Page:Phelps - Essays on Russian Novelists.djvu/44

Rh no occasion for alarm. Nobody will do anything rash.

The fact that the French language, culture, and manners have been superimposed upon Russian society should never be forgotten in a discussion of the Russian national character. For many years, and until very recently, French was the language constantly used by educated and aristocratic native Russians, just as it is by the Poles and by the Roumanians. It will never cease seeming strange to an American to hear a Russian mother and son talk intimately together in a language not their own. Even Pushkin, the founder of Russian literature, the national poet, wrote in a letter to a friend, "Je vous parlerai la langue de l'Europe, elle m'est plus familiere." Imagine Tennyson writing a letter in French, with the explanation that French came easier to him!

It follows, as a consequence, that the chief reading of Russian society people is French novels; that French customs, morals, and manners (as portrayed in French fiction) have had an enormous effect on the educated classes in Russia. If we may believe half the testimony we hear, -- I am not sure that we can, -- Russian aristocratic society is to-day the most corrupt in the world. There is an immense contrast between Parisians and Russians,