Page:Russian Realities and Problems - ed. James Duff (1917).djvu/140

 was a curious instance of the varied mental processes that are going on among the nationalities within the Russian empire. On the one hand a keen interest in Tibet, the home of that type of Buddhism which the Buriats profess, and on the other a hunger for Western civilisation that led to an attempt to adopt the Latin alphabet to the Buriat language.

I recall, again, a young Georgian who lived and studied in Petrograd, and in order to earn a living he secured a post as proof-reader on a Russian newspaper. But the chief interest of his life was to translate Sophocles from Greek into Georgian verse. These are the things I like to think about when I think of the nationalities of Russia.

The number of languages spoken within the Russian empire is something over a hundred, and the number of languages spoken will give some idea of the very great variety of grades of culture and of civilisation there are within the empire. There are almost as many grades of culture and civilisation as there are grades of climate upon that great plain. If you take, for instance, the alphabets of the various newspapers published in the Russian empire, you will see what an extraordinary variety of forms of culture are intermingled there. You have the Gothic letters in the German, Swedish, and Finnish papers. Then you have the Roman characters in Polish and Lithuanian. You have the Hebrew alphabet in the Yiddish and Hebrew press and literature. You have the black square Armenian characters, and you have the beautifully rounded Georgian characters, you have the Arabic alphabet for the Tartar and the Kirghiz languages, you