 a girl, had been guilty of a black ingratitude in wishing 
 to marry, although her angelic mistress could not endure 
 married servants, and who, when she would not give up
 
 278 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 her lover, was punished by a forced marriage to another, 
 after having seen her Petruchklia put into the army. Or 
 there is the story of the deaf and dumb but muscular 
 man-servant Gerassim, whose sweetheart his gracious 
 mistress married to a drunkard for her own amusement, 
 and who was compelled to drown his dog, a little, ema- 
 ciated puppy, Mumu, his last consolation and sole 
 company in the world, because sometimes his barking 
 irritated his mistress when, after too great indulgence at 
 her meals, she was lying sleepless. 
 
 Both stories are told without comment, with no criti- 
 cism of the events ; the hatred of brutality which was 
 manifested is expressed only in irony, and this irony, 
 again, disappears in the pervading sadness. 
 
 What makes Turgenief's vein so rich and peculiar is 
 that he is at once a pessimist and a philanthropist ; that 
 he loved the race of which he thought so poorly and 
 esteemed so lightly. 
 
 But he had seen altogether too much go wrong and 
 miscarry in Russia to be able to narrate any other inci- 
 dents than those with unhappy or sad results. To him, 
 a love story is not genuine Russian if it does not have an 
 unhappy issue in consequence of the inconstancy of the 
 man or the coldness of the woman. An undertaking 
 does not seem to him to be genuine Russian unless it 
 is beyond the capacity of him who attempts it, and falls 
 through in consequence of the insusceptibility of those 
 for whose sake it was to be carried through. But still 
 he cannot refrain from dwelling again and again on vacil- 
 lating love and fruitless struggles in Russia. For him, 
 the land of Russia, where everything comes to grief, is a 
 land of general shipwreck. And his chief emotion is one 
 which awakens and is mingled witli pain in the spectator 
 of a shipwreck, in which the latter must give the suf-
 
 HIS ARTISTIC SUPERIORITY. 279 
 
 ferers themselves the greatest part of the blame. There 
 is a strong and quiet emotion which is always softened in 
 its expression. It is seldom that a great and productive 
 author has made so little noise as he. 
 
 There is something aristocratic in this noble and sim- 
 ple attitude. It is not that, like Lord Byron or Prince 
 Ptickler, he has impressed the marks of superiority upon 
 his works by any external stamp. But the impression 
 forces itself upon us that the author has inherited his 
 intellectual refinement, and has always lived in the best 
 society. He was a man of the world, and we feel behind 
 his works the experience in life of a man of the world, 
 which the German authors generally lack. But this ex- 
 perience has neither made him cynical, like so many 
 French authors, nor given to moralizing, like so many 
 English. Although he has never shown any lack of 
 good breeding in his style, still his tone is not the tone 
 of the world. Even his contempt is not a cold contempt. 
 There is always a soul in his voice. 
 
 It is difficult to say briefly and precisely what it is 
 which makes Turgenief an artist of the first rank. We 
 might almost say that it is because his style is so gen- 
 uine. But even this word needs an explanation. The 
 fact that he possesses in the highest degree the quality 
 of a true poet, of being able to create men who live, 
 is not all. What makes his artistic superiority so 
 perceptible is the harmony which the reader traces be- 
 tween the author's conception of the person who is 
 described, his opinion of him, and also the impression 
 which is made upon him as well as upon the reader by 
 that person. 
 
 The point is here. The relation of the author to his 
 own creations is such that every weakness which he has 
 as an artist or as a man must be exposed to the light.
 
 280 IMPEESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 The author may have many and rare gifts, but if he calls 
 upon us to admire that which is not worthy of admira^ 
 tion, or if he would extort from us admiration for a man, 
 or sympathy with a woman, or enthusiasm for an act, 
 without our feeling that there is any occasion for those 
 sentiments, then he has injured and weakened himself. 
 When the author of a novel, whose company we have 
 kept for a long time with pleasure, suddenly shows him- 
 self less critical or more emotional or morally more lax 
 than we are, then his descriptions lose their point for us. 
 If he allows a person to appear as irresistibly winning, 
 without our finding him fascinating ; if he draws a man 
 as more gifted or even more witty than he seems to us to 
 be ; if he explains his conduct by a magnanimity we 
 have never met with, and in this case do not believe in ; 
 if he defies us by arbitrary, immature judgments, or dis- 
 turbs us by coldness, or irritates us by moralizing : then 
 there steals in upon the reader more and more a feeling 
 of disappointing art. It is as if you heard a false note ; 
 and even if the music is afterwards correct, the disagree- 
 able impression lingers in the mind. What reader of 
 Balzac, or Dickens, or Auerbach to speak only of the 
 great dead has not experienced this disagreeable im- 
 pression ! When Balzac becomes enthusiastic over vul- 
 garity, or Dickens childishly pathetic, or Auerbach 
 affectedly simple, the reader feels that he is in the 
 presence of the untrue, the abortive, and is taken 
 aback. Nothing abortive is ever met with in Turgenief. 
 The subjects he has selected are all the most difficult. 
 He refuses to be interested in romantic characters and 
 marvellous adventures, and he no less refuses the attrac- 
 tions of impurity. There seldom or never happens any- 
 thing unusual in his books a catastrophe like the 
 falling-down of a house at the close of the " King Lear
 
 A CORRESPONDENCE. 281 
 
 of the Steppe " is purely exceptional and although lie 
 does not go out of his way on account of low and vile 
 characters, or of incidents which no English novelist 
 would relate, yet he does not dwell upon the obscene, 
 as those authors who once for all have disregarded con- 
 ventionality are so often tempted to do. As an artist 
 he was a decided realist, but a modest realist. 
 
 His chief domain as a narrator is the poor, the weak, 
 the inconstant and untrustworthy, the superfluous and 
 the abandoned. 
 
 He does not, like Dostoyevski, describe the misfortune 
 which is externally palpable, nor the poverty, the rough- 
 ness, the corruption, the crime, nor, above all, the mis- 
 fortune, which can be seen at a distance. He describes 
 the misfortune which avoids publicity, and he is espe- 
 cially the author for those who have submitted to their 
 fate. He has pictured the inner life of reticent sorrow, 
 the still-life of the unfortunate, so t<^ speak. 
 
 For instance read " A Correspondence." It is a young 
 girl with whom we gradually become acquainted, who 
 has lived isolated, misunderstood, despised by stupid 
 associates in a little country village, and who is on the 
 point of becoming an old maid. She has already re- 
 signed herself to it, deserted as she has been by her lover. 
 She has given up her demands on life, and is trying only 
 for peace and is on the way to success. Then begins 
 from an impulse of communicativeness, of idleness, of 
 longing, of sympathy a friend of her younger days 
 to write to her. At first she answers declining the cor- 
 respondence ; after the receipt of other epistles she 
 allows permission for him to continue to be extorted 
 from her. He writes, and she replies, no longer briefly, 
 but in a long, eloquent letter. In this manner the feel- 
 ing of friendship grows up in her heart, and in no very
 
 282 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 long time occupies it and passes over into love. They 
 are both in love for one short moment. He longs for 
 and worships her, the day of his starting and arrival is 
 already fixed ; then the correspondence is broken off, 
 he allows himself to be carried away by a ballet girl, 
 over whose vulgar graces he forgets everything, and she 
 sinks anew, but this time more deeply wounded, back to 
 her dreadful solitary life. 
 
 The highly elaborated novel "An Unfortunate Woman" 
 treats of the life of another young girl, whose misfor- 
 tune is equally quiet and uneventful. Her earliest 
 remembrance is that her mother, a Jewess, the daughter 
 of a foreign painter, and she herself sat daily at the 
 table of the landed proprietor Kaltovskoi. Kaltovskoi 
 is a grand old bugbear, who smelt horribly of ambergris, 
 continually took snuff out of a gold snuff-box, and in- 
 spires the child with no other feeling than fear, even 
 when he holds (^t his hard, dry hand, with lace cuffs, 
 for her to kiss. At the same time that the mother is 
 made to marry the disgusting steward Ratch, the child 
 learns that the landed proprietor is her father. The 
 father never speaks a loving word to her, and not even 
 once a kindly one ; he accepts her with stiff grandeur, as 
 his little reader. The mother dies. The old, heartless 
 landed proprietor dies some years later. His brother 
 and heir, Serayon Matveitch, gives Susannah some money, 
 which her stepfather immediately appropriates. Hav- 
 ing grown up, her heart speaks for the first time ; she 
 falls deeply in love with Semyon's son, her cousin 
 Mikhail, an excellent young officer, who loves her as she 
 deserves to be loved. But no sooner is the intimacy of 
 the two discovered than they are ruthlessly separated. 
 Mikliail is sent away and dies immediately after. The 
 father, Semy6n, pursues his young niece with dishonor-
 
 *'THE DIABY OF A SUPERFLUOUS MAN." 283 
 
 able advances and proposals. At last he dies also and 
 leaves her an annuity, which her stepfather receives. 
 Three years six, seven years pass . . . time moves on. 
 She sees it gliding away indifferently and with it life. 
 Then a new ray of light falls into her existence ; a fine 
 young man, whom she has won, also wins her interest ; 
 then he hears from her associates, from her own depraved 
 step-brother even, the most scurvy calumnies in regard 
 to her past history, and draws back. She takes poison. 
 
 Or read "The Diary of a Superfluous Man." The 
 title explains the contents. It is a man who is mortally 
 ill, and who occupies his last days in recording the chain 
 of common events which has made up his useless life. 
 He has from first to last been in the way in the world. 
 Once he fell in love, but only to suffer all the pangs of 
 jealousy, and experience all its humiliations. Elizabeth 
 did not love him, but a dazzling young prince from 
 St. Petersburg, who is stopping for a short time in the 
 provincial to\Vn in which she dwells. He challenges the 
 prince, who spares him in the duel, succeeds only in 
 passing for a bad man, and appearing to the object of 
 his affections as a murderer. Even when the prince 
 seduces and abandons Elizabeth, and when, nevertheless, 
 he is ready again to ask for her hand, her aversion to 
 him is unchanged. She gives her hand to another not 
 less magnanimous friend, who has got the start of the 
 unhappy lover, and who thus even on this occasion 
 makes him a superfluity. Here as always the poor 
 fellow has been the fifth wheel to the coach. And yet 
 we feel, through every line, how full of feeling, how 
 nobly endowed and good he is. The last pages of the 
 diary contain the farewell to life of the consumptive, 
 who has been given up by his physician. 
 
 " Jacob Passiukof " is another story of the same kind.
 
 284 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 Passinkof belongs to the type of Russian personalities 
 which Turgenief describes with partiality. He is not 
 specially noble in his exterior, tall, thin, round-shoul- 
 dered, and his nose even a little red. But his forehead 
 is magnificent, his voice mild and subdued, and, as it is 
 significantly enough said of him, " In his mouth the 
 words goodness, truth, life, knowledge, love sound 
 always like phrases, however enthiisiastically he utters 
 them." In his story Turgenief's fundamental theme 
 comes out in a double form. He is in love with a beau- 
 tiful young girl, who does not give him a thought. 
 When he dies, forgotten and alone in an obscure corner 
 of Siberia, he still has some mementos of her on his 
 breast. He needed some faults, some selfishness, some 
 levity, to win her favor. In the mean time, as a requital, 
 without his knowing it, he was silently loved by her plain, 
 rather ugly and awkward sister, who has always kept him 
 faithfully in mind, and who for his sake had never been 
 willing to marry. 
 
 Turgenief's story, written somewhat late in life, " The 
 Living Relic," is certainly the best specimen of these 
 monographs of misfortune, Avhich are just as fine and 
 perfect as they are simple. It is almost an unadorned 
 soliloquy ; it is only the account of her life which a 
 young, formerly beautiful Russian peasant girl, now 
 worn to a skeleton, gives to the author. He finds her 
 lying on her back, after a fateful fall, and she has been 
 lying thus for nearly seven years. Her head is emaci- 
 ated, sallow as bronze ; her nose sharp and pointed as a 
 knife-blade ; her lips sunken in, only the teeth and the 
 white of her eyes have any lustre ; some tufts of thin, 
 flaxen yellow hair fall down over her forehead. Outside 
 of the bed-clothing were lying a pair of very small 
 hands whose fingers, like little dark brown pins, move
 
 THE LIVING RELIC. 285 
 
 slowly to and fro. And once she was the most plump, 
 most graceful, gayest, and most beautiful girl in the 
 country, always ready for laughter, song, and dance. 
 She tells her fate, how after her accident she had be- 
 come shrunken, dark-colored, had lost the power of 
 standing and walking, appetite for eating and drinking ; 
 how they burnt her on the back with red-hot iron, and 
 put her into solid ice, all to no effect. And she tells all 
 this in an almost cheerful manner, without any attempt 
 to excite pity. Her lover has left her, and married 
 another. He is, she says, happy in his marriage, thank 
 God. She finds his act natural and right. She is thank- 
 ful to the people who take care of her, especially to a 
 little girl who brings her flowers ; she is not dull, does 
 aot complain : there are others who are more unhappy 
 i;han she is, the blind or the deaf and dumb ; she sees 
 wonderfully well, and hears everything, hears when 
 a mole is digging under ground, and smells every frar 
 grance, even the weakest, the flowers of the buck- 
 wheat, far out in the fields, and the linden trees far 
 down in the garden. The great events in her existence 
 are when a hen or a sparrow or a butterfly comes in to 
 her through a door or window. She has great pleasure 
 in the recollection of a visit a hare made to her one 
 day. And Lukeria reminds Turgenief of the time when 
 she sang ballads. She still sings them sometimes, she 
 tells him. The thought that this scarcely living being 
 is preparing to sing inspires him with involuntary horror ; 
 and, trembling like a thread of light smoke, her poor 
 little voice comes out in almost inaudible but clear and 
 pure tones. She tells him the wonderful dreams she has 
 had (unfortunately she sleeps but little), one about 
 Jesus, who came to meet her, and held out his hand to 
 her ; one about a woman whom she met, and who was
 
 286 IMPRESSIONS OF BUSSIA. 
 
 her death, but who went past her, and, pitying her, did 
 not complain that she could not take her with her. She 
 contradicts the author when he expresses his admiration 
 of her patience. What is there to admire ! What has 
 she done ! No, the maiden who, in a distant country, 
 with a great sword drove the enemy out into the sea, 
 and then said, "Burn me now, for it was my promise 
 that I would die at the stake for my people ! " that 
 maiden performed a wonderful act. As he went away, 
 Lukeria begs him to say a word for the peasants there 
 in the village at her mother's, so that they might obtain 
 a little bit of an abatement in the rent. She needs 
 nothing herself, and has nothing to wish for in her own 
 behalf. 
 
 Still it is not these minor works which have made 
 Turgenief's name renowned throughout the world. It 
 is his greater novels, his few romances, masterpieces, 
 like " On the Eve " (Helen), " Kudin," " Spring Floods," 
 " Smoke," " Fathers and Sons," and " Virgin Soil." No 
 more subtile psychology is to be found in European, 
 literature, no more perfect delineation of character, and, 
 what is almost unseen in the history of modern author- 
 ship, the figures of the men and women are here equally 
 perfect. 
 
 In order fully to understand these best works of Tur- 
 genief, it is necessary to have some knowledge of his 
 life and character. 
 
 Two decisive events occurred in his life. The first is 
 his imprisonment and subsequent banishment to his 
 estate in 1842. The second is his acquaintance with 
 Mme. Pauline Viardot, nee Garcia. 
 
 In the government circles a suspicious watch ivas kept 
 on Turgenief, on account of his attacks on serfdom. 
 Then, when Gogol died, and Turgenief, in a newspaper
 
 BIS EXILE MME. VIAEDOT. 287 
 
 article (in which the censor in Moscow found nothing to 
 strike out), eulogized the deceased with warm words, they 
 at once seized upon the opportunity to give him a blow. 
 They found Heaven knows how disobedience to- 
 wards the Tsar in the said article, and on "the com- 
 mand of the highest of all " he was thrown into prison 
 in St. Petersburg. Among his letters is to be found a 
 communication which he wrote to the heir-apparent 
 (Alexander) to prove his innocence. After having 
 passed a month in prison, which the delicate condition 
 of his health made doubly painful to him, he was exiled 
 to his estate Spasskoye, where he was obliged to remain 
 for several years. It is plainly enough this event which 
 after his pardon led him to take up his permanent resi- 
 dence outside of his native land. 
 
 The acquaintance with Mme. Viardot imprisoned the 
 author near to her for all the rest of his life far more 
 than half. She Avas born in Paris in 1821 and had made 
 extensive artistic tours in America and Europe with her 
 parents, first as a pianist and then as a vocalist. Her 
 first appearance in Paris, which happened at the same 
 time as Eachel's, is commemorated in verse by Alfred 
 de Musset. From 1840 she was the wife of the author 
 Louis Viardot. As early as 1847, Turgenief accompanied 
 the married couple to Berlin and then to Paris. From 
 1856 he is to be regarded as a member of the Viardot 
 family, and the influence which the mistress of the 
 house exerted upon the author was great, and, so far as 
 can be perceived, only for good. In 1847, when his 
 despotic mother refused to send him any money for his 
 support, Mme. Viardot assisted him out of her own 
 purse, and it was therefore only just that Turgenief in 
 his will should have made her his residuary legatee, 
 which, however, has given rise to many fiendish com- 
 ments on the part of Russians.
 
 288 iMriiESSiONs of bussia. 
 
 Turgenief s relation to Mme. Viardot was that of 
 passionate devotion and admiration. He could not do 
 without her, and took counsel with her about his affairs 
 of every description. Genuine Slav as he was, suscepti- 
 ble to impressions, intellectually productive and almost 
 destitute of will-power, he was fortunate in having a 
 fair ruler over his life. When any friend complained to 
 him of his own irregular and unfortunate career, he 
 usually answered : " Do as I do, my dear fellow ; I 
 allow myself to be ruled." He did what Mme. Viardot 
 told him he ought to do, and was contented therewith. 
 
 She seems to have been the only woman of impor- 
 tance in his life. Naturally, he had known women in 
 his youth. At the age of nineteen, in Berlin, he was 
 the friend of a little sewing-girl and was chagrined that 
 Bakunin, Avith whom he was living, could tell by his 
 looks when he had been to see her.^ At first in the 
 beginning of the fifties he lived in Russia, and then, 
 1851-53, with a Russian serf, Avdotya Yermolayevna 
 Ivanova, who must have been very beautiful, but to 
 whom it appeared to be impossible to impart the mys- 
 teries of the art of reading. She bore to him, in 1842, 
 the daughter whom he married to a Frenchman m 1864. 
 His letters show that he did not at that time even know 
 where the mother, who had married a Russian official, 
 was living. (Letter to Maslof, December 26, 1864.) 
 But he Avas a good father as well as a faithful friend 
 and a magnanimous protector. 
 
 His character was noble ; refined and pure even to the 
 point of tenderness ; but gentle and undecided. Prob- 
 ably he was not obliged to go far, as a young man, to 
 find the model of single traits of character in Riidin. He 
 was never guilty of any low act ; but, on the other hand, 
 
 1 Isaac Pavlovsky : Houvenirs de Tourgu^neff, ]^. 112 and following.
 
 HIS WEAKNESS AND STRENGTH. 289 
 
 he hardly ever acted with any bold and forcible energy. 
 In reading his letters we are surprised to see with what 
 rascals he corresponded, apparently not to make ene- 
 mies of them, and with how little respect he speaks in 
 confidential letters of persons to whom in other letters 
 he shows great regard. When we find that Turgenief, 
 with a character in which will-power was so weakly 
 developed, during the whole of his life remained invio- 
 lably faithful to the old liberal convictions of his youth, 
 we can scarcely err in attributing to Mme. Viardot no 
 small degree of honor for this result. If she had influ- 
 enced him in the opposite direction, he would probably 
 have become conservative, and if her house and circle 
 had not been decidedly liberal, perhaps an influence from 
 some other direction would have succeeded in swaying 
 him. On the contrary, he seems to have been entirely 
 independent in his obstinate position as the exponent 
 and pupil of Western Europe. 
 
 In perfect accord with the weak appearance of his 
 will-power in Turgenief's character is the circumstance 
 that as an author he comes forward with a confidence 
 like that of a somnambulist. He said to Mikhailof, Pro- 
 fessor of Physiology in St. Petersburg (from whom I 
 have it) : " I see a man who strikes me from some char- 
 acteristic or other, perhaps of little importance. I forget 
 him. And then, long after, the man suddenly starts up 
 from the grave of forgetfulness. About the character- 
 istic which I observed, others group themselves, and it is 
 of no use now if I want to forget him : I cannot do it ; 
 he has taken possession of me ; I think with him, live 
 in him ; I can only restore myself to ease by finding 
 an existence for him." 
 
 Turgenief, as a writer, is more elegant than forcible. 
 It is for that reason that female characters are so well 
 adapted to his talents.
 
 290 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 With tranquil tenderness lie draws the young girls 
 who have his full sympathy, Helen and Gemma, and with 
 an indulgent love which, nevertheless, excludes all praise 
 and admiration on the part of the author. Every word 
 which is said of them is determinative, limiting. One, 
 in play of features, gestures, laughter, train of ideas and 
 love is wholly Italian ; the other is impressed on the 
 mind of the reader as the most beautiful type of Russian 
 womanhood. Only the best authors of the world have 
 produced anything so natural, so well sustained. And 
 the worship of beauty that is to be found there has done 
 no harm to the study of nature. They are not women 
 whom the author has arbitrarily created, and who dwell 
 in the fancy-land of poetry, like the forms of women in 
 the works of so many other authors. They are not 
 products of Turgenief's personal enthusiasm for the 
 womanly, not merely an expression of his ideal alone, 
 but studies built up on a foundation of a delicate sense 
 of reality, and by the force of a thorough knowledge of 
 the real. 
 
 In the more important male characters, from the 
 nature of the material, Turgenief found his task espe- 
 cially dif&cult. While the chief aim of an author 
 usually is to sustain his characters and let them escape 
 self-contradiction, the finest characters of Turgenief 
 are made up of contradictions. He understood how to 
 treat inconsistency as a fundamental trait of charac- 
 ter without having the character disorganized thereby. 
 With the regular Eussian, as he describes him, there is 
 nothing certain to be depended upon except instability. 
 As Alexis, in "A Correspondence," leaves Maria in the 
 lurch, so Rudin abandons Natalia, Sanin, in "Spring 
 Floods," Gemma, Litvinof, in " Smoke," Tatyana, etc. ; 
 they abandon youth, freshness, goodness of heart, beauty,
 
 RUDIN A TYPE OF INCONSTANCY. 291 
 
 happiness, to run after intoxication of the senses and 
 degradation, or they deceive from pure weakness and 
 instability in themselves. And to these men, whom no 
 one can trust, and whose sudden outbursts of passion 
 and sudden cessation thereof surprise themselves not 
 less than others, correspond women on whom it is just 
 as impossible to depend, women who are on the point of 
 being able to love, but cannot, like Marie Odinzof, in 
 " Fathers and Sons ; " women who unintentionally in- 
 snare, abandon themselves, draw back, like Iriona in 
 " Smoke ; " and, finally, cold Bacchantes, like that Maria 
 Nikolayevna who carries away Sanin from Gemma. 
 
 Sometimes, the inconsistency and treachery remain 
 rather unsatisfactorily explained, as in " Spring Floods ; " 
 in that case, it depends upon the fact that Turgenief 
 assumes, so to speak, that this trait of character of 
 his young men is known. In his earliest great novel, 
 ^'liiidin" (1855), the study of inconsistency is so thor- 
 ough and exhaustive that, through the weakness of this 
 one character, we understand the weakness of the Rus- 
 sian character everywhere. That which most excites 
 our admiration for the skill of the artist in this, is that 
 he has been able to awaken a no small degree of sympa- 
 thy for Riidin ; that in the milksop and phrase-monger 
 he has shown us the sincere enthusiast. Riidin, who 
 speaks so warmly, tells a story so fascinatingly, and pos- 
 sesses all "the music of eloquence," is lazy, despotic, 
 everlastingly playing a part, forever living at the ex- 
 pense of others, cold when he seems to be warmest, 
 intellectually weak when he seems to be about to accom- 
 plish something. And yet Turgenief shows that he 
 deserves our pity far more than our ill will, and that he 
 rightfully exerts a great influence on young souls. 
 
 Men with constant hearts and strong wills do not
 
 292 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 appear among Turgenief's leading figures in his younger 
 days. They are Hamlets who descend from Pushkin's 
 Onyegin and Herzen's Beltov. When he describes a man 
 who is wholly a man, and to whom a woman can look 
 lip, then, as in " Helen," in order to shame his country- 
 men, he chooses a foreigner, the Bulgarian Insarof, who 
 has exactly those qualities which the Russians, from the 
 best to the poorest, lack. The model of the figure was a 
 real Bulgarian, Katianof, who has figured in his native 
 land, and with whom Turgenief (1855) became acquainted 
 through the papers of a neighboring landed proprietor, 
 Karateyef. Otherwise, men whom Turgenief himself ad- 
 mires are named only incidentally, and they are placed 
 as figures in the background, or used as contrasts to 
 bring out the falsity and weakness of the leading char- 
 acter. Such, for instance, is Pokorski in "Eiidin," of 
 whom Lekhnef speaks with so fascinating an enthusi- 
 asm, and in whom Ave really may see a portrait of the 
 critic Byelinski, the friend and teacher of Turgenief's 
 youth, to whose memory he has dedicated "Fathers and 
 Sons," and by whose side he, on his death-bed, expressed 
 his desire to be buried. It is said of him : 
 
 " Pokorski made the impression of a very quiet and 
 gentle, almost weak nature ; he loved women to madness, 
 enjoyed a little dissipation, and would not have suffered 
 an insult of any kind whatever. Riidin appeared to be 
 all fire and flame, life, boldness, but at the bottom of his 
 soul he was cold and almost a coward, so long as his 
 vanity was not wounded, for then his self-control would 
 be entirely destroyed by his frenzy. He continually 
 sought to be the master of others . . . but acquiesced in 
 bearing his yoke, but Pokorski submitted to all volun- 
 tarily . . . oh, it was a beautiful time and I cannot 
 believe that it was wasted. How often have I not met
 
 ORIGIN OF bazArof. 293 
 
 people from that time, my former comrades, men who 
 seemed to have sunken into a purely animal existence, 
 and yet it was only necessary to mention Pokorski's 
 name ; immediately all the good that had survived in 
 them rose to the surface, as when one in a dirty, dark 
 room opens a bottle of perfume which has been forgotten 
 there." 
 
 Yet it was not until the publication of " Fathers and 
 Sons " in 1861 that Turgenief gave a typical representa- 
 tion of the strong character and intellectual superiority 
 of the Kussian, this time in its modern form. The 
 character of Bazarof introduced " nigilism " into light 
 literature. Even if Turgenief has apparently specially 
 desired to strike a blow against the idolization of simple 
 utility, with its poverty of ideas, in the younger genera- 
 tion, still he has succeeded in drawing a man who by 
 his firmness, his courage, and his steadfastness, towers 
 up in the whole of European literature, which is not 
 rich in types of true men. It cannot have escaped the 
 observation of any one tolerably familiar with modern 
 books that it is as if true manhood had disappeared. A 
 man who has a will and mind and uses his will to aid 
 his mind, sticks to his aim, is a support to his friends, 
 is an everlasting thorn in the flesh to his enemies, and to 
 whom the women, the defenceless, the beginners in life, 
 naturally gravitate, such a man comes no more to the 
 front, save in the dilute romances of boys and ladies. 
 
 In 1860, on a journey in Germany in a railway car- 
 riage, Turgenief met a young Russian physician, who, 
 in the brief conversation that took place between them, 
 astonished him by his original and startling views. He 
 gave the poet the idea of Bazarof. In order to famil- 
 iarize himself with the character, Turgenief began to 
 keep " Bazarof s Diary," that is, as soon as he read a
 
 294 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 new book or met a person who interested him or ex- 
 hibited some characteristic of a political or social nature, 
 he criticised him in this diary according to Bazarof's 
 manner of thought. 
 
 As is well known, it was not so much by the genius 
 which was displayed in the delineation of the principal 
 character as it was from the effect the work created, the 
 ill will, the misunderstandings, the passionate attacks, it 
 provoked on the part of the radical leaders, that " Fathers 
 and Sons " was an event in the history of Russian litera- 
 ture and in the author's own life. The book is a master- 
 piece without a blemish, besides being the original 
 prototype of all the modern novels in different countries 
 which treat of an older and younger generation in their 
 reciprocal relations and conflicts ; but in the beginning 
 nothing else was seen in it than the depreciation of the 
 younger generation to the advantage of the culture of 
 the older. 
 
 In the face of this stupidity, Turgenief's own utter- 
 ances about the hero have an increased interest. A 
 certain Slutchevski had upbraided him that Bazarof 
 had made so unfavorable an impression. He answers 
 (1862) : " Nevertheless, Bazarof drives all the other per- 
 sons of the noveljinto the background. . . . He is honest, 
 upright, and a democrat of the purest water. And you 
 find in him no good quality ! He commends ' Force and 
 Matter ' by name as a popular, that is a worthless book. 
 The duel with Pavel Petrovitch is introduced to repre- 
 sent the intellectual vacuity of the elegant, noble knight- 
 hood; it is even then almost overdrawn, ridiculously 
 represented. . . . According to my view, Bazarof is 
 constantly Pavel Petrovitch wholly superior and uncon- 
 verted. When he calls himself a * nihilist,' we must read 
 revolutionist. . , , On the one side a venal official, on the
 
 " SMOKE'' " VIRGIN SOIL." 295 
 
 other an ideal youth. Such pictures I leave for others 
 to draw; I strove for something greater. ... I close 
 with the remark: If the reader does not find Bazarof 
 dear to him in spite of all his coarseness, heartlessness, 
 merciless dryness and sharpness, then the fault is 
 mine and I have missed my mark. But sweet with 
 syrup to speak after the manner of Bazarof that I 
 would not have, although I had immediately won the 
 youth over to my side thereby." 
 
 And twelve years later, after a fresh attack, he turns 
 back again to his tenderness for Bazarof. He writes : 
 " What ! you also contend that I caricatured youth in 
 Bazarof. You repeat this pardon the freedom of the 
 expression insane complaint. Bazarof, my favorite 
 child, for whose sake I broke with Katkof, and on whom 
 I lavished all the colors I could command ! Bazdrof, 
 this intelligent man, this hero, a caricature ! " . . . ^ 
 
 By the novel "Smoke," Turgenief fell out with 
 another not less influential group in Kussia than that 
 which had been so much offended by " Fathers and 
 Sons." It was almost a blow aimed at the Slavophiles, 
 and imbittered them in every case against him. Katkdf 
 and Dostoyevski were from this time his bitter enemies 
 and persecutors. In this book certain twaddling and 
 conceited Russian quasi-reformers are thrown aside with 
 a cutting scorn, which recalls to a denizen of the North 
 Henrick Ibsen's manner of treating certain reformers 
 among his countrymen. 
 
 But in "Virgin Soil" (1877), Turgeniefs last great 
 work and the most versatile he wrote, he has brought 
 his criticism of society to an end with a thorough unpar- 
 tisan justice, by exposing to sun and air ranks, families, 
 
 ' Briefe von J. S. Turgenjev, Uebersetzt von H. Buhe, 1886, i. 96 
 and foUowJug, 214 and following.
 
 296 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 tendencies, and races in his great native land. " Virgin 
 Soil " is inferior to the older, larger novels to the extent 
 that here for the first time we feel clearly that the 
 author has lived for a long time out of Russia, making 
 up for the lack of personal observation by reading news- 
 papers and legal reports ; and still this book is the 
 richest and most complete expression of Turgenief's 
 humanity and worldly wisdom, and of his love of free- 
 dom and truth. 
 
 Here, perhaps in the most positive manner, his filial 
 affection for Russia, his appreciation of the Russian 
 youth, is brought to light ; here appears unveiled his 
 vision of its high idealism. It is quite true that every- 
 thing miscarries here. With Turgenief all exertions 
 miscarry ; upon the whole, everything meets with mis- 
 fortune. For the moment only hopelessness rules. The 
 older generation, with the liberalism of Sipjaegin, is 
 once for all given up ; in the younger generation, there 
 is much that is well meant, much is disinterestedly 
 carried into effect, but all is fruitless. Nezhdanof wants 
 to go out among the people, wants to distribute pam- 
 phlets among the peasants. It has the force of a sym- 
 bol that the peasants misunderstand him. They will 
 only drink with him ; and the apostle of the common 
 people is carried home dead-drunk. It was not with- 
 out cause that Nezhdanof had previously finished his 
 poem, "The Sleep," with this picture never to be for- 
 gotten : 
 
 " With a glass of spirit in thy hand, with head leaning 
 against the North Pole, with feet pressed against Cauca- 
 sus, oh, fatherland ! Thus thou sleepest, holy Russia, 
 deeply and soundly and steadily." 
 
 And yet in this last work a future is to be seen in 
 vague, distant outlines. Young women like Marianne
 
 HOSTILITY TO GERMANY. 297 
 
 and Maschiirin, young men like Markelof, like Solomin, 
 like Nezhdanof even, prepared the way for it. 
 
 The last twenty years of his life Turgenief passed 
 alternately in the two countries, Germany and France, 
 to which he was most indebted for his culture. He 
 lived in Baden-Baden and Paris. His relations to Ger- 
 many and France were, however, quite different. Prob- 
 ably on account of ancient Russian tradition, and besides 
 in consequence of the nationality of Mme. Viardot, he 
 was far more closely bound to France than to Germany. 
 He had studied in Berlin, and the criticism of young 
 Hegelianism had refined and stimulated his mind. But, 
 although he worshipped Goethe as the master above all 
 others, and for a while in his youth was wholly absorbed 
 in Heine, although he continued to have friendly rela- 
 tions with German authors and writers like Paul Heyse, 
 Ernst Dohn, and Ludwig Pietsch, spoke the language 
 fluently, and knew how to value the scientific greatness 
 of Germany, in spite of all these bonds binding him 
 to that country, the Germans in his books, as in almost 
 all Russian romances and novels, are continually repre- 
 sented in a highly satirical, and now and then even in 
 a hateful light. It is a weakness of German criticism 
 that it has not been able to see this evident fact. It is 
 true enough, as a general rule, that all nations describe 
 others without enthusiasm. A Russian woman, as drawn 
 by Victor Cherbuliez or Paul Heyse {Ladislaus Bolski, 
 " In Paradise," Das Gliick zu Bothenhurg), never has 
 the good part. But there seems to have been a remnant 
 of national hate at the bottom of Turgenief's soul. 
 
 Although, on the other hand, he did not fail to have 
 an eye to the deficiencies in the French dtilture, he con- 
 ducted himself in an entirely different manner in regard 
 to it. He felt that his art was wholly understood and
 
 298 IMPRESSIONS OF hussia. 
 
 appreciated in that Paris which is otherwise so full of 
 prejudice towards foreigners. He had equally warm 
 admirers among those of the same age as himself 
 (Merimee), those of a little younger generation (Augier, 
 Taine, Flaubert, Goncourt), and among the youngest 
 authors (Zola, Daudet, Maupassant), With that circle 
 of authors of which Flaubert was the centre, he associ- 
 ated on a friendly and brotherly footing as with the 
 writers of no other land. 
 
 His relations to his own country were fluctuating. 
 In his younger days he was popular and then a subject of 
 hatred. It was first seen on his last visit to Russia that 
 the misunderstanding that he should have abandoned 
 the ideals of his youth had given way to a better 
 understanding, and his journey became a kind of trium- 
 phal tour through the ovations which he received from 
 the youth. It is true that these ovations created such 
 uneasiness on the part of the government, that it short- 
 ened his stay in St. Petersburg. ' In Moscow, where 
 Katkof had attacked him as hostile to his fatherland 
 and seditious, a festival had been arranged for him, to 
 which Dostoyevski also was invited, his more recent, 
 spiteful appearance against Turgenief having been over- 
 looked on account of the convictions of his youth and his 
 martyrdom. 
 
 In the mean time, the more the younger generation 
 was reconciled to the author of " Fathers and Sons," and 
 the more warmly he was greeted, the more the dissatis- 
 faction of the Russian government with him increased. 
 This was also very clearly shown at his death. A sol- 
 emn funeral, with his house decorated, a long procession 
 and addresses at the grave were forbidden. In perfect 
 quiet, as if he were a convict, the man was buried who, 
 in these later days, had given the widest reputation to 
 the name of Russia.
 
 HIS MELANCHOLY. 299 
 
 For in the last ten years of his life, at least, he could 
 have rejoiced in an admiration which was equally rever- 
 ential over the whole of the civilized world. 
 
 Did he rejoice at it ? I believe not. It affected him 
 agreeably, but he did not delight in it, and it did not 
 disperse his melancholy. Edmond de Goncourt relates 
 of Turgenief, that at a dinner given by Flaubert, in 
 March, 1872, during a moment of despondency, which 
 sometimes seizes upon a circle of friends who are get- 
 ting on towards old age, he allowed himself to be carried 
 away so far as to say : " You know that there is some- 
 times found in a room an odor of musk which cannot be 
 driven out; so it seems to me that about my person, 
 and that continually, there is a perfume of dissolution, 
 annihilation, death." His last works, the charming and 
 original novel " Clara Militch," which is a variation of 
 the theme of his youth, disappointed love, and his admi- 
 rable collection of prose poems, " Senilia," likewise con- 
 tain a deeper melancholy than the works of his youth, 
 save that a lyrical, fantastic element most poetically 
 flashes through them. Here, for the last time, he stands 
 face to face with the secret of life, and explains it in 
 unceasing sadness in symbols and visions. Nature is 
 hard and cold ; then let man not neglect to love. There 
 is a scene here where Turgenief, on a solitary journey 
 from Hamburg to London, sits by the hour with a 
 poor, cowed, fettered little monkey's hand in his the 
 genius, whose spirit had ransacked the universe, hand 
 in hand with the little anthropoid animal, like two kin- 
 dred mortals, two children of the same mother, there 
 is here more true devotion than in any book of devotion. 
 
 At the last, Turgenief seems to have had a strong 
 impression of man's ingratitude. No one who has read 
 " Senilia " will ever forget " The Feast in Heaven." All
 
 300 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 the virtues were invited, and the virtues only; no men 
 were invited, only ladies. Many virtues came, small 
 and great. The small virtues were more agreeable and 
 more modest than the great ; but all seemed to be 
 well contented and talked kindly to each other, as is 
 becoming for those who are akin. Then the good God 
 observed two beautiful ladies who did not seem to be 
 acquainted with each other. The master of the house 
 took one of the ladies by the hand and led her to the 
 other, and he introduced : Charity Gratitude. 
 
 It was the first time since the creation of the world 
 that the two had met. 
 
 What sadness in the wit and what bitterness ! 
 
 It also occurs to me that my gratitude towards this 
 great benefactor has its first expression when he can no 
 longer be sensible of any thanks.
 
 VI. 
 
 In contrast to the national pessimism in Turgenief 
 stands the national optimism in Dostoyevski, The great 
 sceptic Turgenief, who believed in so little, believed in 
 the culture of Western Europe, Dostoyevski despised, 
 the Occident, and believed in Russia. If the works of 
 Turgenief are, to some extent, to be regarded as emigrant 
 literature, then we stand with Dostoyevski wholly on 
 Russian soil ; he is the autochthonic author, " the true 
 Scythian," the legitimate barbarian without a drop of 
 classic blood in his veins. 
 
 Look at this countenance ! half the face of a Russian 
 peasant, half the physiognomy of a criminal, with flat- 
 tened nose, small, piercing eyes, under eyelashes which 
 tremble with nervousness, long, thick, untidy beard, and 
 light hair ; add to this the forehead of a thinker and a 
 poet, large and shapely, and the expressive mouth, 
 which, even when closed, speaks of tortures without 
 number, of ingulfing sadness, of unhealthy desires, en- 
 during pity, sympathy, passionate envy, anxiety, tor- 
 ture ! Look at this body, which is nothing but nerves, 
 small and slender, round-shouldered, and tenacious of 
 life, from his youth up subject to epileptic fits and hal- 
 lucinations ! This exterior, at first sight plain and vul- 
 gar, on closer examination stamped with weird genius, 
 thoroughly morbid and wholly extraordinary, speaks of 
 Dostoyevski's epileptic genius, of the depths of mildness 
 which filled his soul, of the billows of almost insane 
 acuteness which frequently mounted into his head; 
 
 301
 
 302 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 finally of that ambition which creates greatness in its 
 efforts, and the envy which creates smallness in the 
 soul. 
 
 It is a character which reminds one of Rousseau's, irri- 
 table and suspicious, with fits of depression and the 
 most exalted flights. Although his family belonged to 
 the lower ranks of nobility of Russia, from which the 
 subordinate officials are generally taken, he has, like 
 Rousseau, a thoroughly democratic stamp. Moreover, 
 eten if he is fanatical in his ideas, like Rousseau, he dif- 
 fers from him in his profound spiritual characteristics. 
 Rousseau is a deist, but, in spite of his sentimentality, 
 not a Christian, an enemy of the Christian humility, and 
 of all submission to fate. Dostoyevski, on the contrary, 
 entirely regardless of the fact whether his dogmatic 
 faith was orthodox or not, is in his whole emotional 
 nature the typical Christian. His works constitute a true 
 repertory of characters and conditions of thought con- 
 ceived from a Christian standpoint. All his persons are 
 invalids, sinners or saints, of both sexes, and the transi- 
 tion from sinner to a convert, from fair sinner to fair 
 saint, and from the bodily sick to the spiritually sound, 
 happens, now after a slow purification, and now at a 
 flash, as in the New Testament ; nay, often the fair 
 sinner is at the same time a fair saint, and the great- 
 est criminal just as near being worthy of admiration 
 as he is near being a scoundrel. 
 
 Physiologically and psychologically, all these types of 
 paupers and poor fellows, of the ignorant good-hearted, 
 of the simple emotional, of noble Magdalens, of the ner- 
 vously distracted, of those seized with frequent halluci- 
 nations, of gifted epileptics, of enthusiastic seekers after 
 martyrdom, are just the same types as prevailed centu- 
 ries ago.
 
 DOSTOYEVSKL 303 
 
 Feodor Mikhailovitch Dostoyevski was born in Octo- 
 ber, 1821, in a hospital for the poor, in Moscow, where 
 his father was physician. There was a large family of 
 children, and small means. Feodor and his brother 
 Aleksei, to whom he was bound through life by an inti- 
 mate friendship and common literary interests, were 
 sent to the military school for engineers in St. Peters- 
 burg, and left it as sub-lieutenants. But, after the 
 lapse of a year (1844), Feodor asked for his discharge 
 from the military service, to devote himself to literature. 
 He was even then suffering from the disease which was 
 aggravated when he was subsequently whipped in Sibe- 
 ria ; he had epileptic fits, and moreover he was vision- 
 ary. With regard to the subjects which he treated later, 
 and his ability to express the psychology of crime, this 
 saying of his to a friend is characteristic : " The dejec- 
 tion which succeeds my epileptic attacks has this char- 
 acteristic, I feel like a great criminal ; it comes over 
 me like an unknown fault ; a criminally guilty deed 
 weighs upon my conscience." 
 
 At the age of twenty-four he wrote his novel " Poor 
 Folk." Towards the close of his life, in the " Diary of 
 an Author " he related the circumstances of his first ap- 
 pearance as an author. When he had written his novel, 
 and did not know how he should get his manuscript dis- 
 posed of, he got one of his friends, the subsequently 
 well-known author Grigordvitch, to take it to the poet 
 Niekrasof. About three o'clock in the morning, Dos- 
 toyevski heard some one knock at his door. It was 
 Grigordvitch, who had come back with Niekrasof, who 
 had already read the novel, and was so struck by it that 
 he felt an impulse immediately to press the author to 
 his heart. When early the next morning he left Dos- 
 toyevski, he went with the manuscript straight to
 
 304 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 Byelinski, " the oracle of Russian thought, the critic 
 whose bare name frightened debutants." "A new 
 Gogol has arisen," shouted Niekrasof, as he broke in 
 through the door. " Certainly, they shoot up nowadays 
 like toadstools," answered Byelinski, fretfully, and re- 
 luctantly looked into the manuscript. But the effect on 
 liim was the same as on Niekrasof. When the author 
 visited him, he said to him enthusiastically : " Young as 
 you are, do you yourself understand how true it is what 
 you have written ? I don't think so. But true artistic 
 inspiration is there. Respect the gifts you possess, and 
 you will become a great author." 
 
 In order to understand this astonishment and this 
 enthusiasm, we must remember that the Russian litera- 
 ture even now does not possess a single attempt of this 
 kind except Gogol's " Cloak," and that Turgenief's 
 " Recollections of a Huntsman " did not appear till live 
 years later. When a month or two after Byelinski's con- 
 versation with Dostoyevski "Poor Folk" (1846) issued 
 from the press, the author's literary reputation was at 
 once established. 
 
 The uneasiness and versatility of his nature is dis- 
 played in the circumstance that though he had made his 
 debut in a direction which is like that into which 
 Dickens struck a little earlier, he continued his career 
 with worthless and comic novels in Paul de Kock's 
 manner. 
 
 He was an inordinate reader at an early day. At the 
 age of twelve he had already ploughed through Karamzin 
 and Walter Scott, histories and historical novels by the 
 quantity. Reading exhausted him, nervous, irritable, 
 timid, emotional, precocious as he was, and with an un- 
 usual gift of placing himself in the imagined situation. 
 In the School for Engineers, he read Balzac with special
 
 HIS ARREST FOR FOURIERISM. 305 
 
 zeal, being carried away by "Pere Goriot," which in its 
 whole intellectual character furnishes one of the theories 
 of his own novels, and translated " Eugenie Grandet," 
 occupied himself in addition very much Avith George 
 Sand and Eugene Sue, Dickens and Hoffman, the influ- 
 ence of all of whom is perceptible in his works. In this 
 first period of his youth Dostoyevski was still a prey to 
 varied influences. 
 
 He has himself told in his later years how Byelinski 
 at the close of the forties drew him on to socialism, and, 
 as he called it, tried to convert him to atheism. The 
 same hatred and the same ingratitude towards the men 
 who influenced his youth, Herzen, Byelinski, and others, 
 which found its expression in the novel " The Demons " 
 is shown in this bitter and poisonous attempt to cast the 
 blame of his youthful conviction upon a man who is 
 dead. We must remember that it is an old re-actionist 
 who speaks, and in his defence consider that Dostoyevski 
 was a man abused by life. 
 
 On the 23d of April, 1849, at five o'clock in the morn- 
 ing, he, together with thirty-three other young men, was 
 arrested. 
 
 He had then for some time continuously belonged to 
 the circle which had established itself around a certain 
 Petrasheyski, an adherent of the system of Fourier ; in 
 the meetings of this circle the talk had been loud and 
 imprudent. The leader was a genuine Fourierist, an 
 enemy of gods and kings, an opponent of marriage and 
 property in the predominant forms. The indictment of 
 Dostoyevski himself was to this effect : Participation in 
 the meetings of the circle, observations about the strict- 
 ness of the censorship, reading or listening to the read- 
 ing of prohibited pamphlets, and finally promises of 
 possible aid in the establishment of a printing-office.
 
 306 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 The accused were taken to the castle and isolated in 
 the casemates. They were there eight months without 
 any other amusements than their examinations by the 
 magistrate. It was not until towards the end of their 
 time of imprisonment that they were furnished with 
 some books of devotion. The poor poet, who was re- 
 duced to the necessity of communing with his own 
 thoughts alone, felt as if he had been under an air 
 pump. 
 
 December 22, twenty-one of the accused who had 
 been found guilty were taken out to Semenovski Place, 
 where a scaffold had been erected. With the thermometer 
 at 15 Fahr. they were compelled to strip to their shirts 
 to listen to the reading of the sentence. This reading oc- 
 cupied a half-hour. When it began the perpetually opti- 
 mistic Dostoyevski turned to his neighbor and said : 
 " Can it be possible that they are going to execute us ? " 
 Instead of answering, the person to whom the inquiry 
 was addressed pointed to some objects, which were con- 
 cealed under the coverings of the wagons and which 
 looked like coffins. The sentence ended with the words, 
 "... are condemned to be shot." A priest with a 
 crucifix in his hand now came forward and urged the 
 prisoners to confess. They refused with a single excep- 
 tion. They then fastened Petrashevski and two others 
 of the leaders to the stake. An officer directed his com- 
 pany to load their guns and wait for the word of com- 
 mand. At this moment a white flag was waved and it 
 was announced to the condemned that the Tsar had com- 
 muted their punishment. At the foot of the scaffold 
 sledges were waiting which were to carry them to Siberia. 
 Dostoyevski was sentenced to ten years hard labor. But 
 his punishment was changed later to four years in the 
 house of correction, and four years service as a soldier in
 
 TTIE EFFECT OF HIS EXILE. 807 
 
 the ranks with loss of his rank as a noble and his rights 
 as a citizen. In Tobolsk the ways of the prisoners sepa- 
 rated ; they said farewell to each other. Their feet were 
 fettered, their heads shaved, and they were sent to their 
 several places of destination.^ 
 
 What Dostoyevski saw, felt, lived through, and suf- 
 fered in the Siberian House of Correction among the 
 dregs of the world, the poor creatures, the ignorant and 
 the barbarous, the criminals and the desperate, that he 
 has indirectly told the world in his " Recollections of a 
 Dead House," one of the greatest masterpieces descrip- 
 tively and psychologically, which any literature has to 
 show. If he had written it in his OAvn name, and spoken 
 of his crime as political, the book would never have 
 passed the censor. Therefore an imaginary narrator is 
 found, who in a moment of passion has committed a com- 
 mon crime, and to whose account the observations are 
 placed. What Dostoyevski does not tell is that he him- 
 self was the subject of the horrible corporal punishments 
 which he describes. 
 
 From 1849 to 1859 Dostoyevski was wholly dead to 
 literature. 
 
 At the age of thirty-seven he returned home from 
 Siberia with his nervous system wholly destroyed. A 
 great change had taken place in him. In the four years 
 he had passed in the workhouse, he had only one single 
 book Avith him, the New Testament, and he had read it 
 again and again. All revolt was quenched in his soul. It 
 was not simply that he saw with how little knowledge of 
 men he had wished to reform the world, and how little 
 this abstract idealism availed ; bat for once and all he 
 had become meek and humble, obedient and submissive. 
 He found his punishment just ; nay, even more, he was 
 1 De Vogue: Le Roman Russe, p. 218 and following.
 
 308 IMPEESSIONS OF BUSSIA. 
 
 grateful to the Tsar Nicholas for it. He imagined that 
 without it he would have become insane 5 thought that 
 the secret horror he always felt at the approach of dark- 
 ness, under normal conditions would have deprived him 
 of his reason ; now it deprived real sufferings of their 
 power. 
 
 In the next place he had obtained a thorough knowl- 
 edge of the inner life of the Russian people. His fate 
 had opened to him an insight into that which is generally 
 regarded as the sewer of humanity ; and there he found 
 in every one, even in those who had sunken the deep- 
 est, something of value in spite of all their depravity. 
 At the same time that he had lost all faith in the use or 
 possibility of a political revolution, he had found the 
 faith in a moral revolution, starting from the bottom, in 
 the spirit of the gospel. Thus he returned as the phi- 
 lanthropist among the Russian authors, as the author 
 of the helpless pariahs. It has somewhere been justly 
 said that what Wilberforce was in the English Parlia- 
 ment for the negro, he became in the Russian litera- 
 ture for the proletariats, that is, their spokesman. 
 As an artist he is true enough not to embellish the 
 pariah ; as a poet he is visionary enough to proclaim the 
 presence of " a divine spark," even among the wretched. 
 Nay more, the morality he preaches is, perhaps, the 
 purest expression of the morality of the pariah, of 
 the morality of the slave. 
 
 We are indebted to the philosopher Frederick 
 Nietzsche for the establishment of the real and Avide 
 contrast between the morality of gentlemen and the 
 morality of slaves. The expressions originate with 
 him. By the morality of gentlemen is meant all that 
 morality which emanates from self-esteem, positive ani- 
 mal spirits : the morality of Rome, of Iceland, of the
 
 HIS MORAL STANDARD. Sl09 
 
 renaissance ; by the morality of the slave, all that 
 morality which proceeds from contact with wretched- 
 ness as the highest virtue, from the denial of life, from 
 the hatred for the happy and the strong. 
 
 This continual praising of the unselfish, self-sacrificing 
 person, as contrasted to that person who lays all his 
 strength on self-preservation, self-development, and de- 
 velopment of power, does not by any means spring from 
 a spirit of unselfishness. The neighbor commends un- 
 selfishness because he has the profit of it. If he thought 
 himself unselfish, he would reject all that which would 
 be to his advantage. Herein lies the fundamental con- 
 tradiction of this morality, that the motive for it is in 
 conflict with its principles. It is proclaimed for the 
 advantage of the unsuccessful men, and generally has 
 no more zealous or ardent advocates than that kind of 
 unsuccessful men who do not have enough independent 
 spiritual life to be able to live in the world of their 
 own ideas, but do have so-called culture enough to suffer 
 under it, and whose existence is at heart envy. What- 
 ever qualities and culture such men have are strength- 
 ened by anguish; they live in a constant longing for 
 vengeance on those whom they think are happy. 
 
 Dostoyevski developed into a colossal example of this 
 type. With the worst ill-treatment of his life behind 
 him, and noAv poor, soon in debt, and in continual end- 
 less debt, dependent on publishers, whose advances fur- 
 nish him his means of subsistence, he is to begin anew 
 to make his way into literature. 
 
 The first book which he wrote after his return from 
 Siberia, " The Injured and Oppressed," does not belong 
 to his best works, but it contains characters of which his 
 first book had already given a hint, and which re-appear 
 later. He had brought back with him from Siberia a
 
 310 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 young wife with whom he had fallen in love, the widow 
 of one of the adherents of Petrashevski, who had died in 
 prison. But she for her part was in love with another 
 man ; and Dostoyevski's letters show how for a wholer 
 year he labored to unite her to his rival, and set his 
 friends to work to remove the obstacles out of the way 
 of their union. Nevertheless, it ended in the marriage of 
 her to Dostoyevski. 
 
 This is the reality which underlies the occurrences 
 in "The Injured and Oppressed," in which the charac- 
 ters who remind one of Dickens do not, however, make 
 any very deep impression. 
 
 He plunged into journalism, which during his whole 
 life had a fascination for him, and on which he wasted 
 much time and force. He became a contributor to the 
 Slavophile newspapers published by his brother Mikhail, 
 first "The Times," then "The Epoch," and preached 
 the love and admiration for Russia " which cannot be 
 understood by reason, but which is a matter of faith." 
 
 In 1865 he loses his first wife and his brother Aleksei. 
 Mikhail's second newspaper is a failure, and he flies 
 from the country to escape from his creditors. He does 
 not enjoy the journey which he makes through Ger- 
 many, France, and Italy. He continually has epileptic 
 fits, and is obliged to return home to obtain new ad- 
 vances from his publishers, which they, it is true, con- 
 cede to him, but only on the most unfavorable conditions. 
 He brings back only one solitary strong impression 
 from his travels, that of an execution to which he had 
 been a witness in Lyons. This recalled to him the 
 moment in his life in which he felt the greatest horror, 
 and of which the recollection is continually coming back 
 in his novels : that morning hour on the scaffold, Decem- 
 ber 22, 1849.
 
 "CHIME AND PUNISHMENT." 311 
 
 In 1862 he made a strong impression on the reading 
 world by his " Recollections of a Dead House." In 
 1866 he made the greatest impression of his life in 
 " Crime and Punishment " {Prestuplenie l Nakazanie). 
 Hardly any other work has contributed so much to the 
 psychology of the Eussia of that time. What the book 
 describes is only apparently something special ; in real- 
 ity, it unveils a great picture of society. 
 
 The problem of the book in a more limited sense is 
 one which the most thoughtful minds have struggled 
 with ; the two apparently contradictory estimates which 
 society places upon the value of human life. Bismarck 
 has cleverly discussed this subject in his speeches.-^ 
 It occupied the author of this book, Avhen several 
 years ago in Berlin a woman who was more than 
 eighty-two years old was murdered by one of the many 
 lovers whom she had won by her presents.^ The prob- 
 lem was this ; Has human life absolute value ? Why 
 does modern society answer this question in the most 
 contradictory manner? It punishes with the severest 
 penalty the murder by the mother of the new-born 
 child without regard to the fact that she for fear of 
 shame or of want inflicts upon herself a far greater 
 loss and a far greater pain than she inflicts upon 
 society; nay, it punishes her even if the motive of 
 her act was to free the child from all the misery in 
 store for it. Society demands that tlie full cup of 
 earthly misfortune shall be poured out upon the little 
 being's head. But society does not oppose the estab- 
 lishment of manufactories, the operation of which 
 entails sickness and often death among the workmen, 
 nay, even regards the founder of such a manufactory 
 
 1 Gesammelte Reden des Fursten Bismarck (by Hahn), i. 895. 
 
 2 See G. Brandes: Berliu, p. 303 and followiug.
 
 312 IMPBESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 in a quarter destitute of industrial pursuits as a bene- 
 factor. 
 
 The one who in Dostoyevski's work struggles with 
 this problem is Raskolnikof, a young Russian student, 
 unusually good-looking, with fine features, and expres- 
 sive black eyes, eminently gifted, but poor, as only a 
 Russian student is poor, plunged in the deepest poverty, 
 clad in rags, with a hat which cannot be seen without 
 awakening laughter. He has given up his studies on 
 account of his poverty, has tried in vain to support him- 
 self, has let himself go to ruiu. He is reserved, gruif, 
 suspicious, and hypochondriacal ; he is proud, but also 
 high-minded and good ; he very reluctantly betrays his 
 feelings. He is ambitious, with a tendency to boldness, 
 but often so despondent that he seems to be cold and 
 without sensibility to the degree of inhumanity. He is 
 melancholy by nature, sombre and passionate, arrogant 
 and magnanimous, sorrowful over the unhappy condi- 
 tion of the human race, with a constantly burning desire 
 to be a benefactor on a grand scale. At bottom he is 
 without ability. According to the opinion of the 
 author, that is generally the case in Russia, where 
 all wish to become suddenly rich without toil or 
 trouble, and where every one is accustomed to have 
 that which is generally attained brought to him all 
 ready, accustomed to be led about in leading-strings, 
 accustomed to get all the intellectual nutriment after 
 it has been masticated by others. Capacity does not 
 fall down from heaven, and for almost two centuries 
 the people have been weaned from every public activity. 
 
 Even if Raskolnikof was melancholy from the first, 
 poverty creates new melancholy in him. His wretched 
 room is enough to cast an uninternipted gloom over him. 
 The low, small room contracts his whole soul. He can-
 
 THE GERM OF THE CRIME. 313 
 
 not pay his rent and is frequently hungry. In the long 
 winter evenings he has no light and lies in the dark, and 
 at last does not even try to get a light; on his table his 
 college text-books are covered with thick dust. He 
 dreams, dreams continually. . . . 
 
 He dreams of a horrible old pawnbroker-woman, very 
 rich and miserly, from whom he has had a loan now and 
 then, and of a conversation about her to which he had 
 once listened in a restaurant. A student sitting there 
 said : " I should like to kill the old crone and sack her, 
 and I assure you that I could do it without the least sting 
 of conscience." He said it indeed as a joke, but con- 
 tinued seriously : " On the one hand, a stupid, Avretched, 
 malicious old crone, who not only never gives anything 
 away, but does harm to everybody she comes in contact 
 with ; on the other hand, fresh, young powers, who fail 
 for want of means of support, and that by the thousands ; 
 hundreds, perhaps thousands of existences, which might 
 be brought on the right path, dozens of families which 
 could be saved from wretchedness, from debauchery, 
 from loathsome disease, all for the money of this old 
 crone. . . . And, after all, what weight on the universal 
 scales of life has the life of this swindling, stupid, 
 malicious crone ? Not more than a louse's life or a cock- 
 roach's, and not even so much, for the old woman does 
 much more harm, for she undermines the life of others." 
 
 The words take root in Kaskolnikof's mind, just be- 
 cause the same thought is ready to be developed in his 
 head, peeps forth from his brain like a chicken from the 
 shell, and especially because to his own wretchedness is 
 added that of others who are dearest to him. His old 
 mother, who is living in her country village on an annuity 
 of one hundred and twenty rubles a year, and who by 
 knitting and embroidery, which is spoiling her poor
 
 314 IMPBESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 eyes, earns twenty rubles a year more, sends him a 
 letter, from whose kind, considerate expressions he 
 learns that his only dearly loved sister, proud and beauti- 
 ful as she is, is about to offer up herself on the altar of 
 a detested marriage in order to be able to keep him at 
 the university and support her mother in her old age. 
 He starts up against it, he kicks against the pricks, he 
 will forbid his pure sister from entering into this hor- 
 rible marriage. But what right has he to forbid it ? 
 How can he prevent it ? What can he offer her instead ? 
 To devote to her and their mother his whole future, 
 when he has first completed his studies and obtained a 
 position ! In ten years perhaps ! But by that time his 
 mother will be blind or dead from fasting or consump- 
 tion, and by that time his sister will be . . . what can- 
 not happen in ten years ! 
 
 He had early formed a theory of his own about crime, 
 that the extraordinary man has the right, not the official 
 right, but one which his conscience gives him, to over- 
 step certain obstacles and barriers which circumscribe 
 other men ; only, hoAvever, in the case that his idea, an 
 idea which looks towards the happiness of mankind, 
 demands such a step. If men like Kepler and Newton 
 could in no way have made their discoveries available 
 to the world without the taking of human life, which put 
 obstacles in the way of these discoveries, then they 
 would have had the right, nay, it would have been their 
 duty, to take that human life. Experience teaches him 
 that almost all the lawgivers and reformers of humanity, 
 from the oldest down to Lycurgus, Solon, Mahomet, 
 Napoleon, have been criminals, from the very fact 
 that they have created a new law and set aside the old, 
 which was regarded by society as holy and had been 
 handed down from their ancestors, and that they had not
 
 ITS DEVELOPMENT. 315 
 
 shrunk from tlie shedding of blood, and that even very 
 often entirely innocent blood, which was offered up with 
 heroic courage for the defence of the old law. The 
 masses do not recognize the right of such men, they 
 execute or hang them when they can compass it, but the 
 coming generations place these executed men on ped- 
 estals and show them honor. And is not he himself 
 such an exceptional man ? 
 
 But his whole being is roused against the act. It is 
 altogether too shameful, far too disgusting. To kill a 
 little old woman with an axe ! All his pride, all the 
 nobility in his nature, shrinks and groans. 
 
 Still the days roll on and there is no other way out; 
 slowly, slowly he becomes familiar with the idea; by 
 the strangest accident he learns a time when the old 
 woman on a certain evening will be alone . . . it is as if 
 a corner of his coat had been caught on the wheel of a 
 machine, which winds him in with it, and with a com- 
 mingling of determined resolution and child-like reck- 
 lessness, in a moment of crime, he accomplishes the 
 murder and still another murder; for her sister, a 
 simple and good old being, comes in just as Raskolnikof 
 has begun to investigate the drawers and chests of his 
 victim, and he strikes her down with another blow. 
 
 But he was not equal to the task, or too nobly consti- 
 tuted for the misdeed, just as you may regard it. He 
 can commit murder in a somnambulistic insanity, but he 
 does not know how to steal. He only appropriates one 
 or two worthless things ; with the greatest difficulty lie 
 escapes the fate of being arrested on the spot, and now 
 begins that period of his life when he is in no condition 
 to do anything else than brood over his misdeed. He 
 obliterates all material traces of it ; but he is absorbed 
 in the thought of concealing it, and betrays himself inad-
 
 316 IMPBESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 vertently more every day which passes, to those who 
 are seeking for the perpetrator of the crime. That, 
 however, is not the chief thing ; no discovery from with- 
 out annihilates him, but an inner one, that he is not one 
 of those chosen, exceptional natures to whom everything 
 is allowed. After having committed his crime, he is no 
 longer able to raise himself to the height from which he 
 regarded it before it was accomplished. He is consumed 
 by inches. "No," he says to himself, "these men whom 
 we admire are not constituted as I am. The true ruler, 
 to whom everything is allowed, lays Toulon waste, estab- 
 lishes his power in Paris by the bayonet, forgets an 
 army in Egypt, sacrifices a half a million of men on a 
 campaign to Moscow, then makes a pun in Vilno about 
 it, and after his death he is idolized. Such men must 
 be of iron, not of flesh and blood." And a collateral 
 idea almost makes him smile : " Napoleon, the Pyramids, 
 Waterloo and a disgusting, little usury practising old 
 crone, with a red-strapped trunk under her bed. Would 
 a Napoleon ever creep in under the bed of such an old 
 crone ? . . . Insanity." 
 
 He is not sorry for the murder of the old woman ; he 
 continues to regard her life as a useless one, her death 
 as an indifferent, almost a beneficial act. The old 
 woman is, and continues to be, a secondary matter ; he 
 would only by killing her bring a principle to life, kills 
 not a human being, but a prejudice, and strides over the 
 chasm which separates the every-day souls who possess 
 the vulgar faiths from the host of the elect. He has 
 killed the prejudice, but he remains just the same stand- 
 ing on this side of the chasm. He is excessively 
 wretched, more wretched than ever before. 
 
 He has not done anything bad. He only wished not 
 to be obliged to pass by his starving mother and keep
 
 A PERIOD OF DOUBT. 317 
 
 her rubles in his pocket. And how conscientiously has 
 he not acted ! He assured himself first by a careful self- 
 examination, that he would not overstep the barriers to 
 satisfy sensuous impulses, but for the sake of a great 
 object; so he himself selected, among all "the useless 
 lice," the most useless of all, and finally determined, 
 although he killed the woman, to take only so much as 
 was absolutely necessary for the object nearest to him. 
 
 But it is not the old woman he has killed ; it was him- 
 self, his own ef/o. His deed has grown up far above his 
 head; it has isolated him completely, thrown him 
 wholly back into himself. The secret gnaws him to 
 insanity, and the agony of being himself " a louse," like 
 all the others, paralyzes him. 
 
 Scarcely had he committed the murder before he 
 began to feel lonesome, strange to himself, and doomed 
 to everlasting dumbness. He it is who will nevermore 
 be able to talk with others. Soon after, he is tormented 
 by an insane impulse to disclose himself, to tell all 
 himself. He prefers immediately to throw all that he 
 has taken into the canal; he has no idea of using it, 
 conceals it under a stone in a building-lot. He does not 
 himself understand Avliat has happened to him ; but he 
 has been separated from his past, as if by the clip of 
 a pair of scissors. There comes a moment when he 
 almost jumps into the water, to make an end of all. 
 On his associates he makes the impression of a madman. 
 But he falls in with human wretchedness in its worst 
 form a drunkard who dies ; a consumptive widow with 
 a nest full of children, without bread ; a noble young 
 girl who has been compelled to sell herself to get food 
 for her little brothers and sisters ; and the need of 
 showing generosity, of helping, restores to him, for a 
 short time, faith in life. Still, this short rise is followed
 
 318 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 by new pangs. The thought whether the others did not 
 know everything tortures him, so that he plays an en- 
 tirely useless comedy when, towards certain people, he 
 acts as if nothing was the matter. And really there are 
 some who are on the track ; one who has suspected 
 everything and completely sees through him, and he is 
 a genius of a jurist, an examining magistrate. Still 
 Raskolnikof is neither arrested nor examined ; no, what 
 at last opens his lips and compels him to surrender him- 
 self is a purely inward, spiritual movement. Long be- 
 fore it gains the mastery, it presents itself to him, as 
 the moment approaches when he must disclose himself, 
 and he even draws a parallel of the feelings of the 
 advent of this moment with his earlier perception of 
 the necessity that the hour was come for murdering the 
 old woman. Yet this feeling is continually crossed by 
 the feeling of growing hate towards the whole world 
 about him ; he feels a murderous hatred towards those 
 m regard to whom he suspects or feels that they know 
 his secret. When, in his solitary ponderings, he puts to 
 himself the questions what, under these or those given 
 circumstances, he shall do in order not to be trapped, the 
 outburst, " Then I shall kill him," is the constant answer 
 to all such questions that arise. Nay, at last, he discov- 
 ers, with horror, that even of his mother and sisters, 
 who have always been so dear to him, he thinks now 
 and then with a feeling of hate. 
 
 And this hatred and all this anguish have their root 
 in love. If only he had not loved so much, all this would 
 not have liappened. 
 
 If his soul had been barren, if he had not been bold, 
 magnanimous and earnest, he would never have become 
 a murderer. During this horrible time he feels more and 
 more drawn towards the young girl who has been named
 
 GROWTH OF REPENTANCE. 319 
 
 before, and who has fallen on account of her love for her 
 little brothers and sisters. By her most strenuous exer- 
 tions she could not earn what was necessary by her 
 daily wages, and her own mother had driven her out 
 into the street. Pity had brought him into relations 
 with her, admiration for the nobility and purity of her 
 being brings him to seek her out, for not a drop of real 
 unchastity has as yet entered into her heart. He honors 
 the one despised by the world. She also has " over- 
 stepped the barriers," she also has laid her hand upon a 
 human life, her own, has sacrificed herself and sacrificed 
 herself uselessly ; but she stands spiritually high above 
 him. Little by little she becomes his conscience. One 
 day, when he has looked for a long time silently into her 
 tearful face, he throws himself down before her and 
 kisses her feet. 
 
 " What are you doing ? What are you doing ? That 
 to me ? " 
 
 He answers : " Not to you did I bow down I bowed 
 down to the total suffering of the human race." 
 
 It is Sonya's prayer that he shall himself confess his 
 guilt, " take his martyrdom upon himself ; " she will 
 never leave him, will accompany him in his exile to 
 Siberia as an inmate of the House of Correction. He 
 hesitates a long time. His sister also urges him to sur- 
 render himself : she sees in tliis step his only salvation 
 from the self-consumption into which he has fallen. But 
 when she uses the word crime, he becomes excited. 
 " That I have killed a disgusting, mischievous louse, an 
 usurious old crone, for whose death one- ought to be 
 forgiven forty sins, a creature that sucked the blood 
 out of poor folk, that a crime!" "Thou hast shed 
 blood!" breaks in the sister amazed. "Blood!" answers 
 Easkolnikof. "All shed it it flows and has always
 
 320 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 flowed on the earth in streams, it is poured out like 
 champagne, and people are crowned for it on the Capitol 
 and then called the benefactors of mankind I myself 
 only wished for the good and would have done a hun- 
 dred thousand good deeds for this one blunder, and it 
 was not even a blunder, only a clumsy act. By this 
 blunder all I wanted was to put myself in an independent 
 position, make the first step, and then all this would 
 have been compensated by a proportionally large useful- 
 ness. But I have not been able to take the first step, 
 because I am a milksop ! That is the whole of it." 
 
 Still, in the long run, Sonya is stronger than he. He 
 cannot withstand the prayer of the strong woman in all 
 its humility and unworthiness, to make his deed known, 
 and the novel ends with Easkolnikof's self-accusation at 
 the police-office : " It was I who murdered the old regis- 
 ter's widow and her sister witli an axe and then plun- 
 dered their property ! " 
 
 In this story Dostoyevski has plainly intended to give 
 a picture of the times. " What is before us here," says 
 the examining magistrate Porfyrius to the hero, in the 
 third part of the book, " is, evidently enough, a fantastic, 
 tragical product of the new tendency of the times ; it is 
 a deed which only the present time could bring forth, 
 the time in which it is a custom to repress one's feelings 
 and to give utterance to phrases like this : that blood 
 operates refreshing ; that is a fantasy which comes from 
 books ; it is a heart which is spasmodically overstrained 
 by theories ; it is a determination which leads to crimes 
 as if strange feet carried him thither." The author 
 evidently has political ferments in view, althougli he 
 takes care not to say a single word directly about poli- 
 tics. There is undoubtedly contained in it an allusion 
 to the murder of the Tsar. " Still it is well," Porfyrius
 
 A SYMBOLICAL DREAM. 321 
 
 says to Easkolnikof, "that it was only sucli a -wretched 
 old woman whom you killed ; if, on the other hand, your 
 theory had taken another direction, then your misdeed 
 might have been a hundred million times more fright- 
 ful." And indirectly, through a dream which Easkolni- 
 kof has, while he is brooding over thoughts of murder 
 and is frightened at it, there is a description, which, it 
 is true, is not anywhere pointed directly at the Russian 
 people, but which undoubtedly is a symbol of the most 
 sombre representation of the situation. The hero sees 
 in his dream a miserable, emaciated, light brown peas- 
 ant-horse, harnessed to a very large, heavy wagon, which 
 it cannot possibly draw ; but the horse is whipped again 
 and again by the rough owner of the wagon, without 
 mercy, over the muzzle, over the eyes, first with one 
 whip and then with three at a time ; the horse groans 
 and puffs, can scarcely breathe, pulls, stops, tries to pull 
 again, cannot escape from the storm of blows, and at 
 last begins, to the general laughter of the men, to kick 
 back. The horse is whipped again while some beat 
 on a drum in addition, one sings a shameless song, and a 
 woman contentedly cracks nuts is whipped over the 
 muzzle and over the eyes. When even several heavy 
 blows with a wagon pole over the back are not able to 
 drive the horse forward, the owner seizes a great iron 
 bar and gives the horse a blow with that. The horse 
 tries for the last time to pull, then falls down on the 
 ground and breathes his last. When the social condition 
 is of the kind described here symbolically, it is no 
 wonder that sanguinary thoughts spring up in the minds 
 of the youth. 
 
 Even if it is not a political crime which Dostoyevski 
 has represented, it is a crime which has this in common 
 with the political, that it is not mean, was not committed
 
 322 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 for the vulgar, low object of procuring for the perpe- 
 trator greater personal profit, but was in a certain degree 
 unselfish, and, what is most important above all, it was 
 committed by a person who at the moment of the crime 
 does not harbor a doubt as to his right. In the mean 
 time, if we compare the men and women whom in recent 
 years we have seen sentenced in Kussia for intent to 
 commit murder, and not less those who have beeh 
 executed as accessories to the assassination of the Tsar 
 with this homicide, then the contrast is striking. Those 
 persons were not in any way ruined by the spiritual 
 consequences of their deed ; they had as conspirators in 
 and after the moment of the murder been in full accord 
 with their inmost being ; their conviction continued to 
 be unshaken and unmoved to the last. If they had 
 escaped detection, in all probability they would have 
 lived to the end of their lives Avithout any other than 
 peaceful and proud thoughts about their attempts at the 
 murder of a being whose extermination they regarded 
 as a good deed, nay, as a duty. Kaskolnikof, on the 
 other hand, is destroyed by the consequences of the 
 murder. 
 
 Like the political criminals, he started from a certain 
 fixed principle, which, it is true, is not mentioned in the 
 book, but which, nevertheless, lies at the foundation of 
 his way of proceeding, that the end justifies the means. 
 
 This principle, which simplicity has misunderstood 
 and Jesuitism has misused, is exactly and literally sound. 
 The word "justifies" indicates that a good, valuable end 
 is meant. He has a good, valuable end who would 
 maintain or produce results of real value. 
 
 Suppose that one could obtain his good end only by 
 inflicting suffering, and suppose that this suffering is 
 less than that which will be produced if he avoids
 
 THE END JUSTIFIES THE MEANS. 323 
 
 making use of the means. Suppose, for example, that 
 a man wishes the good of his fellow-citizens, and can 
 arrive at his end only by removing a single man (it may 
 be one who is infected with a contagious disease, or a 
 tyrant), then his act is deserving of honor, if of two 
 evils one or the other of which must necessarily be 
 incurred he chooses the lesser. The objection which 
 lies near to this, that he cannot foresee the results of 
 his act, signifies nothing, because the morality depends 
 upon the intent and not upon the result. In our daily 
 life no one entertains any doubt as to the soundness of 
 the principle ; we are quite familiar with the idea that 
 there are no absolute duties. Society teaches : Thou 
 must not kill, but adds : Except where your fatherland 
 (the good end) demands it, for then it becomes not only 
 allowable, but a duty, to kill the largest possible number 
 of enemies. Society teaches : It is a bad act to cut off 
 the arms or legs of another, but adds : when the physi- 
 cian amputates an arm or a leg to save the life of the 
 sick or wounded, then the good end justifies the means. 
 
 In order that the principle shall be applicable, the fol- 
 lowing conditions must be fulfilled : The end must be 
 good. The end must be such that it cannot be attained 
 by any other means than those which inflict the pain, 
 nor even by means which inflict less pain than those 
 which are employed. The suffering which is used as a 
 means must be less than that which would exist without 
 the use of the means. With regard to all these points, 
 the typical Russian terrorist, before as well as after his 
 onslaught upon the course of events, would be without 
 any concern whatever. Why, then, was Raskolnikof not 
 so also ? 
 
 Although Dostoyevski undoubtedly was not in the 
 least degree partial to political terrorists, since even
 
 324 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 political progressionists were hateful to him, he has 
 manifested on this point an extraordinary discrimina- 
 tion. He does not particularly deny the justice of Eas- 
 kolnikof's reasoning, but shows that he is confused as to 
 his end, uncertain if it is really good or not. In desper- 
 ation he says to Sony a, a month after the deed, that he 
 has continually been uncertain. When he examines him- 
 self he finds that in fact he has not committed murder to 
 support his mother nor to become a benefactor of man- 
 kind, but in order to find out if he like the others was a 
 "louse," not a man, that is, if he was in a position to 
 overstep the barriers or not. He is uncertain about his 
 end and uncertain about his iuAvard authority to pursue 
 this indefinite end, which, according to his own theory, 
 only the elect are at liberty to use all means to attain. 
 When he for a whole day has tortured himself with 
 the question whether Napoleon would have done such 
 an act, he already felt dimly that he was not a 
 Napoleon. 
 
 Therefore he was wholly overwhelmed by the conse- 
 quences of the deed. He wished only to kill an old 
 monster ; but that was hardly done before necessity com- 
 pelled him, to escape detection, to kill a poor, kindly 
 being who had never done harm to any mortal, nay, had 
 continually been a sacrifice for others. Since then he 
 has even been obliged to recognize Lisavieta's spiritual 
 kinship to Sonya, whom ho respects so greatly. He 
 says somewhere, "Oh, how I hate this wretched old 
 woman ! I believe I could strike her down once more 
 if she awakened to life. But the poor Lisavieta ! Why 
 must she come in ! Strange that I almost not at all 
 think of her, just as if I had not killed her ! Lisavieta ! 
 Sonya ! ... Ye poor things, ye mild women with timid 
 eyes, ... ye dear women, . . . why do ye not weep ?
 
 haskolnikof's conversion. 325 
 
 why do ye not groan ? . . . They sacrifice everything 
 with their mild and quiet looks." 
 
 Yet far more than the murder of Lisavieta, which had 
 not been wished for, the fear of being arrested tortured 
 him, and the system of dissimulation and denial and 
 lying, in which he involves himself. His reason is not 
 solid enough to endure it, and, until he confesses, he is 
 continually on the verge of insanity. In an epilogue 
 which takes place in Siberia, Dostoyevski then suffers 
 Raskolnikof's defiant and yet troubled nature to be at 
 once dissolved in tenderness and strengthened in spirit 
 by the faithful, enduring love of Sonya. Raskolnikof 
 is an "infidel," but Sonya a believer. Even before 
 Raskolnikof has recognized his guilt, there is an affect- 
 ing scene where Sonya reads aloud to him from the New 
 Testament, a scene where a tallow candle in the bat- 
 tered candlestick in the poor room at once shines upon 
 a murderer, a fallen woman, and the gospel between 
 them, a truly Christian scene, stamped with genius. 
 In the epilogue, for which Dostoyevski has plainly wished 
 to make use of his experiences in Siberia, his religious 
 convictions, direct and doctrinal, make their appearance. 
 As 1 have heard a young Russian lady express it, we 
 very often in reading Dostoyevski have a feeling that the 
 characters which he has created are more profound than 
 the author himself. He was not capable of understand- 
 ing the scope of his own work. 
 
 If we should now study the subordinate characters 
 only approximately with the same care with which the 
 character of the chief person has been examined, we 
 shall find that they, almost without exception, ten in 
 number as they are, stand on a level with the hero by 
 the force and truth with which they are drawn, and that 
 all stand in some relation to him. There is no super-
 
 326 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 fluous person in the book. Among the most admirably 
 conceived characters are the examining magistrate Por- 
 fyrius, a legal genius, and the landed proprietor Svidri- 
 gailof, a very complex nature, a voluptuary, who is in 
 love with Raskolnikof s sistei-, and who pursues her. He 
 is a man of intellect, has an excellent head, and, although 
 he has one or more unrepented murders on his conscience, 
 he possesses both courage and sense of honor in his way. 
 As the murderer from selfishness, by numerous details 
 in regard to his way of acting and thinking, he forms a 
 contrast to the hero of the book, Avho writhes under 
 Svidrigailof's contention that they have one certain 
 characteristic in common. 
 
 Dostoyevski's delineation of character here is of the 
 first rank ; it is profound, and bold. Nevertheless, 
 after the manner of Dickens, it leaves almost the whole 
 of the relations between the sexes, if not untouched, 
 yet undescribed. In this domain, however, the poet 
 does not escape the paradoxical ; thus the morally irre- 
 proachable fallen woman reminds us more of an anti- 
 thesis in human form by Victor Hugo than of a real 
 person. 
 
 His aversion to describing the natural sensual life is 
 all the more impressive since here, as in most of the 
 author's other books, he dwells on unnatural, turbid 
 appetites. We notice Svidrigailof's hideous passion for 
 young girls. And we compare the amazing inquisition 
 in " The Possessed," where Shatof questions Stavrogin 
 if it is true that in St. Petersburg he belonged to a 
 secret society which had for its object the satisfaction of 
 unnatural lust, if he has really said that the Marquis 
 de Sade could go to school to him, and if he has 
 debauched and misused children.^ 
 
 ' Nihilister (Danish translation), i. 319.
 
 DOSTOTEVSKI'S STYLE. 327 
 
 It is evident that Dostoyevski's fancy frequently 
 turned on such unnatural inclinations, just because, 
 according to his train of reasoning, there is no room 
 left for a sound sensuousness. His inclination to de- 
 scribe bodily sufferings, the dwelling greatly on cruel- 
 ties, are suggestive of unnatural desires. It is peculiar 
 that Turgenief again and again returns to the compari- 
 son between Dostoyevski and De Sade. Quite evidently 
 it is very much in consequence of his dislike to see his 
 hateful rival installed as a hero, but also it is plain that 
 it was Turgenief's conviction that there is to be found 
 here physiologically and psychologically a real kinship.^ 
 
 Thus much is clear at all events, that with Dosto- 
 yevski's gifts there was a perverse nervousness. 
 
 However high the delineation of character stands in 
 "Crime and Punishment," the book suffers from the 
 imperfections of. the narrative style. The portions in 
 dialogue are immeasurably the best. As soon as the 
 author himself begins to talk, art ceases. Dostoyevski 
 was not able, like Turgenief, to acquire the French art 
 of narration; what he appropriated to himself from 
 them was their ideal of humanity, a national, funda- 
 mental view, which is akin to that of Louis Blanc and 
 of Victor Hugo in his later years. 
 
 Though an author of such a high rank, he was an 
 artist of a low rank. He allowed all his writings to be 
 printed as they ran off from his pen, without revision of 
 any kind whatever, to say nothing of recasting them. 
 He did not trouble himself to give them the highest 
 possible degree of perfection by condensation or prun- 
 ing, but only worked as a journalist works, and is there- 
 fore universally too prolix. 
 
 Thus so far as this, his best work, is concerned, it is 
 1 See especially Turgenief's letter to Saltykof of September 24, 1862.
 
 328 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 clear that he in the first part had not known anything 
 at all about the treatise which in the second part he 
 states that Raskolnikof had written about his theory. 
 Certain expressions in the first part are even at variance 
 with what the hero must have written in such a treatise. 
 Moreover, it is very little in harmony with the modern 
 art of narration when in numerous places in the novel 
 the author uses such turns as : " Later we learn that 
 Svidrigailof that evening also had made a visit," or 
 " When he afterwards, long afterwards, remembered this 
 time, it was clear to him that his consciousness must 
 have been confused," or " Aftertvards it was wonderful 
 to Sonya that she thus at once had seen," etc. By such 
 turns the author strives to fill up the gaps and omis- 
 sions in the descriptions. Somewhere Dostoyevski even 
 writes with the genuine olden-time naivete : " We will 
 temporarily leave the whole line of thought by which 
 Raskolnikof reaches this result ; besides we have already 
 anticipated it too much. Yet we add only, that the 
 actual material difficulties of the undertaking played 
 only a weak part in his mind." Anticipations and 
 excuses for anticipations have just as little place in a 
 novel as gaps and gap-stoppers. 
 
 It is already seen from " Crime and Punishment " in 
 what sense Dostoyevski can be said to be the author of 
 the proletariats. As no one else he has known and 
 understood the proletariat both of intelligence and of 
 ignorance. 
 
 His chief characteristic, when he presents it, is a kind 
 of psychological clairvoyance, which deserts him when 
 he describes the upper classes. (See, e. g., the Prince 
 in "The Injured and Oppressed.") The force and 
 extent of this clairvoyance is especially traced where 
 the healthy spiritual condition borders upon the domain
 
 HIS TREATMENT OF ''MORAL FEVER." 829 
 
 of insanity. Towards the human spiritual condition he 
 has the sure insight of a physician for the insane, but 
 it acts with him, as sometimes with such physicians, 
 that the habit of constantly having spiritual abnormi- 
 ties before him leads him to see the abnormal every- 
 where, and by degrees disturbs the equilibrium of his 
 own mind. 
 
 He likes to take his stand on the dividing line which 
 separates rational trains of thought from the exalted, and 
 proper modes of action from the criminal. From the 
 narrow and low embankment he looks on both sides and 
 never forgets to call the reader's attention to how nar- 
 row and low the difference in reality is between health 
 and disease, right and wrong. With a peculiar master- 
 ship he depicts the intellectual dizziness which makes 
 men rush headlong into a gulf of crime or sacrifice. He 
 knows, as no other person knows, the irresistible attrac- 
 tion of gulfs. 
 
 As a judge of spiritual life he is wholly pathological. 
 The perpetual sensitiveness, which is the result of his 
 epileptic nature, is also his strength. His own bad 
 health, his nervous tremors, his hallucinations, his fits, 
 pass through into the persons whom he describes. The 
 horror which oppressed him when he first received the 
 sentence of death, and afterwards when he faced the 
 punishment of the lash, meets one in the attitude of his 
 principal characters in the face of punishment (Raskol- 
 nikof, a number of persons in "The Dead Hoiise," 
 Dmitri in "The Brothers Karamazof"), most distinctly 
 perhaps in " The Idiot " (Prince Myshkin), where the 
 hero, in the very beginning of the book, exhibits to his 
 valet all the horrors of the man condemned to death. 
 It is developed here that the putting to death in pursu- 
 ance of a sentence of a court is disproportionately more
 
 330 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 odious than the most dreadful murder, and it is added, in 
 conclusion : " Perhaps there is a man to whom a sentence 
 of death has been read only to torment him." There is 
 always this background of agony and terror. 
 
 The greater number of Dostoyevski's characters are 
 visionary. Thus there are in "The Brothers Kara- 
 mazof" alone, the youngest of the brothers, Aliosha, 
 who reads in the souls of others and sees what is hidden, 
 and the noble monk Zossima, the saint of the book, who 
 foresees the temptation of Dmitri to parricide, and in 
 the Christian mysticism casts himself on his knees 
 before him, as before the most sinful, and therefore the 
 nearest to salvation.^ The hero in " The Idiot," Prince 
 Myshkin, is epileptic, and so is the murderer Smerdiakof,' 
 in " The Brothers Karamazof ." 
 
 Since Dostoyevski's strength is in pathology, it is quite 
 natural that his three principal books should describe 
 criminal natures. We find them in " The Brothers 
 Karamazof," as well as in " The Dead House ; " but 
 " Crime and Punishment," nevertheless, contains the typ- 
 ical example of his masterpiece of psychological analy- 
 sis ; it unfolds the crime in its whole growth, from the 
 first cell until it bears its last fruit. As a judge of the 
 diseased condition of the mind, as an author of the 
 "moral fever," Dostoyevski has not his equal. 
 
 It is natural that in an author who is so exclusively 
 psychological, the natural environments play almost no 
 part. What he needs of a landscape is the strip of the 
 horizon, the glimpse of the blue sky, which is visible 
 from a garret in the suburbs of a great city, or through 
 the panes placed high up in a prison cell. With him it 
 is all repartee, conversation ; to that extent everything 
 is dramatic. 
 
 Dostoyevski; Les Freres Karamazof, by Halperine-Kamiusky, 
 ii. p. 223 and i. p. 38.
 
 LOSTOYEVSKI AS DIALECTICIAN. 331 
 
 Dostoyevski is the greatest dialectician among the 
 Russian authors. His great strength is his amazing skill 
 of question and answer in dialogue. The soliloquy 
 and he is never tired of employing it analyzes a mat- 
 ter from its different aspects in the most delicate details. 
 Dialogue, with him, is a kind of inquisition, a continued 
 contest between men, who seek to wrest their secrets 
 from each other. De Vogue's expression is very apt 
 when he says that he combines the disposition of a com- 
 passionate sister with the abilities of a chief inquisitor. 
 The same author has also very truly said of him that his 
 characters are never shown to us in a tranquil state, 
 obeying the rule of reason. One of them never sits 
 quietly at a table, occupied with one thing or another. 
 It is said: "He was lying upon the sofa, Avith closed 
 eyes, but not sleeping. . . . He went out on the street 
 without knowing where he was. . . . He stood immova- 
 ble, with hi^ look persistently fixed on a point out 
 into vacancy." They never eat, but they drink tea at 
 night. They almost never sleep, and when they do they 
 dream.^ 
 
 Nothing is more foreign to them and their author 
 than the code of honor of Western Europe, as it is most 
 clearly stated in the dramas of Calderon, and still exists 
 as a legacy from the age of chivalry in the Latin and 
 German society. In the world which Dostoyevski opens 
 up to us, the most insulting charges, nay, a blow in the 
 face, are no disgrace to a man. They speak about a 
 flogging as the most natural thing in the world. In a 
 Christian spirit, and in perfect accord with the national 
 mysticism, suffering is regarded almost as a blessing. 
 One of Dostoyevski's characters says, " I am afraid that 
 I am not worthy of my torture." The torture is con- 
 1 De Vogue : Le Roman Ru$se, p. 267.
 
 332 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 sidered as a kind of distinction. It always ransoms 
 somebody or something. When the torture is endured, 
 the guilt which caused it is expiated. 
 
 Still more : suffering in this world turned upside 
 down is a temptation. Shatof says to Stavrogin (iVi- 
 hUister, i. 320) : " Do you know why you made this 
 low and shameful marriage ? . . . You married from 
 a desire to feel pain, pangs of conscience, from moral 
 luxury. It was a nervous irritation." And this con- 
 ception is not exceptional. 
 
 Therefore it is that the extremely significative desire 
 to live which is purely characteristic of the Byzantine 
 Chi'istianity becomes the principle of evil with Dos- 
 toyevski. This is what he has mystically embodied in 
 the three brothers Karamazof. The atheistical Ivan 
 says to his younger brother, " Do you know that if I had 
 lost my faith in life, . . . still I would not have killed 
 myself, I would live in spite of everything ! I have 
 lifted the enchanted cup to my lips, I shall not let it 
 go till I have drained it to the dregs. . . . More than 
 once I have asked myself if there is a pain in the world 
 which is able to conquer this unquenchable thirst, this 
 thirst for life, which, perhaps, is unseemly ; but I do not 
 think that before my thirtieth year any such pain has 
 been given to me. I know very well that this thirst for 
 life is what the moralists, especially those who write 
 verse, the consumptive people, who always have a cold 
 in the head, call low and contemptible. It is also true 
 that this thirst for life is a trait which is characteristic 
 in the Karamazof family : to live ! cost what it will ! 
 It is also in you. But what is there low in it ! " ^ 
 
 Although the thirst for life is an evil, yet suffering, 
 without something more, is not a good. Dostoyevski, 
 1 Les Freres Karamazof, i. 206.
 
 HIS VIEW OF THE USE OF EVIL. 333 
 
 with all his (unconsciously cruel) dwelling on torture, 
 and the enjoyment of torture, is too gentle and ner- 
 vously weak and shattered not to melt in pity thereat. 
 Nay, pity is a kind of religion with him, and it some- 
 times conflicts with his system, his faith in God, his 
 Christianity. He is dialectician enough to evolve a 
 fearful attack upon faith in God from suffering upon 
 earth. We read, for instance, Ivan's enumeration of 
 all the cruelties of men towards defenceless animals, 
 little children ; his busying himself with all the refine- 
 ments of cruelties : a little horse, whipped over the 
 eyes ; a girl seven years old, who is whipped with 
 thorns ; a girl of five, who, on a cold night in winter, is 
 locked up in a closet, and whose face is smeared with 
 filth, which she is made to eat ; a serf boy eight years 
 old, whom a general suffers to be torn to pieces by his 
 dogs, all this without the intervention of God, and 
 we ponder over his conclusion: It is possible that all 
 this fits into the heavenly harmony of the Almighty; 
 but I do not recognize it ; it counterbalances for me not 
 a single tear of a child. 
 
 The young hero Aliosha, on Dostoyevski's behalf, 
 disposes of this doubt with the answer, " There is a 
 Being who can forgive all, for he himself has poured out 
 his innocent blood for all men and things." 
 
 The argument is not much better than that which, in 
 another place in the book (ii. 209), the devil in a hallu- 
 cination uses with Ivan : " What pleasure can one have 
 without suffering ? It would all be like an unending 
 ceremonial, holy, but unendingly tedious." 
 
 With a very extraordinaiy sublimity and greatness, 
 Dostoyevski has developed the religious problem, as it 
 appeared to him, in the ingenious poem, " The Chief 
 Inquisitor," which he puts into the mouth of Ivan, and
 
 334 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 for whose sake alone " The Brothers Karamazof " ought 
 to be translated. 
 
 Christ has come back upon the earth. He shows him- 
 self at a great auto-da-fe in Seville, where hundreds of 
 heretics are burned in his honor, gently walking about 
 in the ashes of the fire. All know him, the common 
 people throng around him, he blesses them. Then the 
 chief inquisitor, an old man of ninety, causes him to be 
 arrested, imprisoned, and placed in a cell used for those 
 who are condemned to the stake, and there visits him in 
 the night. A conversation then follows between the 
 inquisitor and Christ, or rather a long monologue of the 
 former, which is not interrupted by any answer, a 
 monologue in which the cardinal shows the Saviour how 
 wrong he has been in coming again and disturbing the 
 work of his believers, and proclaims to him his fixed 
 intention of letting him be burned alive as a heretic 
 in order to bring peace to his work. The inquisitor 
 unfolds to Christ the faults, the political faults, he 
 committed in his lifetime. The most important of all 
 was that he did not accept the offer of the tempter to 
 change stones to bread, but showed himself to men with 
 empty hands. He thereby made it possible for them 
 who rise up against him to rally about the watchword : 
 " Give them first meat, if thou wilt that they shall be 
 good." "We," says the cardinal, "give them bread. We 
 understand how to lie, and we speak in thy name. And 
 they end by bringing us their freedom, laying it down 
 at our feet, and asking us for chains and bread. There 
 are only three forces on earth which can keep that 
 humanity in check, which is really so weak and yet 
 so rebellious, and these are : the miracle, the mystery, 
 and the authority. And thou hast rejected these forces 
 to proclaim a freedom which it was particularly neces-
 
 HIS LATER YEARS. 335 
 
 sary to confiscate, and a love with which mankind can- 
 not be governed; therefore it has been necessary to 
 correct thy work, to correct it by the power of Rome 
 and with the sword of Csesar, and make some hundreds 
 of thousands of progressive spirits unhappy, extermi- 
 nate them when it was possible, in order to secure the 
 weal of untold millions. To-morrow I shall have you 
 burned. Dixi." 
 
 Christ does not answer a word, but looks into the eyes 
 of the inquisitor with a mild but firm gaze, then he 
 quietly moves his face close to the inquisitor's, and kisses 
 the old man on his bloodless mouth. 
 
 Then the old man trembles, opens the cell door, and 
 says, " Go your way, and come again never more . . . 
 never, never more ! " 
 
 This poem is condemned in the novel as the offspring 
 of an atheistical train of thought, but even the compo- 
 sition shows with what seriousness and versatility Dos- 
 toyevski has asked the question and tested the different 
 answers. 
 
 The period from 1871 to 1881 was the most peaceful 
 in Dostoyevski's life. His second marriage was instru- 
 mental in introducing order in his household affairs. 
 He eclipsed in popularity all the writers who were at 
 first regarded as his equals, especially causing Pisemski's 
 reputation to grow pale in comparison. But he also 
 eclipsed Turgenief, who had so long been regarded as 
 his superior. All the ill will which this great author 
 had stirred up among the Slavophiles and radicals enured 
 for a long time to the advantage of Dostoyevski. When, 
 in 1880, the unveiling of Pushkin's statue in Moscow 
 was the occasion of a great national literary festivity, 
 at which the greatest authors made speeches, Turgenief's 
 was applauded, but Dostoyevski's excited raptures and
 
 336 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 sobs ; and when he had finished, he was carried about in 
 triumph.^ 
 
 In his monthly periodical, " The Diary of an Avithor," 
 he now preached faith in Russia as a duty and attacked 
 with equal bitterness the Russian "intelligence" and 
 the culture of Western Europe, which had become to 
 him the culture of Babel and of Sodom. He was thus 
 regarded as the greatest popular author of Russia at the 
 time of his death. The sorrow at his loss was a national 
 sorrow ; forty thousand men followed him to his grave. 
 The Russian students sent an open letter to his widow, 
 in which appears, among other things : 
 
 " Dostoyevski's ideals will never be forgotten ; from 
 generation to generation we shall hand them down as 
 a precious inheritance from our great, beloved teacher. 
 . . . His memory will never be extinguished in the 
 hearts of the Russian youth, and, as we love him, we 
 will also teach our children to honor and love the man 
 for whom we now so bitterly and disconsolately mourn. 
 . . . Dostoyevski will always stand bright before us in 
 our battle of life ; we shall always remember that it was 
 he who taught us the possibility of preserving the purity 
 of the soul undefiled in every position of life and in all 
 circumstances." 
 
 It was, as we see, the Slavophile direction of thought 
 which spoke the last word at his death. 
 
 1 The most of Dostoyevski's novels have been translated into 
 Danish, as well as Pisemski's excellent novel, " Thousand Souls." 
 "Crime and Punishment" has been translated into English, and 
 published by T. Y. Crowell & Co., New York.
 
 vn. 
 
 Russia's last great realist and dreamer, Count Leo 
 Nikolayevitch Tolstoi, is more powerful than Turge- 
 nief and more healthy than Dostoyevski. He ap- 
 proaches Turgenief in pessimism ; in Slavic piety and 
 faith in the Russian common people he approaches 
 Dostoyevski. In common with the latter, he has a dis- 
 tmst of the culture of Western Europe, only he extends 
 it so as to embrace all civilization. 
 
 His fancy is far-reaching, epic. So far as he is con- 
 cerned, the proposition is true that the novel is the 
 modern epic. He has not only like other authors given 
 a phase of culture and the life of so-called good society 
 in and out of the capitals of Russia, but in his greatest 
 work he has depicted an age, an army, a people, and a 
 historic catastrophe of the first rank. Napoleon's cam- 
 paign and defeat on Russian soil. 
 
 He was born August 28, 1828, on the estate Yasnaya 
 Polyana, in the department of Tula, lost his father in 
 1837, Avent to the University of Kazan in 1843, where 
 he studied jurisprudence and the Oriental languages, but 
 returned to his estate at the end of three years. In 
 1851 he served in the army of the Caucasus, where he 
 made his first essay as an author, took part in the 
 Crimean War, was in the battle at Tchernaya and the 
 siege of Sevastopol, and, on the conclusion of peace, 
 obtained his discharge. In 1857 he made his first 
 journey abroad, visiting Germany and Italy. On his 
 
 337
 
 338 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 estate, where he came in close contact with the common 
 people and studied their natures, he established a free 
 school and busied himself in all directions with meditat- 
 ing on what could and ought to be done for the common 
 people. He married in 1862. He first contemplated 
 writing a great novel about the " Decembrists " (the 
 heroes of the revolts of 1825), but abandoned this idea 
 for another, of which " War and Peace " was the result 
 (1865-1868). "Anna Karenina" followed in 1878, and 
 later, novels, plays, sketches of the people, confessions. 
 It is indicative of the kind of Tolstoi's faith in reality 
 that he began as an observer of himself, and an autobi- 
 ographer. Turgenief keeps himself wholly in the back- 
 ground in his writings. When we catch a glimpse of 
 the author himself in Dostoyevski's works it is in those 
 characters which wholly sacrifice themselves for others, 
 and generally in turn are despised, because they lack 
 all the fascinating qualities with which the more ordi- 
 nary persons are adorned. Thus it is with the narrator 
 of the story, Ivan Petrovitch, in "The Injured and 
 Oppressed." There is a gleam of the same thing even 
 in old Makar Alekseyevitch, in "Poor Folk." His de- 
 scription of himself in "The Dead House" is patheti- 
 cally modest, even humble, although the author lets it be 
 understood that the narrator is regarded by the others 
 as an uncommon person. But Avhen he uses himself as 
 a model, Dostoyevski always draws a person of the most 
 extraordinary goodness. In his novel, " The Idiot," he 
 has presented himself in the guise of the hero, Prince 
 Myshkin. Myshkin is a genius of the greatest ability, 
 a child in simplicity and purity of heart. For four and 
 twenty years he has been afflicted with that incurable 
 disease, epilepsy, so that he acquiesces with mildness 
 when, even although he is in possession of all his facul-
 
 TOLSTOI. 339 
 
 ties, he is treated as one who is sick or insane, one who 
 is on tjie point of " having a convulsive fit." He has no 
 fine manners, is not able to husband his ideas, and 
 therefore, as he himself says, uses words which are not 
 suitable for the lofty thoughts he would express, and, as 
 it were, disgrace them. But, notwithstanding this, 
 there is no one in his circle of acquaintances, not one, 
 who is worthy of such words. Dostoyevski proclaims 
 that through the mouth of a young girl : *' There is no 
 one here who is worthy of your soul, your heart, nay, 
 not even of your little finger. You are more honest 
 than all of us, nobler and wiser than any one of us." 
 
 If Tolstoi begins by describing himself, it is because 
 he wants to describe what he knows. He, relates the 
 life of his childhood and youth ( Childhood," "Youth ") ; 
 then, indirectly, but in a transparent manner, his expe- 
 riences as an officer in the Caucasus (" The Cossacks "), 
 his memories of war (" Pictures of War," " Sevastopol "). 
 In every place where he gives a picture of himself the 
 criticisms of himself and the use of irony towards him- 
 self are palpable. He unveils his own weaknesses, 
 shows us his own follies. He never makes the impres- 
 sion of an ideal figure. On the contrary, it is he 
 who less often than others succeeds in winning hearts, 
 and who does not deserve any other happiness than that 
 which falls to his lot. In " The Cossacks," his Olyenin, 
 like Fetschdrin with Lermontof, is a Russian officer 
 of the elegant world, living in the Caucasus. But while 
 Petschorin, in spite of all his coldness, everywhere 
 meets with a warm reception from the women, Olyenin, 
 from his passionate love cherished for a long time for a 
 child of nature, a Cossack girl, reaps only such ill will 
 and contempt that she would not even turn her head 
 towards him when he went away. In Lermontofs book
 
 340 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 the highly cultured man is attractive even when he 
 is tired of the world; for Tolstoi the object here, as 
 ever, is to extol the superiority of nature to the results 
 of artistic culture. And to this love and admiration for 
 nature we may attribute the fact that the Caucasian 
 landscape, which in " The Hero of Our Time " was only 
 a frame, in " The Cossacks " presents itself identified 
 with the freshness and force of the nature of man : " the 
 everlasting snow, untouched by man, and the exalted 
 woman in her primitive beauty." ..." I rejoiced over 
 her as over the glory of the mountains and of the 
 heavens, and could not help rejoicing, for she is as beau- 
 tiful as they." ..." Perhaps I love in her the nature, 
 the embodiment of everything that is beautiful in 
 nature," etc. We feel that something besides self- 
 glorification is dear to the author, namely fidelity to 
 reality. 
 
 It is this fidelity to reality which moves us every- 
 where in Tolstoi : First, where the author's own charac- 
 ter is traced in his created characters, as in certain heavy 
 natures, strong and awkward men, who, without any 
 special stimulus, for a long time allow themselves to float 
 with the stream, until an awakening of their religious 
 natures calls all their best qualities into action : Bezukhoi 
 in " War and Peace," Levin in " Anna Karenina," are 
 examples. In the next place, where Tolstoi describes 
 the every-day life of strange natures, as in the finished, 
 bitterly veracious story "Family Happiness," which is 
 strongly effective, simply and only in the development 
 of the way in which the illusions of life spring up, are 
 nourished and lost. It describes the growth and blos- 
 soming of love, then the slow transformation which 
 degrades the love of the two consorts to friendship, and 
 at last allows tenderness for tlie children to displace
 
 HIS HISTORICAL PORTRAITS. 341 
 
 every other sentiment. It is e very-day life, without even 
 a single romantic event. 
 
 Next to fidelity to reality the quality of divination, 
 the gift of being able to anticipate, is noteworthy in 
 Tolstoi. He possesses the extremely rare historical 
 imagination. 
 
 It is quite true that he has a spirit sufficiently modern 
 not to make any attempts to conjure up distant persons, 
 who have long since died. He does not go farther back 
 than to an epoch where he is assisted by a tradition still 
 vigorous. Nevertheless, his description of a past historic 
 period, like that of Alexander the First, is admirable. 
 His historical portraits make an impression as if the 
 picture was painted on a foundation of personal experi- 
 ences. His Napoleon, his Kutiizof, are instances. 
 
 There are perhaps in all only two artistic descriptions 
 in which the appearance of Napoleon makes the impres- 
 sion of entire truthfulness, and which are drawn with 
 genuine art. One is Alfred de Vigny's admirable de- 
 scription of Napoleon's conversation with the Pope, in 
 Servitude et Grandeur Militaires; the second is the scene 
 in " War and Peace," where Napoleon gives an audience 
 to the Russian envoy Balashof. It is written as if the 
 author was present unseen. 
 
 How expressive is such a little trait as this of Napo- 
 leon : ' His white and fat neck was set off sharply 
 against the black collar of his uniform, from which 
 there came a strong smell of eau-de-cologne." We feel 
 the parvenu in this paltry detail. 
 
 Tolstoi's Kutiizof is a characteristic picture of the 
 same rank. Nevertheless, however eminent it is as a 
 work of art, it certainly has great defects as a portrait. 
 It can hardly be doubted that, for national and religious 
 reasons, the author has placed too high an estimate on
 
 342 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 Kutiizof, and too low an estimate on Napoleon. What 
 is emphasized in Napoleon is the violence and the fool- 
 ish arrogance which unconsciously stand before a fall; 
 what we lack the impression of is of the force of his 
 genius. In Kutiizof, even inaction, nay, imbecility, is 
 extolled as the expression of a profound knowledge to 
 what extent matters go as they will or rather as they 
 must, without the interference of any single man having 
 any special effect one way or the other. 
 
 This partiality, however, depends entirely on Tolstoi's 
 peculiar views of life. Without the nervousness or 
 exaltation of Dostoyevski, he is just as far as the latter 
 from having a reverence for human intelligence and for 
 political or scientific greatness. 
 
 In Germany authors believe in reason and culture, in 
 England on the independent power of the individual, 
 in France on abilities, in the North on morality ; Tolstoi, 
 as Russians so frequently are, is impressed with the 
 insignificance of the single man in the presence of the 
 universe. He cherishes a reverence for the universe 
 and for fate, but has none for science, art, or culture. 
 
 In his view nothing depends on science or art. No, 
 life and death are two great, earnest, inscrutable things. 
 The great sermon which life and death daily preach into 
 the ear of the author stifles the noise of the whole earth 
 for him. The understanding of man seems to him so 
 weak in the face of the enigma of life that the simplest 
 intelligence here is no better than the highest. 
 
 And the will of man is to be counted as nothing in 
 regard to the irresistible stream of historic events. It is 
 not the leader of the army who in reality leads the army ; 
 fate drives it on ; the battle is won or lost without his 
 intervention, by the play of the secret impelling power. 
 
 A scene typical of Tolstoi is that where the wounded
 
 HIS PESSIMISM. 343 
 
 Prince Andrei, lying stretclied out on the battle-field, 
 looks up to the heavens. Napoleon, with his suite, stops 
 by the side of the wounded man. The now feeble man, 
 whose admiration for Napoleon had hitherto been so 
 boundless, finds him small and unimportant in compari- 
 son with what is going on between his own soul and the 
 immeasurable heavens. 
 
 It is significant that hardly any other author has de- 
 scribed so frequently and with such confidence and ver- 
 satility as Tolstoi, how people die. He is equally con- 
 versant with the feelings which precede suicide, man's 
 as well as woman's with the emotions with which the 
 wise and the foolish in sickness await the coming of 
 death, and with the terror and the final release which 
 death brings in battle. 
 
 From Tolstoi's lack of scientific culture and his weak 
 faith in the intelligence of man results the ideal he has 
 created for himself of a return to nature. It does not 
 correspond to Rousseau's, for it has a religious charac- 
 ter ; but it reminds one of it. The peasant Karatayef, 
 in " War and Peace," makes so deep an impression on 
 Bezukhoi, not only because he is a primitive creation 
 but because he has the resignation and the Christian 
 brotherly love which the civilized man lacks. 
 
 Tolstoi is a pure romanticist to the extent that he 
 does not seek his ideal before us, but behind us, in the 
 lowest classes. He is not a pure pessimist, in so far as, 
 however black the situation appears to him, he con- 
 tinually tries to embody his ideal, and preaches its 
 realization to others. In this the pessimism which 
 appears in his writings differs sharply from that in 
 which in our day the French literature has culminated, 
 the most characteristic expression of which is found in 
 the writings of Huysmann, a conscientious artist and a
 
 344 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 man without hope. The pessimism of the latter consists 
 in his being tired of life and disgusted with it. All 
 that he has seen and experienced was to an intolerable 
 degree vulgar and low. He suffers and is wounded by 
 everything which there presents itself to his view, and 
 it is very significant that he has created a character in a 
 novel, who retires to a solitary life, to whom the reality 
 is so hateful that he replaces the natural by the artifi- 
 cial, even natural by artificial light, and who from the 
 simple classics, which are not spicy enough and which he 
 despises, resorts to the very unnatural writers. 
 
 With this radical pessimism the pessimism of Tolstoi 
 has one point of contact : the dislike of what is plain 
 and rational. But for the typical French pessimist life 
 is a worthless thing, whose enigma is not worth ponder- 
 ing over. The only thing which the pessimists of this 
 literature honor and love is art. And the same thing 
 which they loathe in real life, they honor when they find 
 it in art. For only where the work of art almost exclu- 
 sively represents that which in itself is purely common- 
 place and ungraceful are they sure that what they love in 
 the work is the art itself. The lover of art indeed often 
 prefers the low and the sordid as the subject in order to 
 be able to the full extent to enjoy the art in the manner 
 of its treatment. 
 
 For Tolstoi, on the other hand, life is so serious and 
 inexhaustible a thing that his interest for art was from 
 the first infinitesimal, in comi)arison with the interest 
 which he bestows upon the questions of life and happi- 
 ness. Upon the whole, art has never had an independ- 
 ent value for him, and in his last period he looks down 
 upon his earlier works as far too artistic. He is wholly 
 absorbed in a kind of Christian socialism of a wholly per. 
 sonal and eccentric nature, and it is evident that, so far
 
 HIS RELIGIOUS VIEWS RUSSIAN. 345 
 
 as he gives art any importance, it is only as the organ of 
 the sound views of life, as the power which elevates the 
 people on the largest scale. 
 
 It is impossible to enter into the spirit of a view of 
 art which despises the form, the style, even the element 
 which makes the art an art. 
 
 There can, however, be no doubt as to which of the 
 two constructions is best adapted to advance a literature 
 which is not on its decadence, but in full prosperity ; 
 that which regards literature as an organ for ideas, or 
 tliat which cultivates the form of art simply as form. 
 
 The teaching that art is its own end is sound enough, 
 but must not be understood as sanctioning speaking or 
 writing only for the sake of speaking and writing. Only 
 where there are broad views and great thoughts is there 
 to be found in literature that principle of life which 
 saves it from being lost in its barrenness. 
 
 Therefore the intellectual life of Russia is in no dan- 
 ger from Tolstoi's more recent disdain of art. 
 
 Why speak of what all know who have in any way 
 kept up with the times : of the great man's remorse for 
 the thoughtless life of his youth, which as his books 
 of that epoch show now appears to him far more 
 thoughtless than it really was, of his public confession, 
 dignified and naive, the confession of a contemplative 
 man who was not created for a thinker, of his self-made 
 religious system, which adopts the instruction of Chris- 
 tianity about the unlawfulness of war, nay, of all armed 
 defence, and in which the principle, that after the blow 
 on one cheek we ought to turn the other also, becomes 
 its chief corner-stone. That there are very great objec- 
 tions to this is more than evident : but what interests 
 us Is not that, but the genuine Russian character of this 
 fundamental idea and of this predominant emotion. It
 
 346 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 is as if even this peace-loving, utterly unwarlike spirit 
 of the people, which is peculiarly Russian, had become 
 instrumental in the development of Tolstoi's religious 
 teaching. 
 
 The philologian Carl Abel somewhere says, after hav- 
 ing given the linguistic characteristics of the Great and 
 Little Russian people : " There is still a nationality in 
 Russia more important than either of the two already 
 mentioned. This most remarkable kind of men consists 
 of the higher classes of the empire. As a fusion of all 
 the different races which are collected under the sceptre 
 of the Tsar, these higher classes constitute one of the 
 most gifted, courageous, and enterprising types of man- 
 kind produced anywhere on the face of the earth. In 
 them sound Finnish reason is combined with Polish 
 boldness, Armenian sagacity with the German reflective 
 and methodical manner of thought, and to the patient 
 endurance of the Tatar is added the suppleness of the 
 Slav." And he declares that if Russia has accomplished 
 much in diplomacy and war, it is due to this group of 
 leaders. J 
 
 That interests Tolstoi least because war and diplo- 
 macy are just the things which do not interest him at 
 all. And it is to those who have hitherto been under 
 the necessity of blind obedience to this group of leaders 
 that his whole sympathy is secured. It is with them 
 that he in his employments, nay, in dress and exter- 
 nals, has gradually sought to identify himself, partly in 
 order to become thoroughly acquainted with their man- 
 ner of feeling, and partly not to look down upon them 
 in any respect. 
 
 One of my acquaintances, a very dispassionate jurist, 
 who visited him at his estate last summer, could not 
 1 Carl Abel : Slavic and Latin, p. 51,
 
 HIS PRESENT MODE OF LIFE. 347 
 
 speak of his visit without emotion. Concerning the 
 reports of a decay in Tolstoi's intellectual power he said : 
 " Tolstoi has a clear, penetrating mind, especially toler- 
 ant of such as think otherwise, and of an angelic good- 
 ness. He reads everything, is interested in everything, 
 and in his conversation does not attempt any propa- 
 ganda. Poorly clad, half in rags, he lives in his family, 
 which does not share in his convictions, but which 
 honors and idolizes him. His wife is an intelligent 
 woman, an excellent mistress of her house, a house 
 which is kept up in grand style. The sons, practical 
 men, take care of the estate. The daughter is beautiful, 
 worldly ; in her very elegant costume she goes out to 
 walk with her half-dressed father, and worships him." 
 
 The people who surround him at the present time 
 consist of three classes : the half-mad, who see in him 
 what they want to see, and who get out of his words 
 what they wish. In the second place, the good-for- 
 nothings, who come to profit by his benevolent disposi- 
 tion, and who are often discontented, since he cannot 
 satisfy all their demands. Finally, the correspondents 
 of the different newspapers, who write about him en- 
 tirely according to the tendency of the paper to which 
 they contribute. 
 
 Tolstoi teaches, above everything else, that people 
 ought to be happy just as they ought to be pure. To 
 be happy we must have as few necessities as possible. 
 Hence the return to the primitive condition, which he 
 finds in the life of the peasant, which is so simple. 
 
 The moralizing propensity has been strong in Tolstoi 
 from the beginning. It is always to be found in his 
 writings, except, perhaps, in some of his very earliest 
 little stories, like " Lucerne." It is unmistakable in 
 " AVar and Peace ; " it is very strongly stamped oil
 
 348 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 "Anna Karenina," where it even weakens the result. 
 The moral lesson which we should deduce appears quite 
 too distinctly in his sketches. In other words : the fixed 
 idea of the generations of the past is traced here ; the 
 idea of punishment : thus it goes, when, etc. Cause and 
 effect, without its being expressly so stated, become 
 transformed to guilt and punishment. 
 
 Of late Tolstoi has devoted his efforts to writing 
 for the people. He has determined to turn to the hun- 
 dred million instead of to the upper ten thousand. 
 He has written a series of short narrative legends, sym- 
 bolical stories and tales, which from his disinterested- 
 ness are sold for about one cent (Ij kopeks) for each 
 number, and which are intended to give to the Kussian 
 peasants and workmen, who are now, for the first time, 
 awakening from a sleep of a thousand years, the food 
 which is suited to their minds and the ideas which they 
 need. 
 
 These brief writings are not reading for us who have 
 a different culture. But the great peasant drama of last 
 year, " The Power of Darkness," stands far above these 
 didactic sheets. Perhaps it is the masterpiece of this 
 great eccentric and independent thinker. By its poetic 
 meaning it belongs to the literature of the world, nay, 
 so far as the dramatic literature is concerned, marks the 
 discovery of a new world of material. 
 
 Although this play has the wonderful quality that 
 there is not a single repartee which cannot be under- 
 stood by the ignorant and untaught, it is food for the 
 most cultured. 
 
 It is a peculiarity of Tolstoi, with his lack of scien- 
 tific endowments, that his thought is not able to pene- 
 trate the economical causes of unhappiness and misery. 
 No one who has read his essay " On the Importance of
 
 THE POWER OF DARKNESS. 349 
 
 Art and Science," that is, its unimportance, this attempt 
 of a self-taught moralist to pass judgment on things 
 which are out of the scope of his intellect, will be 
 surprised that Tolstoi regards money as the root of all 
 evil. With his own hand he does all sorts of service for 
 the poor; but he never assists them with money. He 
 wastes his time in helping an old woman set up her 
 stove, but does not give her the ruble or two which she 
 needs to get the stove set up better and more solidly. 
 
 He is himself rich and has a large income, but he makes 
 use of the expression that money affairs belong to the 
 domain of his wife. He never has any money about him, 
 only now and then gets from his home fifteen kopeks to 
 pay for a bath in one of the bath-houses for the common 
 people. 
 
 In the play " The Power of Darkness " there is a trace 
 of this eccentricity. We notice Akim's indignation when 
 Mitritch explains to him how it is that money put in the 
 bank draws interest. All matters of interest and of 
 banks are in his view a delusion. The author is to be 
 heard here through the old peasant. 
 
 Otherwise, with exemplary self-control he keeps him- 
 self concealed behind his characters, and the play is a 
 great work in its exceptional sense of reality and the 
 great, kind heart which beats in it. 
 
 Here we look into a world where no one has the bear- 
 ings, where no one really knows anything about what 
 lies beyond the confines of the country town, not even 
 the soldier who has roamed about. And how the women 
 are regarded can be seen from what is said about them 
 in one of the conversations : " There are millions of them 
 in the Russian land, and all as blind as moles ; no knowl- 
 edge but a little superstition ; when they die, they are 
 just as wise as when they were born."
 
 350 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 It is against this " Power of Darkness " that Tolstoi 
 has directed the beams of light from the blaze of his 
 fantasy and his enthusiasm. It is with this that he, as 
 the educator of the people, has begun the fight. Behind 
 his Asgaard's wall he kindles the bright fire into which 
 the Spirit of Darkness, the giant in the Eagle's home, is 
 to fall in the future.' 
 
 In the Russian monograph " Count L. N. Tolstoi and 
 a Criticism of his Works," we have collected all the por- 
 traits extant of the great author. There is a group of 
 the year 1856, in which the young officer is painted with 
 Grigordvitch, Gontcharof, Turgenief, and Dnizhinin, and 
 the keen author of comedies, Ostrovski, and another of 
 the year 1857, in which the group consists of Turgenief, 
 SoUogub, Tolstoi, Niekrasof, Grigordvitch, and Panayef. 
 There is an admirable portrait by Kramskoi, and a great 
 many photographs from later years. 
 
 We can thus trace how this characteristic head has 
 been moulded and developed from within. There is the 
 officer, not yet thirty years old, with the military mus- 
 tache and the regularfy cut, smooth hair, and the already 
 peculiar, discontented, penetrating look, the expressive 
 mouth, querying and uncertain, a face which shows 
 uneasiness, betraying a shy and violent spirit. All the 
 others seem so tame, so mild by the side of him, capri- 
 cious as he seems, and naif and defiant. 
 
 Years roll on, developments take place, and this head 
 becomes changed. A quality appears in it which con- 
 quers all the others : commanding power. In the later 
 pictures this expression becomes very strong. There is 
 Kramskoi's portrait, when Tolstoi was between forty 
 and fifty years of age, with the smooth, black hair fall- 
 
 1 Tolstoi's works have been translated into Danish, German, French, 
 and English.
 
 HIS PORTRAITS. 351 
 
 ing in waves over the temples, the heavy, dark, full 
 beard, which covers his throat and collar, with an 
 expression of concentrated depth of understanding and 
 strength. There is no more uncertainty about this 
 mouth, no uneasiness in the brow ; the look is the look 
 of the seer and of the thinker penetrating into the very 
 marrow of things. Then there is the portrait of Tolstoi 
 at his writing-desk, a wonderful picture from the great- 
 ness of his style and bearing. The greatest gravity and 
 absorption shine out from it. Every one who sees the 
 portrait feels that what that man writes is not vanity, is 
 not idle words, but strong, mighty words, worth ponder- 
 ing over. And there is still one later portrait, where 
 the expression of the eyes and about the mouth comes 
 very near to being frightful, appalling, it is so strong 
 and commanding. The heavy eyebrows almost seem to 
 threaten ; the thick beard, growing freely, and be- 
 sprinkled with gray, reminds one of the old prophets. 
 
 In the series of illustrations in the book come also 
 the latest portraits : the well-known photograph of the 
 sixty -year-old Tolstoi as a muzhik, in the dark blouse of 
 the peasant, with the leather belt around his waist, with 
 his hair parted in the middle of his forehead in the 
 fashion of the Eussian peasant, with his forehead fur- 
 rowed with deep wrinkles curving down in the middle, 
 the dishevelled, snow-white beard, extending almost down 
 to where the arms are crossed upon the breast, and the 
 anxious look of the mystic, whose firmness reminds us 
 of the gaze of the careworn. 
 
 Last of all is Riepin's masterly painting, which is 
 also known in other lands from the chromo-lithographs : 
 a broad field with a background of woods ; peasants are 
 ploughing in the middle distance ; in the foreground 
 Tolstoi as a peasant is ploughing in the Russian style,
 
 352 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA. 
 
 with a white horse harnessed to an antique wooden 
 plough, leading by a halter another white horse behind 
 him, which draws the harrow. For it is Leo Nikola- 
 yevitch himself, this strong, broad-shouldered frame, 
 with the soft white hat, which protects the sunken eyes 
 from the sun, with the blue peasant's-frock, open about 
 the neck, exposing his naked breast, and the high boots, 
 which sink in the rich mould. There is nothing here 
 which reminds one of the count, of the born aristocrat. 
 The thick, broad nose, the heavy jaws, are those of the 
 Russian peasant. But what a wonderful peasant ! this 
 bearing, this immense force in simplicity ! It is the 
 peasant in contemplation, as a hero, as a genius, as a 
 civilizer. It is the Scythian prince of Herodotus, Kola- 
 Xais, the Prince of the Ploughshare ; it is Mikula, the 
 child of the village, the hero of agriculture, with the 
 wonderful plough, who draws his furrow rich in bless- 
 ings in the boundless Russian plain. It is the national 
 hero Ilia of Murom himself, risen from his death of 
 a thousand years to cultivate again the Russian soil and 
 earth, he who, stronger than fate, went on the road to 
 riches and "did not become rich," but was wholly 
 engrossed in the fundamental Russian idea of commu- 
 nity. 
 
 Thus with Tolstoi' we turn back to our first impres- 
 sion of Russian intellectual life and literature. He, to 
 whom Turgenief directed his last words written with a 
 pencil, and whom, when dying, he addressed as "my 
 friend, the great author of Russia ! " he in our days is 
 the last great one of the group of cultivators in this 
 immense empire. 
 
 What is it that he cultivates ? what is it that all 
 these, young and old, the men with good will, prepare 
 and cultivate ?
 
 RUSSIA AND THE FUTURE. 353 
 
 Black land, fertile land, new land, grain land, . , . 
 the broadly constituted, rich, warm nature, . . . the 
 broad, unlimited expanse which fills the mind with 
 melancholy and hope, . . . the incomprehensible, darkly 
 mysterious, . . . the womb of new realities and new 
 mysticism, . . . Kussia and the future.
 
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