Page:Ossendowski - The Shadow of the Gloomy East.djvu/164

 CHAPTER XXI

LWAYS and ever during the Christian era Russia, having accepted the cross as her emblem, has maintained in the customs of her sects the ancient pagan ritual, and has desired instinctively, even subconsciously, from motives hidden in the depth of the souls of those tribes which live amid forests, fields, and mountains, and preserve in their blood so many elements inherited from the primitive nomads—to preserve some link with the "old gods," who, it seemed, perished long ago, annihilated either by the hand of man or the grinding of time.

So it was even in the final period of the Russian Empire of the Tsars, when the Court of St. Petersburg impressed the whole world, when civilised Europe was charmed by the refined Russian aristocracy and intelligentsia, by Russian literature, art, the Russian village described in such poetic words by Tolstoy, when the soul of the Russian people was the subject of animated discussions and studied in the best types of the educated classes, of the learned world, of the novelists, and of soldiers of the Imperial Guard.

None of the foreign visitors penetrated into the