Page:Russian Realities and Problems - ed. James Duff (1917).djvu/142

 strange and curious languages whose origin and connections are yet hardly known in the far east of Siberia—some languages apparently related to the languages of the North American Indians and others to the language of the Esquimaux. Then in the Caucasus you have those extremely interesting languages related to Georgian, and also to Armenian, languages which are believed by the scholar who knows them best, Professor Marr, of Petrograd, the son of a Scotch father and a Georgian mother, to form what he calls a Japhetic group, which is a kind of cousin to the Semitic group of languages. Thus the languages of the empire represent an extraordinary variety of linguistic tendencies and of lines of linguistic evolution. Within this broad expanse of Russian territory men have elaborated various forms of speech, which mean various ways of thinking, various ways of looking at the world, various efforts to rise to a spiritual consciousness. All these tendencies have gone their own varied ways in the course of history. They have come into conflict, they have influenced each other, and now we find this wonderful variety of forms of speech and forms of thought, of spiritual reaction, all linked together in the vast territory of the Russian empire, all linked together in one complex Imperial organisation,

I think if we realise this we shall realise one very important fact. I wish we could at last get out of the way of thinking of Russia as a huge piece of the map, as something flat, and given, and static, and solid, and stationary. Russia is not that. Russia is a process. Russia is one huge process of evolution, in which all these various nationalities play a very important and