Page:Russian Realities and Problems - ed. James Duff (1917).djvu/63

 at that time the uttermost outposts of western culture, turned to the East but facing the West, and themselves of western make. A very characteristic expression of this fact is to be found in the Ecclesiastical History of the famous mediaeval writer, Adam of Bremen, who, in speaking of the Russians of Kiev, distinguishes them from the barbarians by calling them Greeks, and describes Kiev as "Aemula sceptri Constantinopolitani, clarissimum decus Graeciae"—a rival of the sceptre of Constantinople and the brightest ornament of Greece. The Tartar invasion changes all this, isolating the Russian population from the West and plunging it into another, an Asiatic world. The distance between Russia and Western Europe increases, and Russia becomes if not a part of Asia at least a world by itself. This change is curiously reflected in the character of Russian historical sources. Russia becomes a wonderland, and travellers who visit it are afterwards able to tell things strange and incredible that strike the imagination. Travel literature, from the time of Herberstein in the sixteenth century up to the beginning of the nineteenth, bulks far more largely in the sources of Russian history than it does in the historiography of other European countries, a fact which has called forth many bibliographical and