Page:Columbia University Lectures on Literature (1911).djvu/331

Rh "But it is impossible to believe that such a language was not given to a great people."

An opinion fully indorsed by a Frenchman, De Vogüé, who says, "The Russian Language is undoubtedly the richest of all the European tongues."

Of the three distinct varieties (into which Russian, roughly speaking, is subdivided), the "Little Russian" in the South of Russia, "White Russian" in the Western provinces bordering on Germany and around the Baltic coast, and "Great Russian" spoken in the rest of Russia by nearly seventy million souls,—this last is the literary language, the speech of Moscow being its purest form. On the other hand, St. Petersburg, from a literary point of view, is even more than the Paris of Russia, for every writer of note, no matter where born, has gravitated to the capital; and this has given an additional impulse towards a single literary language.

With these physical, historical, and political conditions, Russia presents certain special psychological characteristics which, in part at least, are the result of such conditions.

This huge expanse of earth's surface, often without a single tree for hundreds of miles, with only a carpet of grass in summer and a thick mantle of snow in winter, makes the Russian self-centered and contemplative, with a strong tendency towards the mystical, the vague, and the fantastic.

The early mingling of Slavic, Norse, and Finnish elements, centuries of Byzantine influence with its sapping of secular life to foster monastic ideals, two hundred and fifty years of Mongolian domination and intermarriage, followed by a faint taste of Italian Renaissance in the artistic labors of the Fioraventis, thereupon a forcible inoculation of Western manners and civilization by Peter I, finally to be succeeded by unbroken intercourse with Western Europe,—this process has brought it about that to-day Russia is, for the tourist, culturally (as she is geographically) the middle ground between Western Europe and Asia, and justifies to a certain degree Havelock