or the aspirations of mankind. That despotism has neither an European
nor an Oriental parentage; more, it seems to have no root either in the
institutions or the follies of this earth. What strikes one with a sort
of awe is just this something inhuman in its character. It is like a
visitation, like a curse from Heaven falling in the darkness of ages upon
the immense plains of forest and steppe lying dumbly on the confines of
two continents: a true desert harbouring no Spirit either of the East or
of the West.

This pitiful fate of a country held by an evil spell, suffering from an
awful visitation for which the responsibility cannot be traced either to
her sins or her follies, has made Russia as a nation so difficult to
understand by Europe. From the very first ghastly dawn of her existence
as a State she had to breathe the atmosphere of despotism; she found
nothing but the arbitrary will of an obscure autocrat at the beginning
and end of her organisation. Hence arises her impenetrability to
whatever is true in Western thought. Western thought, when it crosses
her frontier, falls under the spell of her autocracy and becomes a
noxious parody of itself. Hence the contradictions, the riddles of her
national life, which are looked upon with such curiosity by the rest of
the world. The curse had entered her very soul; autocracy, and nothing
else in the world, has moulded her institutions, and with the poison of
slavery drugged the national temperament into the apathy of a hopeless
fatalism. It seems to have gone into the blood, tainting every mental
activity in its source by a half-mystical, insensate, fascinating
assertion of purity and holiness. The Government of Holy Russia,
arrogating to itself the supreme power to torment and slaughter the
bodies of its subjects like a God-sent scourge, has been most cruel to
those whom it allowed to live under the shadow of its dispensation. The
worst crime against humanity of that system we behold now crouching at
bay behind vast heaps of mangled corpses is the ruthless destruction of
innumerable minds. The greatest horror of the world--madness--walked
faithfully in its train. Some of the best intellects of Russia, after
struggling in vain against the spell, ended by throwing themselves at the
feet of that hopeless despotism as a giddy man leaps into an abyss. An
attentive survey of Russia's literature, of her Church, of her
administration and the cross-currents of her t