Page:Ossendowski - The Shadow of the Gloomy East.djvu/9



S a Pole I was an alien in Russia, where I lived for many years, and I looked upon that huge country with all the detachment of an unprejudiced foreigner.

I knew Russia from her Western confines right to the Pacific and the Pamir, and I think I understand the psychology of the peoples of that vast, mysterious land, where modern civilisation of the West and the ideology of Mongolian nomads, the asceticism of orthodox Christianity and heathenism exist together in weird confusion to this very day. The Russian intelligentsia, spiritualised and rising to the loftiest idealism, has long ago cut adrift from the people; it could not understand the great mass and contemptuously disdained to notice its qualities, hostile and dangerous to mankind, which nevertheless remained.

Tolstoy has cast upon the ant-heap of the country a new idea, which to his mind defined the pith of his people.

He called the common people "the carriers of God," and considered that all the qualities, the fine as well