Book I.

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RUSSIA

ITS PEOPLE AND ITS LITERATURE

BY

EMILIA PARDO BAZÁN

Translated from the Spanish

By FANNY HALE GARDINER

CHICAGO

A.C. McCLURG & CO.

1901

TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE.

Emilia Pardo Bazán, the author of the following critical survey of

Russian literature, is a Spanish woman of well-known literary

attainments as well as wealth and position. Her life has been spent in

association with men of mark, both during frequent sojourns at Madrid

and at home in Galicia, "the Switzerland of Spain," from which province

her father was a deputy to Cortes.

Books and libraries were almost her only pleasures in childhood, as she

was allowed few companions, and she says she could never apply herself

to music. By the time she was fourteen she had read widely in history,

sciences, poetry, and fiction, excepting the works of the French

romanticists, Dumas, George Sand, and Victor Hugo, which were forbidden

fruit and were finally obtained and enjoyed as such. At sixteen she

married and went to live in Madrid, where, amid the gayeties of the

capital, her love for literature suffered a long eclipse.

Her father was obliged, for political reasons, to leave the country

after the abdication of Amadeus, and she accompanied him in a long and

to her profitable period of wandering, during which she learned French,

English, and Italian, in order to read the literatures of those tongues.

She also plunged deep into German philosophy, at first out of curiosity,

because it was then in vogue; but she confesses a debt of gratitude to

it nevertheless.

While she was thus absorbed in foreign tongues and literatures, she

remained almost entirely ignorant of the new movement in her own land,

led by Valera, Galdos, and Alarcon. The prostration which characterized

the reign of Isabella II. had been followed by a rejuvenation born of

the Revolution of 1868. When this new literature was at last brought to

her notice, she read it with delighted surprise, and was immediately

struck by something resembling the spirit of Cervantes, Hurtado, and

other Spanish writers of old renown. Inspired by the possibility of this

heredity, she resolved to try novel-writing herself,--a thought which

had never occurred to her when her idea of the novel had been bounded by

the romantic limitations of Victor Hugo and his suite. But if the novel

might consist of descriptions of places and customs familiar to us, and

studies of the people we see about us, then she would dare attempt it.

As yet, however, no one talked of realism or naturalism in Spain; the

tendency of Spanish writers was rather toward a restoration of elegant

Castilian, and her own first novel followed this line, although

evidently inspired by the breath of realism as far as she was then aware

of it. The methods and objects of the French realists became fully

manifest to her shortly afterward; for, being in poor health, she went

to Vichy, where in hours of enforced leisure she read for the first time

Balzac, Flaubert, Goncourt, and Daudet. The result led her to see the

importance of their aims and the force of their art, to which she added

the idea that each country should cultivate its own tradition while

following the modern methods. These convictions she embodied first in a

prologue to her second novel, "A Wedding Journey," and then in a series

of articles published in the "Epoca" at Madrid, and afterward in Paris;

these she avers were the first echoes in Spain of the French realist

movement.

All of her novels have been influenced by the school of art to which she

has devoted her attention and criticism, and her study of which has well

qualified her for the essays contained in this volume. This work on

Russian literature was published in 1887, but prior to its appearance

in print the Señora de Bazán was invited to read selections from it

before the Ateneo de Madrid,--an honor never before extended to a woman,

I believe.

Few Spanish women are accustomed to speaking in public, and she thus

describes her own first attempt in 1885, when, during the festivities

attending the opening of the first railway between Madrid and Coruña,

the capital of her native province, she was asked to address a large

audience invited to honor the memory of a local poet:--

"Fearful of attempting so unusual a performance, as well as

doubtful of the ability to make my voice heard in a large

theatre, I took advantage of the presence of my friend

Emilio Castelar to read to him my discourse and confide to

him my fears. On the eve of the performance, Castelar,

ensconced in an arm-chair in my library, puzzled his brains

over the questions whether I should read standing or

sitting, whether I should hold my papers in my hand or no,

and having an artist's eye to the scenic effect, I think he

would have liked to suggest that I pose before the mirror!

But I was less troubled about my attitude than by the

knowledge that Castelar was to speak also, and before me,

which would hardly predispose my audience in my favor....

The theatre was crowded to suffocation, but I found that

this rather animated than terrified me. I rose to read (for

it was finally decided that I should stand), and I cannot

tell how thin and hard and unsympathetic my voice sounded in

the silence. My throat choked with emotion; but I was

scarcely through the first paragraph when I heard at my

right hand the voice of Castelar, low and earnest, saying

over and over again, 'Very good, very good! That is the

tone! So, so! 'I breathed more freely, speaking became

easier to me; and my audience, far from becoming impatient,

gave me an attention and applause doubly grateful to one

whose only hope had been to avoid a fiasco. Castelar greeted

me at the close with a warm hand-grasp and beaming eyes,

saying, 'We ought to be well satisfied, Emilia; we have

achieved a notable and brilliant success; let us be happy,

then!'"

Probably the Señora de Bazán learned her lesson well, and had no need of

the friendly admonitions of Castelar when she came to address the

distinguished audience at the Ateneo, for she is said to have "looked

very much at ease," and to have been very well received, but a good deal

criticised afterward, being the first Spanish woman who ever dared to

read in the Ateneo.

Turning from the authoress to the work, I will only add that I hope the

American reader may find it to be what it seemed to me as I read it in

Spanish,--an epitome of a vast and elaborate subject, and a guide to a

clear path through this maze which without a guide can hardly be clear

to any but a profound student of belles-lettres; for classicism,

romanticism, and realism are technical terms, and the purpose of the

modern novel is only just beginning to be understood by even fairly

intelligent readers. In the belief that the interest awakened by Russian

literature is not ephemeral, and that this great, young, and original

people has come upon the world's stage with a work to perform before the

world's eye, I have translated this careful, critical, synthetical study

of the Russian people and literature for the benefit of my intelligent

countrymen.

F.H.G.

Chicago, March, 1890.

CONTENTS.

Book I.

THE EVOLUTION OF RUSSIA.

I. Scope and Purpose of the Present Essay

II. The Russian Country

III. The Russian Race

IV. Russian History

V. The Russian Autocracy

VI. The Agrarian Communes

VII. Social Classes in Russia

VIII. Russian Serfdom

Book II.

RUSSIAN NIHILISM AND ITS LITERATURE.

I. The Word "Nihilism"

II. Origin of the Intellectual Revolution

III. Woman and the Family

IV. Going to the People

V. Herzen and the Nihilist Novel

VI. The Reign of Terror

VII. The Police and the Censor

Book III.

RISE OF THE RUSSIAN NOVEL.

I. The Beginnings of Russian Literature

II. Russian Romanticism.--The Lyric Poets

III. Russian Realism: Gogol, its Founder

Book IV.

MODERN RUSSIAN REALISM.

I. Turguenief, Poet and Artist

II. Gontcharof and Oblomovism

III. Dostoiëwsky, Psychologist and Visionary

IV. Tolstoï, Nihilist and Mystic

V. French Realism and Russian Realism

Book I.

THE EVOLUTION OF RUSSIA.

I.

Scope And Purpose of the Present Essay.

The idea of writing something about Russia, the Russian novel, and

Russian social conditions (all of which bear an intimate relationship to

one another), occurred to me during a sojourn in Paris, where I was

struck with the popularity and success achieved by the Russian authors,

and especially the novelists. I remember that it was in the month of

March, 1885, that the Russian novel "Crime and Punishment," by

Dostoiëwsky, fell into my hands and left on my mind a deep impression.

Circumstances prevented my following up at that time my idea of literary

work on the subject; but the next winter I had nothing more important to

do than to make my projected excursion into this new realm.

My interest was quickened by all the reports I read of those who had

done the same. They all declared that one branch of Russian literature,

that which flourishes to-day in every part of Europe, namely, the novel,

has no rival in any other nation, and that the so much discussed

tendency to the pre-eminence of truth in art, variously called realism,

naturalism, etc., has existed in the Russian novel ever since the

Romantic period, a full quarter of a century earlier than in France. I

saw also that the more refined and select portion of the Parisian

public, that part which boasts an educated and exacting taste, bought

and devoured the works of Turguenief, Tolstoï, and Dostoiëwsky with as

much eagerness as those of Zola, Goncourt, and Daudet; and it was

useless to ascribe this universal eagerness merely to a conspiracy

intended to produce jealousy and humiliation among the masters and

leaders of naturalism or realism in France, even though I may be aware

that such a conspiracy tacitly exists, as well as a certain amount of

involuntary jealousy, which, in fact, even the most illustrious artist

is prone to display.

I do not ignore the objections that might be urged against going to

foreign lands in search of novelties, and I should decline to face them

if Russian literature were but one of the many caprices of the exhausted

Parisian imagination. I know very well that the French capital is a city

of novelties, hungry for extravagances which may entertain for a moment

and appease its yawning weariness, and that to this necessity for

diversion the _decadent_ school (which has lately had such a revival,

and claims the aberrations of the Spanish Gongora as its master), though

aided by some talent and some technical skill, owes the favor it enjoys.

Some years ago I attended a concert in Paris, where I heard an orchestra

of Bohemians, or Zingaras, itinerant musicians from Hungary. I was

asked my opinion of them at the close, and I frankly confessed that the

orchestra sounded to me very like a jangling of mule-bells or a

caterwauling; they were only a little more tolerable than a street band

of my own country (Spain), and only because these were gypsies were

their scrapings to be endured at all. Literary oddities are puffed and

made much of by certain Parisian critics very much as the Bohemian

musicians were, as, for example, the Japanese novel "The Loyal Ronins,"

and certain romantic sketches of North American origin.

It is but just, nevertheless, to acknowledge that in France the mania

for the exotic has a laudable aim and obeys an instinct of equity. To

know everything, to call nothing outlandish, to accord the highest right

of human citizenship, the right of creating their own art and of

sacrificing according to their own rites and customs on the altar sacred

to Beauty, not only to the great nations, but to the decayed and obscure

ones,--this surely is a generous act on the part of a people endowed

with directive energies; the more so as, in order to do this, the French

have to overcome a certain petulant vanity which naturally leads them to

consider themselves not merely the first but the only people.

But confining myself now to Russia, I do not deny that to my curiosity

there were added certain doubts as to the value of her literary

treasures. During my investigations, however, I have discovered that,

apart from the intrinsic merit of her famous authors, her literature

must attract our attention because of its intimate connections with

social, political, and historical problems which are occupying the mind

of Europe to-day, and are outcomes of the great revolutionary movement,

unless it would be more correct to say that they inspired and directed

that movement.

I take this opportunity to confess frankly that I lack one almost

indispensable qualification for my task,--the knowledge of the Russian

language. It would have been easy for me, during my residence in Paris,

to acquire a smattering of it perhaps, enough to conceal my ignorance

and to enable me to read some selections in poetry and prose; but not so

easy thus to learn thoroughly a language which for intricacy, splendid

coloring, and marvellous flexibility and harmony can only be compared,

in the opinion of philologists, to the ancient Greek. Of what use then a

mere smattering, which would be insufficient to give to my studies a

positive character and an indisputable authority? Two years would not

have been too long to devote to such an accomplishment, and in that

length of time new ideas, different lines of thought, and unexpected

obstacles might perhaps arise; the opportunity would be gone and my plan

would have lost interest.

Still, I mentioned my scruples on this head to certain competent

persons, and they agreed that ignorance of the Russian language, though

an ignorance scarcely uncommon, would be an insuperable difficulty if I

proposed to write a didactic treatise upon Russian letters, instead of

a rapid review or a mere sketch in the form of a modest essay or two.

They added that the best Russian books were translated into French or

German, and that in these languages, and also in English and Italian,

had been published several able and clever works relative to Muscovite

literature and institutions, solid enough foundations upon which to

build my efforts.

It may be said, and with good reason, that if I could not learn the

language I might at least have made a trip to Russia, and like Madame de

Staël when she revealed to her countrymen the culture of a foreign land,

see the places and people with my own eyes. But Russia is not just

around the corner, and the women of my country, though not cowardly, are

not accustomed to travel so intrepidly as for example the women of Great

Britain. I have often envied the good fortune of that clever Scotchman,

Mackenzie Wallace, who has explored the whole empire of Russia, ridden

in sleighs over her frozen rivers, chatted with peasants and _popes_,

slept beneath the tents of the nomadic tribes, and shared their offered

refreshment of fermented mare's-milk, the only delicacy their

patriarchal hospitality afforded. But I acknowledge my deficiencies, and

can only hope that some one better qualified than I may take up and

carry on this imperfect and tentative attempt.

I have tried to supply from other sources those things which I lacked.

Not only have I read everything written upon Russia in every language

with which I am acquainted, but I have associated myself with Russian

writers and artists, and noted the opinions of well-informed persons

(who often, however, be it said in parenthesis, only served to confuse

me by their differences and opposition). A good part of the books (a

list of which I give at the end) were hardly of use to me, and I read

them merely from motives of literary honesty. To save continual

references I prefer to speak at once and now of those which I used

principally: Mackenzie Wallace's work entitled "Russia" abounds in

practical insight and appreciation; Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu's "The Empire

of the Czars" is a profound, exact, and finished study, so acknowledged

even by the Russians themselves in their most just and calm judgments;

Tikomirov's "Russia, Political and Social" is clear and comprehensible,

though rather radical and passionate, as might be expected of the work

of an exile; Melchior de Voguié's "The Russian Novel" is a critical

study of incomparable delicacy, though I do not always acquiesce in his

conclusions. From these four books, to which I would add the remarkable

"History of Russia" by Rambaud, I have drawn copious draughts; and

giving them this mention, I may dispense with further reference to

them.

II.

The Russian Country.

If we consider the present state of European nations, we shall observe a

decided decline of the political fever which excited them from about the

end of the last century to the middle of the present one. A certain

calm, almost a stagnation with some, has followed upon the conquest of

rights more craved than appreciated. The idea of socialistic reforms is

agitated darkly and threateningly among the masses, openly declaring

itself from time to time in strikes and riots; but on the other hand,

the middle classes almost everywhere are anxious for a long respite in

which to enjoy the new social conditions created by themselves and for

themselves. The middle classes represent the largest amount of

intellectual force; they have withdrawn voluntarily (through egoism,

prudence, or indifference) from active political fields, and renounced

further efforts in the line of experiment; the arts and letters, which

are in the main the work of well-to-do people, cry out against this

withdrawal, and, losing all social affinities, become likewise isolated.

France possesses at this moment that form of government for which she

yearned so long and so convulsively; yet she has not found in it the

sort of well-being she most desired,--that industrial and economical

prosperity, that coveted satisfaction and compensation which should

restore to the Cock of Brenus his glittering spurs and scarlet crest.

She is at peace, but doubtful of herself, always fearful of having to

behold again the vandalism of the Commune and the catastrophes of the

Prussian invasion. Italy, united and restored, has not regained her

place as a European power, nor, in rising again from her glorious ashes,

can she reanimate the dust of the heroes, the great captains and the

sublime artists, that lie beneath her monuments. And it is not only the

Latin nations that stand in more or less anxious expectation of the

future. If France has established her much desired republic, and Italy

has accomplished her union, England also has tasted all the fruits of

the parliamentary system, has imparted her vigor to magnificent

colonies, has succeeded in impressing her political doctrines and her

positive ideas of life upon the whole continent; while Germany has

obtained the military supremacy and the amalgamation of the fatherland

once dismembered by feudalism, as well as the fulfilment of the old

Teutonic dream of Cæsarian power and an imperial throne,--a dream

cherished since the Middle Ages. For the Saxon races the hour of change

has sounded too; in a certain way they have fulfilled their destinies,

they have accomplished their historic work, and I think I see them like

actors on the stage declaiming the closing words of their rôles.

One plain symptom of what I have described seems to me to be the

draining off of their creative forces in the domain of art. What

proportion does the artistic energy of England and Germany bear to

their political strength? None at all. No names nowadays cross the

Channel to be put up beside--I will not say those of Shakspeare and

Byron, but even those of Walter Scott and Dickens; there is no one to

wear the mantle of the illustrious author of "Adam Bede," who was the

incarnation of the moral sense and temperate realism of her country, and

at the same time an eloquent witness to the extent and limit allowed by

these two tendencies, both of puritanic origin, to the laws of æsthetics

and poetry. On the other side of the Rhine the tree of Romance is dry,

though its roots are buried in the mysterious sub-soil of legend, and

beneath its branches pass and repass the heroes of the ballads of Bürger

and Goethe, and within its foliage are crystallized the brilliant

dialectics of Hegel. To put it plainly, Germany to-day produces nothing

within herself, particularly if we compare this to-day with the not

distant yesterday.

But I would be less general, and set forth my idea in a clearer manner.

It is not my purpose to sacrifice on the altar of my theme the genius of

all Europe. I recognize willingly that there are in every nation writers

worthy of distinction and praise, and not only in nations of the first

rank but in some also of second and third, as witness those of Portugal,

Belgium, Sweden, modern Greece, Denmark, and even Roumania, which can

boast a queenly authoress, extremely talented and sympathetic. I merely

say--and to the intelligent reader I need give but few reasons why--that

it is easy to distinguish the period in which a people, without being

actually sterile, and even displaying relatively a certain fecundity

which may deceive the superficial observer, yet ceases to produce

anything virile and genuine, or to possess vital and creative powers.

To this general rule I consider France an exception, for she is really

the only nation which, since the close of the Romantic period, has seen

any spontaneous literary production great enough to traverse and

influence all Europe,--a phenomenon which cannot be explained by the

mere fact of the general use of the French tongue and customs. It will

be understood that I refer to the rise and success of Realism, and that

I speak of it in a large sense, not limiting my thoughts to the master

minds, but considering it in its entirety, from its origin to its newest

ramifications, from its antecedent encyclopedists to its latest echoes,

the pessimists, _decadents_, and other fanatics. Looking at what are

called French naturalists or realists in a group, as a unity which

obliterates details, I cannot deny to France the glory of presenting to

the world in the second half of this century a literary development,

which, even if it carries within itself the germs of senility and

decrepitude (namely, the very materialism which is its philosophic

basis, its very extremes and exaggerations, and its erudite, and

reflective character, a quality which however unapparent is nevertheless

perfectly demonstrable), yet it shows also the vigor of a renaissance in

its valiant affirmation of artistic truth, its zeal in maintaining this,

in the faith with which it seeks this truth, and in the effectiveness

of its occasional revelations thereof. When party feeling has somewhat

subsided, French realism will receive due thanks for the impulse it has

communicated to other peoples; not a lamentable impulse either, for

nations endowed with robust national traditions always know how to give

form and shape to whatever comes to them from without, and those only

will accept a completed art who lack the true conditions of nationality,

even though they figure as States on the map.

There are two great peoples in the world which are not in the same

situation as the Latin and Saxon nations of Europe,--two peoples which

have not yet placed their stones in the world's historic edifice. They

are the great transatlantic republic and the colossal Sclavonic

empire,--the United States and Russia.

What artistic future awaits the young North American nation? That land

of material civilization, free, happy, with wise and practical

institutions, with splendid natural resources, with flourishing commerce

and industries, that people so young yet so vigorous, has acquired

everything except the acclimatization in her vast and fertile territory

of the flower of beauty in the arts and letters. Her literature, in

which such names as Edgar Poe shine with a world-wide lustre, is yet a

prolongation of the English literature, and no more. What would that

country not give to see within herself the glorious promise of that

spirit which produced a Murillo, a Cervantes, a Goethe, or a Meyerbeer,

while she covers with gold the canvases of the mediocre painters of

Europe!

But that art and literature of a national character may be spontaneous,

a people must pass through two epochs,--one in which, by the process of

time, the myths and heroes of earlier days assume a representative

character, and the early creeds and aspirations, still undefined by

reflection, take shape in popular poetry and legend; the other in which,

after a period of learning, the people arises and shakes off the outer

crust of artificiality, and begins to build conscientiously its own art

upon the basis of its never-forgotten traditions. The United States was

born full-grown. It never passed through the cloudland of myth; it is

utterly lacking in that sort of popular poetry which to-day we call

folk-lore.

But when a nation carries within itself this powerful and prolific seed,

sooner or later this will sprout. A people may be silent for long years,

for ages, but at the first rays of its dawning future it will sing like

the sphinx of Egypt. Russia is a complete proof of this truth. Perhaps

no other nation ever saw its æsthetic development unfold so

unpromisingly, so cramped and so stunted. The stiff and unyielding

garments of French classicism have compressed the spirit of its national

literature almost to suffocation; German Romanticism, since the

beginning of this century, has lorded it triumphantly there more than in

any other land. But in spite of so many obstacles, the genius of Russia

has made a way for itself, and to-day offers us a sight which other

nations can only parallel in their past history; namely, the sudden

revelation of a national literature.

I do not mean to prophesy for others an irremediable sterility or

decadence; I merely confine myself to noting one fact: Russia is at this

moment the only young nation in Europe,--the last to arrive at the

banquet. The rest live upon their past; this one sets out now

impetuously to conquer the future. Over Russia are passing at present

the hours of dawn, the golden days, the times that after a while will be

called classic; some even of the men whom generations to come will call

their glorious ancestors are living now. I insist upon this view in

order to explain the curiosity which this empire of the North has

aroused in Europe, and also to explain why so much thoughtful and

serious study and attention is given to Russia by all foreigners; while

every book or article on such a country as Spain, for instance, is full

of so many careless and superficial errors. That elegant and subtle

author, Voguié, in writing of Léon Tolstoï, says that this Russian

novelist is so great that he seems to belong to the dead,--meaning to

express in this wise the idea that the magnitude of Tolstoï's genius

annuls the laws of temporal criticism by which we are accustomed to see

the glory of our contemporaries less or more than the reality. I would

apply Voguié's phrase to the Russian national literature as a whole.

Though I see it arise before my very eyes, yet I view it amid the halo

of prestige enjoyed only by things that have been.

There is indeed no parallel to it anywhere. The modern phenomenon of the

resurrection of local literatures, and the reappearance of forgotten or

amalgamated races, bears no analogy to this Russian movement; for apart

from the fact that the former represents a protest by race individualism

against dominant nationalities, and the latter, on the contrary, bears

the seal of strong unity of sentiment (which distinguishes Russia), it

must be borne in mind that local literatures are reactionary in

themselves,--restorers of traditions more or less forgotten and lost

sight of,--while Russian literature is an innovation, which accepts the

past, not as its ideal, but as its root.

I have heard Émile Zola say, with his usual ingenuousness, that between

his own spirit and that of the Russian novel there was something like a

haze. This gray vapor may be the effect of the northern mist which is so

asphyxiating to Latin brains, or it may be owing to the eccentricity

which sometimes produces a work entirely independent of accepted social

notions and historical factors. In order to dissipate this haze, this

mist, I must devote a part of this essay to a study of the race, the

natural conditions, the history, the institutions, the social and

political state of Russia, especially to that revolutionary

effervescence known as Nihilism. Without such a preliminary study I

could scarcely give any idea of this literary phenomenon.

Let us, then, cross the Russian frontier and enter her colossal expanse,

without being too much abashed by its size, which, says Humboldt, is

greater than that of the disk of the full moon. Really, when we cast our

eyes upon the map, fancy refuses to believe or to conceive that so large

an extent of territory can form but one nation and obey but one man. We

are amazed by its geographical bigness, and a sentiment of respect

involuntarily enters the mind, together with the instinctive conviction

that God has not modelled the body of this Titan without having in view

for it some admirable historical destiny to be achieved by the fine

diplomacy of Providence. Truly it is God's handiwork, as is proved by

its solid unity,--geographical as well as ethnographical,--and its

duration as an independent empire. Russia is no artificial

conglomeration, nor a federation of States,--each with distinct internal

life and traditions,--the result of conquest or of the necessity of

resistance to a common enemy; for while the strife against the nomadic

Asiatics may have contributed to solidify her union, it was Nature that

predisposed her to a community of aspirations and political existence.

There are islands like Sicily, peninsulas like Spain, whose territory,

though so small, is far more easily subdivided than Russia, which is

intersected by no mountain chains, and which is everywhere connected by

rivers,--water-ways of communication. The vast surface of Russia is like

a piece of cloth which unfolds everywhere alike, seamless and level. The

northern regions, which produce lumber, cannot exist without the

southern regions, which produce cereals; the two halves of Russia are

complementary; there is nowhere any conception of the provincialisms

which honeycomb the Spanish peninsula; and in spite of the imposing

magnitude of the nation, which at first glance would seem necessarily

divided into different if not inimical provinces, especially those most

distant, the cohesion is so strong that all Russia considers herself,

not so much a state as a family, subject to the law of a father; and

Father they call, with tender familiarity, the Autocrat of all the

Russias. Even to-day the name of the famous Mazeppa, who tried to

separate Ukrania from Russia, is a term of insult in the Ukranian

dialect, and his name is cursed in their temples. To this sublime

sentiment Russia owes that national independence which the other

Sclavonic peoples have lost.

III.

The Russian Race.

It is no hindrance to Muscovite unity that within it there are two

completely opposing elements, namely, the Germanic and the Semitic. The

influence of the Germans is about as irritating to the Russians as was

that of the Flemings to the Spaniards under Charles V. They are petted

and protected by the government, especially in the Baltic provinces, all

the while that the Russians accuse them of having introduced two

abominations,--bureaucracy and despotism. But even more aggravating to

the Russian is the Jewish usurer, who since the Middle Ages has fastened

himself like a leach upon producer and consumer, and who, if he does not

borrow or lend, begs; and if he does not beg, carries on some

suspicious business. A nation within a nation, the Jews are sometimes

made the victims of popular hatred; the usually gentle Russians

sometimes rise in sudden wrath, and the newspapers report to us dreadful

accounts of an assault and murder of Hebrews.

Russian national unity is not founded, however, upon community of race;

on the contrary, nowhere on the globe are the races and tribes more

numerous than those that have spread over that illimitable territory

like the waves of the sea; and as the high tide washes away the marks of

every previous wave, and levels the sandy surface, these divers races

have gone on stratifying, each forgetful of its distinct origin. Those

who study Russian ethnography call it a chaos, and declare that at least

twenty layers of human alluvium exist in European Russia alone, without

counting the emigrations of prehistoric peoples whose names are lost in

oblivion. And yet from these varied races and origins--Scythians,

Sarmatians, Kelts, Germans, Goths, Tartars, and Mongols--has proceeded a

most homogeneous people, a most solid coalescence, little given to

treasuring up ancient rights and lost causes. Geographical oneness has

superseded ethnographical variety, and created a moral unity stronger

than all other.

When so many races spread themselves over one country, it becomes

necessary and inevitable that one shall exercise sovereignty. In Russia

this directive and dominant race was the Sclav, not because of numerical

superiority, but from a higher character more adaptable to European

civilization, and perhaps by virtue of its capability for expansion.

Compare the ethnographical maps of Russia in the ninth and nineteenth

centuries. In the ninth the Sclavs occupy a spot which is scarcely a

fifth part of European Russia; in the nineteenth the spot has spread

like oil, covering two thirds of the Russian map. And as the Sclavonic

inundation advances, the inferior races recede toward the frozen pole or

the deserts of Asia. When the monk Nestor wrote the first account of

Russia, the Sclavs lived hedged in by Lithuanians, Turks, and Finns;

to-day they number above sixty million souls.

Thus it is once more demonstrated that to the Aryan race, naturally and

without violence, is reserved the pre-eminence in modern civilization. A

thousand years ago northern Russia was peopled by Finnish tribes; in

still more recent times the Asiatic fisherman cast his nets where now

stands the capital of Peter the Great; and yet without any war of

extermination, without any emigration of masses, without persecutions,

or the deprivation of legal privileges, the aboriginal Finns have

subsided, have been absorbed,--have become Russianized, in a word.

This is not surprising, perhaps, to us who believe in the absolute

superiority of the Indo-European race, noble, high-minded, capable of

the loftiest and profoundest conceptions possible to the human

intellect. I may say that the Russian ethnographical evolution may be

compared with that of my own country, if we may trust recent and

well-authenticated theories. The most remote peoples of Russia were,

like those of Spain, of Turanian origin, with flattish faces, and high

cheek-bones, speaking a soft-flowing language; and to this day, as in

Spain also, one may see in some of the physiognomies clear traces of the

old blood in spite of the predominance of the invading Aryan. In Spain,

perhaps, the aboriginal Turanian bequeathed no proofs of intellectual

keenness to posterity, and the famous Basque songs and legends of Lelo

and Altobizkar may turn out to be merely clever modern tricks of

imitation; but in Russia the Finnish element, whose influence is yet

felt, shows great creative powers. One of the richest popular

literatures known to the researches of folk-lore is the epic cycle of

Finland called the Kalevala, which compares with the Sanscrit poems of

old.

A Castilian writer of note, absent at present from his country, in

writing to me privately his opinions on Russia, said that the

civilization which we behold has been created, so far as concerns its

good points, exclusively by the Mediterranean race dwelling around that

sea of inspiration which stretches from the Pillars of Hercules to Tyre

and Sidon; that sea which brought forth prophets, incarnate gods, great

captains and navigators, arch-philosophers, and the geniuses of mankind.

Recently the most celebrated of our orators has stirred up in Paris some

Greco-Latin manifestations whose political opportuneness is not to the

point just here, but whose ethnographical significance, seeking to

divide Europe into northern barbarians and civilized Latin folk,--just

as happened at the fall of the Roman Empire,--is of no benefit to me.

Who would listen without protest nowadays to the famous saying that the

North has given us only iron and barbarism, or read tranquilly Grenville

Murray's exclamation in an access of Britannic patriotism, "Russia will

fall into a thousand pieces, the common fate of barbarous States!" The

intelligence of the hearers would be offended, for they would recall the

part played in universal civilization by Germans and Saxons,--Germany,

Holland, England; but confining myself to the subject in hand, I cannot

credit those who taunt the Sclav with being a barbarian, when he is as

much an Aryan, a descendant of Japhet, as the Latin, descended as much

as he from the sacred sources beside which lay the cradle of humanity,

and where it first received the revelation of the light. Knowing their

origin, are we to judge the Sclav as the Greeks, the contemporaries of

Herodotus, did the Scythian and the Sarmatian, relegating him forever to

the cold eternal night of Cimmerian regions?

It is nothing remarkable that, in the varied fortunes of this great

Indo-European family of races, if the Kelt came early to the front, the

Sclav came correspondingly late. Who can explain the causes of this

diversity of destiny between the two branches that most resemble each

other on this great tree?

In the study of Russian writings I was ofttimes surprised at the

resemblances in the character, customs, and modes of thought of the

Russian _mujik_ to those of the peasants of Gallicia (northern Spain),

my native province. Then I read in various authors that the Sclav is

more like the Kelt than like his other ancestors, which observation

applied equally well to my own people. Perhaps the Kelt brought to Spain

and France the first seeds of civilization; but the superiority of the

Greek and the Latin obliterated the traces of that primitive culture

which has left us no written monuments. More fortunate is the Sclav, the

last to put his hand to the great work, for he is sure of leaving the

marks of his footprints upon the sands of time.

It is undeniable that he has come late upon the world's stage, and after

the ages of inspiration and of brilliant historic action have passed. It

sometimes seems now as though the brain of the world had lost its

freshness and plastic quality, as though every possible phase of

civilization had been seen in Greece and Rome, the Middle Ages and the

Renaissance, and in the scientific and political development of our own

day. But the backwardness of the Russian has been caused by no

congenital inferiority of race; his quickness and aptitude are apparent,

and sufficient to prove it is the rich treasure of popular poetry to be

found among the peoples of Sclav blood,--Servians, Russians, and Poles.

Such testimony is irrefutable, and is to groups of peoples what

articulate speech is to the individual in the zoological scale. What the

Romanceros are to the Spaniard, the Bilinas are to the Russian,--an

immense collection of songs in which the people have immortalized the

memory of persons and events indelibly engraved on their imagination; a

copious spring, a living fountain, whither the future bards of Russia

must return to drink of originality. What the poem of the Cid represents

to Spain, and the Song of Roland to France, is symbolized for the

Russian by the Song of the Tribe of Igor, the work of some anonymous

Homer,--a pantheistic epic impregnated with the abounding and almost

overwhelming sense of realism which seems to preponderate in the

literary genius of Russia.

History--and I use this word in the broadest sense known to us

to-day--thrusts some nations to the fore, as the Latins, for example;

others, like the Sclavs, she holds back, restraining their instinctive

efforts to make themselves heard. We are accustomed to say that Russia

is an Asiatic country, and that the Russian is a Tartar with a thin coat

of European polish. The Mongolian element must certainly be taken into

account in a study of Muscovite ethnography, in spite of the supremacy

of the Byzantine and Tartar influence, and in order to understand

Russia. In the interior of European Russia the ugly _Kalmuk_ is still to

be seen, and who can say how many drops of Asiatic blood run in the

veins of some of the most illustrious Russian families? Yet within this

question of purity of race lies a scientific and social _quid_ easily

demonstrable according to recent startling biological theories, and only

the thoughtless will censure the old Spaniards for their efforts to

prove their blood free of any taint of Moor or Jew. Russia, with her

double nature of European and Asiatic, seems like a princess in a

fairy-tale turned to stone by a malignant sorcerer's art, but restored

to her natural and living form by the magic word of some valiant knight.

Her face, her hands, and her beautiful figure are already warm and

life-like, but her feet are still immovable as stone, though the damsel

struggles for the fulness of reanimation; even so Imperial Russia

strives to become entirely European, to free herself from Asiatic

inertia to-day.

Apart from the undeniable Asiatic influence, we must consider the

extreme and cruel climate as among the causes of her backwardness. The

young civilization flourishes under soft skies, beside blue seas whose

soft waves lave the limbs of the new-born goddess. Where Nature

ill-treats man he needs twice the time and labor to develop his vocation

and tendencies. To us of a more temperate zone, the description of the

rigorous and overpowering climate of Russia is as full of terrors as

Dante's Inferno. The formation of the land only adds to the trying

conditions of the atmosphere. Russia consists of a series of plains and

table-lands without mountains, without seas or lakes worthy of the

name,--for those that wash her coasts are considered scarcely navigable.

The only fragments of a mountain system are known by the generic and

expressive term _ural_, meaning a girdle; and in truth they serve only

to engirdle the whole territory. To an inhabitant of the interior the

sight of a mountainous country is entirely novel and surprising. Almost

all the Russian poets and novelists exiled to the Caucasus have found an

unexpected fountain of inspiration in the panorama which the mountains

afforded to their view. The hero of Tolstoï's novel "The Cossacks," on

arriving at the Caucasus for the first time, and finding himself face to

face with a mountain, stands mute and amazed at its sublime beauty.

"What is that?" he asked the driver of his cart.

"The mountain," is the indifferent reply.

"What a beautiful thing!" exclaims the traveller, filled with

enthusiasm. "Nobody at home can imagine anything like it!" And he loses

himself in the contemplation of the snow-covered crests rising abruptly

above the surface of the steppes.

The oceans that lie upon the boundaries of Russia send no refreshing

breezes over her vast continental expanse, for the White Sea, the

Arctic, the Baltic, and sometimes the Caspian, are often ice-bound,

while the waves of the Sea of Asof are turbid with the slime of marshes.

Neither does Russia enjoy the mild influence of the Gulf Stream, whose

last beneficent waves subside on the shores of Scandinavia. The winds

from the Arctic region sweep over the whole surface unhindered all the

winter long, while in the short summer the fiery breath of the central

Asian deserts, rolling over the treeless steppes, bring an intolerable

heat and a desolating drought. Beyond Astrakan the mercury freezes in

winter and bursts in the summer sun. Under the rigid folds of her winter

shroud Russia sleeps the sleep of death long months at a time, and upon

her lifeless body slowly and pauselessly fall the "white feathers" of

which Herodotus speaks; the earth becomes marble, the air a knife. A

snow-covered country is a beautiful sight when viewed through a

stereopticon, or from the comfortable depths of a fur-lined,

swift-gliding sleigh; but snow is a terrible adversary to human

activity. If its effects are not as dissipating as excessive heat, it

none the less pinches the soul and paralyzes the body. In extreme

climates man has a hard time of it, and Nature proves the saying of

Goethe: "It envelops and governs us; we are incapable of combating it,

and likewise incapable of eluding its tyrannical power." Formidable in

its winter sleep, Nature appears even more despotic perhaps in its

violent resurrection, when it breaks its icy bars and passes at once

from lethargy to an almost fierce and frenzied life. In the spring-time

Russia is an eruption, a surprise; the days lengthen with magic

rapidity; the plants leaf out, and the fruits ripen as though by

enchantment; night comes hardly at all, but instead a dusky twilight

falls over the land; vegetation runs wild, as though with impatience,

knowing that its season of happiness will be short. The great writer,

Nicolaï Gogol, depicts the spring-time on the Russian steppes in the

following words:

"No plough ever furrowed the boundless undulations of this

wild vegetation. Only the unbridled herds have ever opened a

path through this impenetrable wilderness. The face of earth

is like a sea of golden verdure, broken into a thousand

shades. Among the thin, dry branches of the taller shrubs

climb the cornflowers,--blue, purple, and red; the broom

lifts its pyramid of yellow flowers; tufts of white clover

dot the dark earth, and beneath their poor shade glides the

agile partridge with outstretched neck. The chattering of

birds fills the air; the sparrow-hawk hangs motionless

overhead, or beats the air with the tips of his wings, or

swoops upon his prey with searching eyes. At a distance one

hears the sharp cry of a flock of wild duck, hovering like a

dark cloud over some lake lost or unseen in the immensity of

the plain. The prairie-gull rises with a rhythmic movement,

bathing his shining plumage in the blue air; now he is a

mere speck in the distance, once more he glistens white and

brilliant in the rays of the sun, and then disappears. When

evening begins to fall, the steppes become quite still;

their whole breadth burns under the last ardent beams; it

darkens quickly, and the long shadows cover the ground like

a dark pall of dull and equal green. Then the vapors

thicken; each flower, each herb, exhales its aroma, and all

the plain is steeped in perfume. The crickets chirp

vigorously.... At night the stars look down upon the

sleeping Cossack, who, if he opens his eyes, will see the

steppes illuminated with sparks of light,--the fireflies.

Sometimes the dark depths of the sky are lighted up by fires

among the dry reeds that line the banks of the little

streams and lakes, and long lines of swans, flying northward

and disclosed to view by this weird light, seem like bands

of red crossing the sky."

Do we not seem to see in this description the growth of this impetuous,

ardent, spasmodic life, goaded on to quick maturity by the knowledge of

its own brevity?

Without entirely accepting Montesquieu's theory as to climate, it is

safe to allow that it contains a large share of truth. It is indubitable

that the influence of climate is to put conditions to man's artistic

development by forcing him to keep his gaze fixed upon the phenomena of

Nature and the alternation and contrast of seasons, and helps to develop

in him a fine pictorial sense of landscape, as in the case of the

Russian writers. In our temperate zone we may live in relative

independence of the outside world, and almost insensible to the

transition from summer to winter. We do not have to battle with the

atmosphere; we breathe it, we float in it. Perhaps for this reason good

word-painters of landscape are few in our (Spanish) literature, and our

descriptive poets content themselves with stale and regular phrases

about the aurora and the sunset. But laying aside this parallel, which

perhaps errs in being over-subtle, I will say that I agree with those

who ascribe to the Russian climate a marked influence in the evolution

of Russian character, institutions, and history.

Enveloped in snow and beaten by the north wind, the Sclav wages an

interminable battle; he builds him a light sleigh by whose aid he

subjects the frozen rivers to his service; he strips the animals of

their soft skins for his own covering; to accustom his body to the

violent transitions and changes of temperature, he steams himself in hot

vapors, showers himself with cold water, and then lashes himself with a

whip of cords, and if he feels a treacherous languor in his blood he

rubs and rolls his body in the snow, seeking health and stimulus from

his very enemy. But strong as is his power of reaction and moral

energy, put this man, overwrought and wearied, beside a genial fire, in

the silence of the tightly closed _isba_, or hut, within his reach a jug

of _kvass_ or _wodka_ (a terrible _fire-water_ more burning than any

other), and, obeying the urgency of the long and cruel cold, he drinks

himself into a drunken sleep, his senses become blunted, and his brain

is overcome with drowsiness. Do not exact of him the persevering

activity of the German, nor talk to him of the public life which is

adapted to the Latin mind. Who can imagine a forum, an oracle, a

tribune, in Russia? Study the effect of an inclement sky upon a Southern

mind in the Elegies of Ovid banished to the Pontus; his reiterated

laments inspire a profound pity, like the piping of a sick bird cowering

in the harsh wind. The poet's greatest dread is that his bones may lie

under the earth of Sarmatia; he, the Latin voluptuary, son of a race

that desires for its dead that the earth may lie lightly on them,

shrinks in anticipation of the cold beyond the tomb, when he thinks that

his remains may one day be covered by that icy soil.

The Sclav is the victim of his climate, which relaxes his fibres and

clouds his spirit. The Sclav, say those who know him well, lacks

tenacity, firmness; he is flexible and variable in his impressions; as

easily enthusiastic as indifferent; fluctuating between opposite

conclusions; quick to assimilate foreign ideas; as quick to rid himself

of them; inclined to dreamy indolence and silent reveries; given to

extremes of exaltation and abasement; in fact, much resembling the

climate to which he has to adapt himself. It needs not be said that

this description, and any other which pretends to sum up the

characteristics of the whole people, must have numerous exceptions, not

only in individual cases but in whole groups within the Russian

nationality: the Southerner will be more lively and vivacious; the

Muscovite (those properly answering to that name) more dignified and

stable; the Finlander, serious and industrious, like the Swiss, to whose

position his own is somewhat analogous. There is in every nation a

psychical as well as physical type to which the rank and file more or

less correspond, and it is only upon a close scrutiny that one notices

differences. The influence of the Tropics upon the human race has never

been denied; we are forced to admit the influence of the Pole also,

which, while beneficial in those lands not too close upon it,

invigorating both bodies and souls and producing those chaste and robust

barbarians who were the regenerators of the effete Empire, yet too

close, it destroys, it annihilates. Who can doubt the effect of the snow

upon the Russian character when it is stated upon the authority of

positive data and statistics that the vice of drunkenness increases in

direct proportion to the degrees of latitude? There is a fine Russian

novel, "Oblomof" (of which I shall speak again later), which is more

instructive than a long dissertation. The apathy, the distinctively

Russian enervation of the hero, puts the languor of the most indolent

Creole quite in the shade, with the difference that in the case of the

Sclav brain and imagination are at work, and his body, if well wrapped,

is able to enjoy the air of a not unendurable temperature.

Not only the rigors of climate but the aspect of the outside world has a

marked influence on character. Ovid in exile lamented having to live

where the fields produced neither fruits nor sweet grapes; he might have

added, had he lived in Russia, where the fields are all alike, where the

eye encounters no variety to attract and please it. Castile is flat and

monotonous like Russia, but there the sky compensates for the nakedness

of the earth, and one cannot be sad beneath that canopy of turquoise

blue. In Russia the dark firmament seems a leaden vault instead of a

silken canopy, and oppresses the breast. The only things to diversify

the immense expanse of earth are the great rivers and the broad belts or

zones of the land, which may be divided into the northern, covered with

forests; the _black lands_, which have been the granary of the empire

from time immemorial; the arable steppes, so beautifully described by

Gogol, like the American prairies, the land of the wild horses of the

Russian heroic age; and lastly, the sandy steppes, sterile deserts only

inhabited by the nomadic shepherds and their flocks. Throughout this

vast body four large arteries convey the life-giving waters: the Dnieper

which brought to Russia the culture of old Byzantium; the Neva, beside

which sits the capital of its modern civilization; the Don, legendary

and romantic; and the Volga, the great _Mother Volga_, the marvellous

river, whose waters produce the most delicious fish in the world.

Without the advantage of these rivers, whose abundance of waters is

almost comparable to an ocean, the plains of Russia would be

uninhabitable. Land, land everywhere, an ocean of land, a uniformity of

soil, no rocks, no hills, so that stone is almost unknown in Russia. St.

Petersburg was the first city not built entirely of wood, and it is an

axiom, that Russian houses, as a rule, burn once in seven years. This

dulness and desolation of Nature's aspect must of course influence brain

and imagination, and consequently must be reflected in the literature,

where melancholy predominates even in satire, and whence is derived a

tendency to pessimism and a sort of religious devotion tinged with

misery and sadness. Indolence, fatalism, inconstancy,--these are the

defects of Russian character; resignation, patience, kindness,

tolerance, humility, its better qualities. Its passive resignation may

be readily transformed into heroism; and Count Léon Tolstoï, in his

military narrative of the "Siege of Sevastopol," and his novel "War and

Peace," studies and portrays in a wonderful way these traits of the

national soul.

IV.

Russian History.

History has been for Russia as inclement and hostile as Nature. A

cursory glance will suffice to show this, and it is foreign to my

purpose to devote more than slight attention to it.

The Greeks, the civilizers of the world, brought their culture to

Colchis and became acquainted with the very southernmost parts of Russia

known as Sarmatia and Scythia. Herodotus has left us minute descriptions

of the inhabitants of the Cimmerian plains, their ways, customs,

religions, and superstitions, distinguishing between the industrious

Scythians who produce and sell grain, and the nomadic Scythians, the

Cossacks, who, depending on their pastures, neither sow nor work. The

Sarmatian region was invaded and subjugated by the northern Sclavs, who

in turn were conquered by the Goths, these by the Huns, and finally,

upon the same field, Huns, Alans, and Bulgarians fought one another for

the mastery. In this first confused period there is no historical

outline of the Russia that was to be. Her real history begins in a, to

us, strange event, whose authenticity historical criticism may question,

but which is the basis of all tradition concerning the origin of Russian

institutions; I mean the famous message sent by the Sclavs to those

Norman or Scandinavian princes, those daring adventurers, the Vikings

supposedly (but it matters not), saying to this effect, more or less:

"Our land is broad and fertile, but there is neither law nor justice

within it; come and possess it and govern it."

Upon the foundation provided by this strange proceeding many very

original theories and philosophical conclusions have been built

concerning Russian history; and the partisans of autocracy and the

ancient order of things consider it a sure evidence that Russia was

destined by Heaven to acknowledge an absolute power of foreign

derivation, and to bow voluntarily to its saving yoke. Whether the

triumphal rulers were Normans or Scandinavians or the original Sclavs,

it is certain that with their appearance on the scene as the element of

military strength and of disciplined organization, the history of Russia

begins: the date of this foreign admixture (which would be for us a day

of mourning and shame) Russia to-day celebrates as a glorious

millennium. Heroic Russia came into being with the Varangian or Viking

chieftains, and it is that age which provides the subject of the

_bilinas_; it was the ninth century after Christ, at the very moment

when the epic and romantic life of Spain awoke and followed in the train

of the Cid.

With the establishment of order and good government among the Sclavs,

Rurik founded the nation, as certainly as he founded later the legendary

city of Novgorod, and his brother and successor, Olaf, that of Kief,

mother of all the Russian cities. It fell to Rurik's race also to give

the signal for that secular resistance which even to-day Russia

maintains toward her perpetual enemy, Constantinople; the Russian fleets

descended the Dnieper to the Byzantine seas to perish again and again

under the Greek fire. Russia received also from this same Byzantium,

against which her arms are ever turned, the Christian religion, which

was delivered to Olga by Constantine Porfirogenitus. Who shall say what

a change there might have been over the face of the earth if the

Oriental Sclavs had received their religion from Rome, like the Poles?

Olga was the Saint Clotilde of Russia; in Vladimir we see her

Clodovicus. He was a sensuous and sanguinary barbarian, though at times

troubled with religious anxieties, who at the beginning of his reign

upheld paganism and revived the worship of idols, at whose feet he

sacrificed the Christians. But his darkened conscience was tortured

nevertheless by aspirations toward a higher moral light, and he opened a

discussion on the subject of the best religion known to mankind. He

dismissed Mahometanism because it forbade the use of the red wine which

rejoiceth the heart of man; Judaism because its adherents were wanderers

over the face of the earth; Catholicism because it was not sufficiently

splendid and imposing. His childish and primitive mind was taken with

the Asiatic splendors of the church of Constantinople, and being already

espoused to the sister of the Byzantine emperor, he returned to his own

country bringing its priests with him, cast his old idols into the

river, and compelled his astonished vassals to plunge into the same

waters and receive baptism perforce, while the divinity he venerated but

yesterday was beaten, smeared with blood, and buried ignominiously.

Happy the people upon whom the gospel has not been forced by a cruel

tyrant, at the point of the sword and under threats of torture, but to

whom it has been preached by a humble apostle, the brother of

innumerable martyrs and saintly confessors! In the twelfth century, when

Christianity inspired us to reconquer our country, Russia, more than

half pagan, wept for her idols, and seemed to see them rising from the

depths of the river demanding adoration. From this corrupt Byzantine

source Russia derived her second civilization, counting as the first

that proceeding from the colonization and commerce of the Greeks, as

related by Herodotus. The dream of Yaroslaus, the Russian Charlemagne,

was to make his capital, Kief, a rival and imitator of Byzantium. From

Byzantium came the arts, customs, and ideas; and it seemed the fate of

the Sclav race to get the pattern for its intellectual life from abroad.

Some Russian thinkers deem it advantageous for their country to have

received its Christianity from Byzantium, and consider it an element of

greater independence that the national Church never arrogated to itself

the supremacy and dominion over the State. Let such advantages be judged

by the rule of autocracy and the nullity of the Greek Church. The

Catholic nations, being educated in a more spiritual and exalted idea of

liberty, have never allowed that the monarch could be lord of the human

conscience, and have never known that monstrous confusion of attributes

which makes the sovereign absolute dictator of souls. The Crusade, that

fecund movement which was the work of Rome, never spread over Russia;

and when the Sclavs fell under the Tartar yoke, the rest of Europe left

her to her fate. Russia's choice of this branch of the Christian

religion was fatal to her dominion over other kindred Sclavs; for it

embittered her rivalry with the Poles, and raised an insurmountable

barrier between Russia and European civilization which was inseparably

intertwined with the Catholic faith even in such phenomena as the

Renaissance, which seems at first glance laic and pagan.

Nevertheless, so much of Christianity as fell to Russia through the

accepted channel sufficed to open to her the doors of the civilized

world, and to rouse her from the torpid sleep of the Oriental. It gave

her the rational and proper form of family life as indicated by

monogamy, whose early adoption is one of the highest and most

distinguishing marks of the Aryan race; and instead of the savage

chieftain surrounded by his fierce vassals always ready for rebellion

and bloodshedding, it gave the idea of a monarch who lives as God's

vicar upon the earth, the living incarnation of law and order,--an idea

which, in times of anarchy and confusion, served to constitute the State

and establish it upon a firm basis. Lastly, Russia owes to Christianity

her ecclesiastical literature, the fount and origin of literary culture

throughout Europe.

In the thirteenth century--that bright and luminous age, the time of

Saint Thomas, of Saint Francis of Assisi, of Dante, of Saint

Ferdinand--Russia was suddenly invaded by the Mongols, and, like locusts

in a corn-field, those hideous and demoniacal foes fell upon her and

made all Christendom tremble, so that the French historian Joinville

records it as a sign of the coming of Antichrist. "For our sins the

unknown nations covered our land," say the Russian chroniclers. Genghis

Khan, after subduing all Asia, drew around him an immense number of

tribes, and fell upon Russia with irresistible force, sowing the land

with skulls as the flower of the field sows it with seeds, and

compelling the once free and wealthy native Boyars to bring grist to the

mill and serve their conquerors as slaves. The Russian towns and princes

performed miracles of heroism, but in vain. The Tartar hordes, let loose

upon those vast plains where their horses found abundant pasture, rolled

over the land like an inundation. In a more varied country, more densely

populated and with better communication, the Tartars would have been

beaten back, as they were from Moravia. Again Nature's hand was upon the

destinies of Russia; the topographical conditions laid her under the

power of the Golden Horde.

This great misfortune not only isolated Russia from the Occident and

left her under Asiatic sway, but it also subjugated her to the growing

autocracy of the Muscovite princes who were becoming formidable

oppressors of their subjects, and they in turn were victims,

tributaries, and vassals of the great Khans. So the invasion came to

exercise a decisive influence upon the institutions of the future

empire, pernicious in consequence of the abnormal development allowed to

monarchical authority, and beneficent inasmuch as it aided forcibly in

the formation of the nationality. At the time of the Mongol irruption

Russia was composed of various independent principalities governed by

the descendants of Rurik; the necessity of opposing the invader

demonstrated the necessity also of uniting all under one sceptre.

Continually chafing at the bit, dissimulating and temporizing with the

enemy by means of clever diplomatic envoys, the princes slowly cemented

their power and prepared the land for a homogeneous state, until one day

the chivalrous Donskoï, the victor at the battle of the Don, opened the

era of reconquest, exclaiming in the exuberance of his first triumph

over the Tartars, "Their day is past, and God is with us!" But Russia's

evil star awoke one of the greatest captains named in history,

Tamerlane, who ruined the work begun by Donskoï, and toward the end of

the fourteenth century once more laid the Muscovite people under

subjection.

At the meeting of the Council of Florence, when the Greek Emperor John

Paleologos agreed to the reunion of the two churches, the prince of

Moscow, Basil the Blind, showed himself blind of soul as well as of eye,

in obstinately opposing such a union, thus cutting off Russia again from

the Occident. When the Turks took Constantinople and consummated the

fall of the Byzantine empire, Moscow became the capital of the Greek

world, the last bulwark of the schismatic church, the asylum of the

remains of a depraved and perishing organism, of the senile decadence of

the last of the Cæsars.

V.

The Russian Autocracy.

Such was the sad situation in Russia at the opening of the period of

European Renaissance, out of which grew the modern age which was to

provide the remedy for her ills through her own tyrants. For without

intending a paradox, I will say that tyranny is the liberator of Russia.

Twice these tyrants who have forced life into her, who have impelled her

toward the future, have been called _The Terrible_,--Ivan III., the

uniter of the provinces, he whose very look made the women faint, and

Ivan IV., the first to use the title of Czar. Both these despots cross

the stage of history like spectres called up by a nightmare: the former

morose, dissimulating, and hypocritical, like Louis XI. of France, whom

he resembles; the latter demented, fanatical, epileptic, and

hot-tempered, clutching his iron pike in hand, with which he transfixed

Russia as one may transfix a fluttering insect with a pin. But these

tyrants, gifted and guided by a saving instinct, created the nation.

Ivan III. instituted the succession to the throne, thus suppressing the

hurtful practice of partition among brothers, and it was he who finally

broke the yoke of the Mongols. Ivan IV. did more yet; he achieved the

actual separation of Europe from Asia, put down the anarchy of the

nobles, and taught them submission to law; and not content with this,

he put himself at the head of the scanty literature of his time, and

while he widened the domains of Russia, he protected within her borders

the establishment of the press, until then persecuted as sacrilegious.

It is difficult to think what would have become of the Russian nation

without her great tyrants. Therefore it is that the memory of Ivan IV.

still lives in the popular imagination, and the Terrible Czar, like

Pedro the Cruel of Spain, is neither forgotten nor abhorred.

The consolidation of the autocratic idea is easily understood in the

light of these historic figures. No wonder that the people accepted it,

from a spirit of self-preservation, since it was despotism that

sustained them, that formed them, so to speak. It is folly to consider

the institutions of a nation as though they were extraneous to it, fruit

of an individual will or of a single event; society obeys laws as exact

as those which regulate the courses of the stars, and the historian must

recognize and fix them.

The autocracy and the unity of Russia were consolidated together by the

genius of Ivan III., who made their emblem the double-headed eagle, and

by Ivan IV., who sacrificed to them a sea of blood. The municipal

autonomies and the petty independent princes frowned, but Russia became

a true nation; at the beginning of the sixteenth century, the brilliant

age of the monarchical principle, no European sovereign could boast of

being so thoroughly obeyed as the sovereign prince of Moscow.

The radical concept of omnipotent power, not tempered as in the West by

the humanity of Catholicism, at once rushed headlong to oppression and

slavery. The ambitious regent Boris Godonof was not long in attaching

the serfs to the soil, and upon the heels of this unscrupulous act

followed the dark and bloody days of the false Demetrii, in which the

serf, irritated by the burden of his chains, welcomed, in every

adventurer, in every impostor, a Messiah come to redeem him. Then the

Poles, the eternal enemies of Russia, seized the Kremlin, the Swedes

threatened to overcome her, and the nation seemed ready to perish had it

not been for the heroism of a butcher and a prince; a suggestive example

of the saving strength which at supreme moments rises up in every

nation.

But one more providential tyrant was needed, the greatest of all, the

most extraordinary man of Russia's history, of the house of Romanoff,

successor to the extinct dynasty of the Terrible Ivans. "Terrible" might

also be applied to the name of the imperial carpenter whose character

and destiny are not unlike those of Ivan IV. Both were precocious in

intellect, both were self-educated, and both cooled their hot youth in

the hard school of abandonment. Out of it came Peter the Great,

determined at all costs to remodel his gigantic empire.

Herodotus relates how the young Anacarsis, on returning from foreign

lands wherein he had learned new arts and sciences, came to Scythia his

native country, and wished to celebrate there a great feast, after the

manner of the Greeks, in honor of the mother of the gods; hearing of

which the king Sarillius impaled him with a lance. He tells also how

another king who wearied of the Scythian mode of living, and craved the

customs of the Greeks, among whom he had been educated, endeavored to

introduce the Bacchanalian dances, himself taking part in them. The

Scythians refused to conform to these novel ideas, and finally cut off

the king's head; for, adds the historian, "The Scythians detest nothing

so much as foreign customs." The tale of Herodotus was in danger of

being repeated at the beginning of the reign of Peter Romanoff. With him

began the battle, not yet ended, between old Russia, which calls itself

Holy, and new Russia, cut after the Western pattern. While Peter

travelled and studied the industry and progress of Europe with the idea

of bringing them to his Byzantine empire, the rebels at home conspired

to dethrone this daring innovator who threatened to use fire and sword,

whips and scourges, the very implements of barbarism, against barbarism

itself.

It is a notable fact in Russian history that none of her mighty

sovereigns was possessed of moral conditions in harmony with the vigor

of their intelligence and will force. Russia has had great emperors but

not good emperors. The halo that wreathes the head of Berenguela of

Castile and Isabel the Catholic, Saint Ferdinand, or Saint Louis,--men

and women in whom the ideal of justice seemed to become incarnate,--is

lacking to Vladimir the Baptizer, to Ivan IV., to Peter the Great.

Among Occidental peoples the monarchy owed its prestige and sacred

authority to good and just kings, vicars of God on earth, who were

impressed with a sense of being called to play a noble part in the drama

of history, conscious of grave responsibilities, and sure of having to

render an account of their stewardship to a Supreme Power. The Czars

present quite a different aspect: they seem to have understood

civilization rather by its externals than by its intrinsic doctrines,

which demand first of all our inward perfecting, our gradual elevation

above the level of the beast, and the continuous affirmation of our

dignity. Therefore they used material force as their instrument, and

spared no means to crown their efforts.

But with all it is impossible to withhold a tribute of admiration to

Peter the Great. That fierce despot, gross and vicious, was not only a

reformer but a hero. Pultowa, which beheld the fall of the power of

Sweden, justified the reforms and the military organization instituted

by the young emperor, and made Russia a European power,--a power

respected, influential, and great. Whatever may be said against war,

whatever sentimental comparisons may be made between the founder and the

conqueror, it must still be admitted that the monarch who leads his

people to victory will lead them _ipse facto_ to new destinies, to a

more glorious and intense historic life.

If Peter the Great had vacillated one degree, if he had squandered time

and opportunity in studying prudent ways and means for planting his

reforms, if his hand had trembled in laying the rod across the backs of

his nobles, or had spared the lash upon the flesh of his own son,

perhaps he would never have achieved the transformation of his Oriental

empire into a European State, a transformation which embraced

everything,--the navy, the army, public instruction, social relations,

commerce, customs, and even the beards of his subjects, the much

respected traditional long beards, mercilessly shaven by order of the

autocrat. In his zeal for illimitable authority, and that his decrees

might meet with no obstacles either in heaven or earth, this Czar

conceived the bright idea of assuming the spiritual power, and having

suppressed the Patriarchy and created the Synod, he held in his hands

the conscience of his people, could count its every pulsation, and wind

it up like a well-regulated clock. What considerations, human or divine,

will check a man who, like Abraham, sacrifices his first-born to an

idea, and makes himself the executioner of his own son?

The race sign was not obliterated from the Russian culture produced by

immoral and short-sighted reformers. A woman of low extraction and

obscure history, elevated to the imperial purple, was the one to

continue the work of Peter the Great; his daughter's favorite became the

protector of public instruction and the founder of the University of

Moscow; a frivolous and dissolute Czarina, Elisabeth Petrowna, modified

the customs, encouraged intellectual pleasures and dramatic

representations, and put Russia in contact with the Latin mind as

developed in France; another empress, a parricide, a usurper and

libertine, who deserves the perhaps pedantic name of the Semiramis of

the North given her by Voltaire, hid her delinquencies under the

splendor of her intellect, the refined delicacy of her artistic tastes,

her gifts as a writer, and her magnificence as a sovereign.

It was the profound and violent shock administered by the hard hand of

Peter the Great that impelled Russia along the road to French culture,

and with equal violence she retraced her steps at the invasion of the

armies of Napoleon. The nobility and the patriots of Russia cursed

France in French,--the language which had been taught them as the medium

of progress; and the nation became conscious of its own individuality in

the hour of trial, in the sudden awakening of its independent instincts.

But in proportion as the nationality arose in its might, the low murmur

of a growing revolution made itself heard. This impulse did not burst

first from the hearts of the people, ground down by the patriarchal

despotism of Old Russia, but from the brain of the educated classes,

especially the nobility. The first sign of the strife, predestined from

the close of the war with the French, was the political repression of

the last years of the reign of Alexander I., and the famous republican

conspiracy of December against Nicholas,--an aristocratic outbreak

contrived by men in whose veins ran the blood of princes. Of these

events I shall speak more fully when I come to the subject of Nihilism;

I merely mention it here in this general glimpse of Russian history.

Menaced by Asia, Russia had willingly submitted to an absolute power,

because, as we have seen, she lacked the elements that had concurred in

the formation of modern Europe. Classic civilization never entered her

veins; she had no other light than that which shone from Byzantium, nor

any other model than that offered by the later empire; she had no place

in the great Catholic fraternity which had its law and its focus in

Rome, and the Mongolian invasion accomplished her complete isolation.

Spain also suffered an invasion of a foreign race, but she pulled

herself together and sustained herself on a war-footing for seven

centuries. Russia could not do this, but bent her neck to the yoke of

the conqueror. Our national character would have chafed indeed to see

the kings of Asturias and Castile, instead of perpetually challenging

the Moors, become their humble vassals, as the Muscovite princes were to

the Khans. With us the struggle for re-conquest, far from exhausting us,

redoubled our thirst for independence,--a thirst born farther back than

that time, in spite of Leroy-Beaulieu's statement, although it was

indeed confirmed and augmented during the progress of that

Hispano-Saracenic Iliad. The Russians being obliged to lay down their

arms, to suffer and to wait, assumed, instead of our ungovernable

vehemence, a patient resignation. But they none the less considered

themselves a nation, and entertained a hope of vindicating their rights,

which they accomplished finally in the overthrow of the Tartars, and in

later days in rising against the French with an impetuosity and

spontaneity almost as savage as Spain had shown in her memorable days.

Moreover, Russia lacked the elements of historic activity necessary to

enable her to play an early part in the work of modern civilization. She

had no feudalism, no nobility (as we understand the term), no chivalry,

no Gothic architecture, no troubadours, no knights. She lacked the

intellectual impetus of mediæval courts, the sturdy exercise of

scholastic disputations, the elucidations of the problems of the human

race, which were propounded by the thirteenth century. She lacked the

religious orders, that network which enclosed the wide edifice of

Catholicism; and the military, uniting in mystic sympathy the ascetic

and chivalric sentiments. She lacked the councils of the laws of modern

rights; and that her lack might be in nothing lacking, she lacked even

the brilliant heresies of the West, the subtle rationalists and

pantheists, the Abelards and Amalrics, whose followers were brilliant

ignoramuses or rank bigots roused by a question of ritual. Lastly, she

lacked the sunny smile of Pallas Athene and the Graces, the Renaissance,

which brightened the face of Europe at the close of the Middle Ages.