" I know of no
nation whose destiny has been more frequently disturbed than
Russia's. It resembles a flowing stream that, owing to violent
upheavals, has several times changed its bed. Like one of those
men who, having been ill-treated by fate, has put his hand to
several different occupations, but has never been successful.
The Western nations developed under far more favourable conditions.
When the barbarians, after the recoil of Islam, had settled
down, they had twelve centuries of comparative peace in which
to work and to develop spontaneously. Revolutions and wars never
completely threw them off the lines on which they had started.
Russia, on the other hand, seems to have been the chosen field
in which to make radical experiments. This process is accompanied
with much oppression. Every two or three centuries, at the moment
when these unfortunate people had settled on a certain line
of progress, their course is headed and turned aside.
It makes one giddy when one realizes
the disordered changes this great body of humanity was subjected
to by sudden collisions with ideas and facts. Barbaric anarchy
due to heathenism and intertribal wars continued in Russia for
two or three centuries after they had ceased with us. Eventually
Christianity appears, but from the Byzant, a source the least
pure, for it is a vitiated Christianity, enervated by that effete
spirit which prevailed in the Eastern Empire. Those Slavs, Lithuanians,
Finns have all now to become Greek in religion, legislature
and government. They begin history anew.
Would it be possible for them to live
and adapt themselves to the senile and exhausted traditions
which were to supplant their old faith? Nevertheless these form
the seed of life, and are the first pledge towards a fusion
with the people of Europe, at this time the chosen leaders in
human affairs. Will this germ have time to ripen?
Two hundred years after the "national
baptisms" at Kiev, Russia was once more disturbed and submerged
under the wave of a Mongolian invasion. It was the ebbtide of
an Asiatic overflow that seized its prey and fastened on the
youngest of the Christian countries - one which had only just
set her course towards Europe. The Tartars entering as heathens
soon went over to Mohammedanism. They remained Asiatics, and
forced oriental customs on their Russian subjects. No one has
been a Tartar subject with impunity. Like the Bulgarians or
the Armenians of modern Turkey, the peoples of the Golden Horde
will for a long time yet carry in their hearts and minds the
marks of the Tartar yoke.
In the fifteenth century, whilst for us the
dawn of Renaissance was already shining, the Russians were only
just commencing to shake off this yoke. A succession of noble
efforts delivers them. Asia steps back, but slowly, for the
Crescent does not disappear from the banks of the Volga till
after 1550. But its spirit remains. The impress of orientalism
will not fade away for some time yet. Russia left to herself,
her people are now crushed by an iron despotism, an admixture
of Mongol customs and Byzantine practices. On a certain inauspicious
day, the day of St. George - of cursed memory to the peasant
for three hundred years - Boris Godunov by one stroke of the
pen condemned them to serfdom, whereby all previous social conditions
were once more changed.
The next century was followed by a fresh
invasion, this time from the West; the Poles occupied half Russia,
and ruled at Moscow. They were in turn driven away, and then
at last the nation could breathe freely again, and could once
more look ahead. In which direction? Towards Europe, or towards
Asia? Her traditions would incline her toward the latter. But
she was once again to be forced out of her natural course. A
rough pilot arose suddenly, and in a moment, with one brutal
shove of his heavy pole, sent off this grand aimlessly floating
raft into the current leading towards Europe.
With Peter the Great the moment arrived,
when commenced perhaps the most singular and unquestionably
the most abnormal attempts for experimenting with the historic
development of a people. Continuing the above figure, imagine
a ship in which the captain and his officers steer for the West
and the crew set their sails for a wind that would carry them
to the East. Such was the curious state of affairs for one hundred
and fifty years, from the advent of Peter the Great up to the
death of the Emperor Nicholas, to which the prevailing habits
still bear witness. At first the sovereign and a few specially
selected individuals abjured oriental ways, and turned themselves
into Europeans by adopting their ideas, their politics, language
and clothes. By degrees, during the end of the last century,
the upper classes impulsively followed this example. In the
first half of the present century, by the force of circumstances,
those European influences penetrated still further. They permeated
the administrative spheres, the schools, even to the country
squire, the provincial nobility. A few, carried away by the
uplifting movement, detached themselves from the masses, but
the bed-rock of the nation remained rebellious, immovable, with
minds firmly set towards the East like the naves of their churches,
and the praying Tartar, their former masters...The vast valleys
still lie plunged in the shadows of the past - with difficulty
will they arise there from.
During all this time the unique spectacle
was provided of a small ruling class - due to their newly adopted
customs, ideas, and often language - having become complete
strangers to the people they governed. This class received its
intellectual food, both ethical and political, from so to speak
imported sources, as from Germany, from England, or France,
turn and turn about, but always from abroad. The supervision
of orthodox glebes were frequently entrusted to aliens, "
heathens " as the Russian peasant called them... Catherine
the Great was succeeded by generations of amiable men and women
who, in turn, lived the elegant Paris life of the times of Louis
XV, of the Empire, and of the Restoration, unaffected by our
occasional revolutionary spirit which laid bare our aspirations
fashioned by our writings - those great treatises on administration
and on political economy. But not one of these administrators
asked himself as to what lay in the mind of the peasant in Yaroslavl
or in Samara, or as to how he existed and suffered. In the shadow
of this exotic plant the people, left to themselves, merely
vegetated, and developed only in the dim light of their oriental
instincts...
But what obstacles were in the way!
How was it possible to abolish the past; how to make the needed
restitutions?
It was as if one of those worlds high up in the heavens were
suddenly to come under the opposing influence of attracting
forces. It breaks in two; a fragment flies to the distant star
that calls it, while the main body gravitates towards less distant
spheres. In spite of everything these two parts of a world tend
to reunite. How will they succeed in traversing the wide expanse
that separates them, and that in opposition to newly acquired
forces? So with Russia, made up as she is of many utterly dissimilar
elements, by turns attracted by opposite poles, repeatedly thrown
against Europe, Asia, Turkey in Europe, and finally against
her divided self.
To this ill-starred record must also be added
that of the drawbacks of the soil and of the climate wherein
the Russian drama is unrolled. Rigorous, interminable winters
afflict the people, interrupt their labours, and sadden their
thoughts. In the north a poor vegetation sets man a noble example
for exerting vigorous energy in the hard struggle against nature.
Is it not true that in time man's spirit is modelled by the
characteristics of the land in which he lives? If this is a
fact, as I believe it is, then the strongly accentuated countries,
clearly defined horizons, and other marked features are aids
towards developing a strong individuality, with a clearness
of conception and powers of perseverance. There is nothing of
this kind in the Russian soil; not, at least, in the central
regions where the dominant race was formed. There it is a waterlogged
remnant from chaotic times, overlooked by the Great Creator
in his primary creative operations when dividing the waters.
Not a stone, not a striking feature, not a muscle in this flabby
body; only that continuous monotony that everlasting plain,
stretching over thousands of miles, always the same, without
a break in the horizon, without a feature - only and always
the delusive image of snow, bog or sand ! Nowhere the mountain
that challenges man to subdue it; on all sides the undefined
which exhausts, yet attracts - but to no purpose. Tolstoy has
well described it as "The Call of Desert."
A country of vacuous minds, like those
of the seafarer; self-centred, long-suffering and resigned,
subject to sudden passions of desire! A soil better suited to
dwellers in tents than in houses, where the ideas are as nomadic
as are the inhabitants themselves. Just as the cold blasts from
the White Sea find no obstacles in their way to the Black Sea,
so do invasions, calamities and the sorrows of slavery pass
rapidly and irresistibly over these vast empty spaces. The direction
taken is left to chance. It is indeed a favourable soil for
nourishing those confused aspirations towards annihilation,
so deeply rooted in the Russian's heart, inherited by him from
the beginning. It is certainly not the kind from which to expect
the growth of a healthy, intellectual spirit needed for the
advance in arts and literature. Nevertheless from even under
these rude skies, and despite all misfortune, we shall yet behold
the stubborn seed coming up - a seed so necessary to man that
he seems to have brought from no one knows where, an everlasting
springtime for its storage in every clime."
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