Page:The Novels of Ivan Turgenev (volume VI).djvu/19

Rh of Young Russia 'to go to the people,' for it is in the matter of the education of the peasants that Russia's hope of social and political reform lies. Besides, this plan of action meant for Young Russia the taking of the path of least resistance. The other paths had been closed by reactionary decrees. But to go actually among the peasantry and work for them and learn from them had never been attempted, and by a natural impulse the Young Russian theorists threw themselves into this Utopian campaign. The movement, of course, was foredoomed. Not only did the Government enact harsh penalties against the Socialists, but the peasants themselves were too ignorant, too far off in their life, to understand what Young Russia meant. And the exiling and imprisonment of the leading propagandists, when it came, could not fail to bring the Nihilists into a direct war with autocracy itself.

The whole quarrel between the autocracy and the liberal opposition, a quarrel which the Nihilists of the late seventies brought to a head, is a question of liberty. Is Russia to be more Orientalised or more Europeanised ? If