Mrs. Gardiner has fairly earned the gratitude of her American countrymen by her excellent translation of this remarkable work. No study of a foreign people has been entitled to rank with this since the "Germany" of Madame de Stäel, whose disquisition was made after prolonged residence in the country, and especial intimacy with the literary coterie at Weimar, which then included the men who in modern times have given to Germany its literary fame.

Let us glance at what the crucible of Madame Bazán's thought has distilled from the unlike materials cast into her retort. Russian literature, she tells us, must attract our attention because of its intimate connection with the social, political, and historical problems which are occupying the mind of Europe to-day, and which are outcomes of the great revolutionary movement, unless it would be more correct to say that they inspired and directed that movement.

It is with the hope of dissipating the haze which hangs between Russia and the rest of the world that she undertakes the study of race, natural condition, and the social and political state of Russia, especially nihilism. It is not the purpose of the author to sacrifice on the altar of her theme the genius of all Europe. Yet she cannot remain blind to the present dissatisfactions of the older modern nations. France possesses at this moment the form of government for which she has so long and convulsively yearned, but she is doubtful of herself, and unsatisfied with her relation to other nations. Italy, though united and restored, cannot reanimate the ashes of her glorious past. England and Germany have seen their political dreams fulfilled, but the hour of change has sounded for the European-Saxon as for the Latin races, and they are declaiming their farewell message on the world's stage.

two

"There are two great peoples in the world which are not in the same situation as the Latin and Saxon nations of Europe, peoples which have not yet placed their stones in the world's historic edifice. They are the great transatlantic republic and the colossal Sclavonic empire, the United States and Russia."

Russia is in twilight, but it is the twilight of the dawn. This truth, felt, if but dimly understood, is the reason why so much thoughtful and serious attention is given to Russia by all foreigners.

There are at least twenty layers of human alluvium in European Russia, not counting the prehistoric migrations; yet from these various races has proceeded a homogeneous people, living in geo

graphical and moral unity, and calling, with a tender familiarity, the Autocrat of all the Russias by the name of Father.

Nature's hand has been from the first on the destiny of this great people, from the frozen wilderness of the north to the smiling harvest-fields of the south, but it has ever been with one unvarying and unique ideal before her.

Russia lacks the sunny smile of Pallas and Athene; she has no place in the great Catholic fraternity (a calamity, from our author's point of view); she lacks the brilliant heresies of the West, the intellectual impetus of medieval scholarship; she has had no feudalism, no chivalry, no Gothic architecture, no troubadours, no knights. Her development does not present the gentle undulations of European history in which yesterday creates to-day, and to-day prepares for to-morrow. In the social order of Russia, primitive institutions coexist with products of our spickand-span new sociology, an ancient people and a society in embryo struggling to burst its bonds. This confusion engenders Russian dualism, the cause of her moral and political disturbances.

There are two bases of the national life, the autocracy and the agrarian commune. The autocracy is the organic product of the soil and the race, paternal in its character, and inspiring the respect due to any spontaneous and genuine production. The important school of Russian thinkers known as Selavophiles - people enamored of their ancient land and its customs insist that the only independent forces on which Russia can count are the people and the Czar, the immense herd of peasants and the Autocrat as their head. It is a fact that the Russian empire of to-day, in spite of official hierarchies, is a rural state in which the people sustain the Czar, now against the rich and mighty nobles and officials, now against the revolutionists. If turbulent magnates or sullen conspirators get rid of the person of the Czar, the principle remains inviolate. They may kill a hundred emperors, but Russia is Russia still, and at its head is the Czar of all the Russias.

Next to the Czar, the true Russian loves his mir. Half the arable land in the empire is subject to this system. The tendency to aggregate, either in agrarian municipalities or otherwise, is born in the blood and bred in the bone of the Sclavs. The mir is a common possession of the land, which in the Russian village belongs to the municipality amongst whose members it is distributed periodically: each able-bodied individual receives what he needs, and is spared hunger and disgrace. This system, so much

lauded by "advanced" thinkers, is really a sociological fossil, preserved in Russia by suspension, or the slow development of the Common possession of the land is a primitive idea, as remote as the prehistoric ages, and gave way before individual interest and the modern idea of property.

race.

The mir in Russia owes its vitality to the fact that it was produced naturally by the family, from which type the whole Russian state organization springs, from the Czar Father to the child of the humblest serf or peasant. This patriarchal or tribal type of the family offers many advantages from the agrarian point of view, but it places the individual, and hence the true family, under immense disadvantages. The modern way of understanding property is the only way compatible with the independence and dignity of the individual. The laboring-man, under agrarian communism, theoretically considers himself a member of a coöperative agricultural society, but he is in reality a slave, subject to collective responsibilities and obligations.

The socialistic leaven lies in the peasants. In Russia the cities have no proportionate influence; that which demands the special attention of the governor or the revolutionist is the existence, needs, thoughts, of the innumerable peasant communities which are the foundation and the material of the empire. Of the peasant, the charity of his friends and the poetic imagination of Russian writers has made an ideal from which is distilled a poetic essence. From Turgenieff to Tolstoï the peasant is painted with a loving touch, while corruption, effeminacy, and vice characterize the upper classes. This is true in so far as the upper classes, mostly educated abroad, are thus only reflectors of the life of other nations, while the originality, the poetry, the epic element, is always with the masses.

The middle class has been constantly infused with the peasant element, and thus the cities, colleges, schools, universities, and theatres founded by the imperial power are the cradle of unrest. No barrier prevents the peasant from becoming a merchant, and the latter from becoming a noble. The nobility are descended chiefly, however, from the retinues of the early Muscovite czars, who were given wealth and lands on condition of military service, although feudalism as an institution never existed in Russia. The advance of culture has mainly proceeded from the nobility. The aristocracy, everywhere else the support of the throne, is in Russia a destroying element, while office-holders are justly painted in darkest colors, and the Russian clergy are wrapped in Byzantine lethargy.

Nihilism is not a mere Russian intellectual element, although the nihilist explosions are characteristic of the Sclav empire. Turgenieff, in his novel "Fathers and Sons," applied the name nihilists, but the word is of French coinage. The reign of Nicholas I. was one of absolutism and oppression. He was not, however, essentially a tyrant, and saw when too late that his policy had been a failure. Under it, nevertheless, Russian thought sprang to new development, and a national literature began to flourish. To write a history of modern literature, particularly of the novel, is equivalent to writing the history of the revolution. This is the fruit in Russia of the seed of French materialism and infidelity imported by Katharine II., and later of Kantism and Hegelianism imbibed by Russian youth at German universities. These European ideas were soon amalgamated with the indigenous and Oriental fatalism of the Russian mind, forming a compound which had at first no political coloring. During the decade 1860-70, a fever for universal negation seized the youth of Russia, and after 1871 the echo of the Paris Commune crossed the Russian frontier, and the "nihilists" crystallized into a clandestine organization seven years later, which inaugurated an era of terror, assassination, and explosion. Nihilism has no definite creed, but embraces all negatives. Anarchists, federalists, cantonalists, covenantists, terrorists, are all grouped under the one banner, which bears for its motto Nihil. From the seminaries and schools, from the nobility and the literati, arose a host composed of young women hungering for the ideal, and young students poor in pocket and position, who gave themselves up to a Bohemian sort of life well calculated to set at nought society and the world in general.

Before political rights, Russian nihilism seeks natural rights; and the position of women, far more bitter and humiliating in Russia than in the rest of Europe, has through the new ideas become more free, intelligent, and respected. Many of the marriages of nihilists are purely austere and ideal, the bride's dower going into the common treasury; her person consecrated to the unknown divinity; and the nominal marriage bond allowing husband and wife each to go their own way, sometimes to distant provinces to disseminate their views, the relation being terminated at the pleasure of either party. Notwithstanding the fact that the Russian nihilist laughs at the supernatural, there is a deep underlying element of mysticism in his thought, and he talks about the martyrs to the cause with an inspired voice and an unction worthy of a religious dreamer. The thirst for martyrdom is common, but

the deity of the Russian nihilist is the sublimated peasant of Russian literature. So the cultivated nihilists go in search of the poor, the ignorant, and the humble. The sons of families belonging to the highest classes, alumni of the universities, leave fine clothes and books, dress like peasants, and mix with factory hands, so as to know them and to teach them; young ladies of fine education return from a foreign tour and accept situations as cooks in manufacturers' houses, so as to be able to study the labor question in their workshops.

The active nihilists are all young people, and this is the reason why they are not discouraged by the failures of their efforts. There is, in addition to the enthusiasm of youth, a sympathetic disinterestedness in nihilism, a strange mingling of mysticism and fanaticism with negation and pessimism.

discovered by the attentive Herzen, in his novel "Who

All this and much more may be reader of modern Russian literature. is to Blame?" is the great precursor of nihilism. His aim was not to civilize, but to obliterate; to sweep away the past with one stroke was his perennial aspiration. Later novelists adopted the motto that to destroy is to create. Turgenieff's "Fathers and Sons" represented the man of the future as a materialist, and positivism followed. "Force and Matter" were for a time the Bible

of Russian students.

The reign of terror in Russia has been short and tragic. When it fell upon the country, the frightened people imagined an army of terrorists, while in reality the offenses from 1878 to 1882- the mines under two capitals, the explosions at the station at Moscow and in the palace at St. Petersburg, the many assassinations, and the marvelous organization - were the work of a few dozens of men and women, enthusiastic students and young girls, ready to perform any service, and seemingly endowed with ubiquitousness, so rapid and unceasing were their journeys, and so varied the disguises, names, and stratagems of which they made use to bewilder and confound the police. The executive committee was scarcely more than a triumvirate, but assassination became a political factor, and at last touched the person of the Czar, just as he had convened a meeting for the consideration of reforms solicited by public opinion.

It is not easy to say whether the government was ill-advised in confronting the terrors of nihilism with the terrors of authority. One must put one's self in the place of a government so menaced and attacked. The methods of the special police and