Page:Columbia University Lectures on Literature (1911).djvu/326

312 Was this unprecedented success the result of a mere whim of literary taste among the jaded and volatile Frenchmen? Its persistence and its rapid conquest of the reading public throughout the world preclude a negative answer to our question.

It was the new world, both of men and of emotions, into which the foreign reader was introduced, and it was the new spiritual attitude of the Russian writers that supplied the real cause of the conquering march of Russian Literature.

What are the peculiar traits that exercised such a potent influence on the foreigner? A more or less satisfactory answer can be given only when a thorough examination is made of the country and the people that produced this Literature. Have they not grown trite, these dicta that "Literature is the mirror of the spiritual hfe of a nation," that "the literary history of a nation is the history of the nation's psychology," etc.?

Geographically, Russia (European, I mean chiefly) is one vast plain with hardly an elevation within its confines. It has a negligible length of seacoast (particularly navigable for a considerable part of the year) and several sluggish, if majestic, rivers. Thus, while presenting practically no natural barrier to foreign incursions, Russia, on the other hand, has enjoyed the advantage of easy communication among the various tribal and racial elements that composed it. For centuries, it is true, such relations were far from amicable, yet the fact stands that intercourse was free and easily achieved. Again, the absence of mountain barriers on the North placed no obstacle in the way of the icy winds from the Arctic Sea, and though the southernmost regions of Russia, such as the Crimea and Caucasus, may be a land of olives and oranges, there is unbroken winter with permanent snow-roads and sleighs and sleighbells for several months even in the South, following upon the scorching heat of summer. And this contrast in temperature has tended but to make the Russian physique more rugged and inured to hardships.