Page:Phelps - Essays on Russian Novelists.djvu/27

Rh impression of Vastness that their books produce on Occidental eyes. I do not refer at all to the length of the book for a book may be very long, and yet produce an impression of pettiness, like many English novels. No, it is something that exhales from the pages, whether they be few or many. As illustrations of this quality of vastness, one has only to recall two Russian novels--one the longest, and the other very nearly the shortest, in the whole range of Slavonic fiction. I refer to War and Peace, by Tolstoi, and to Taras Bulba, by Gogol. Both of these extraordinary works give us chiefly an impression of Immensity--we feel the boundless steppes, the illimitable wastes of snow, and the long winter night. It is particularly interesting to compare Taras Bulba with the trilogy of the Polish genius, Sienkiewicz. The former is tiny in size, the latter a leviathan; but the effect produced is the same. It is what we feel in reading Homer, whose influence, by the way, is as powerful in Taras Bulba as it is in With Fire and Sword.

The Cosmopolitanism of the Russian character is a striking feature. Indeed, the educated Russian is perhaps the most complete Cosmopolitan in the world. This is partly owing to the uncanny facility with which he acquires foreign languages, and to the admirable custom in Russia of giving children in