--Easter Eve
in the Kremlin--Curious Custom--Anecdote of the Emperor
Nicholas--Domiciliary Visits of the Iberian Madonna--The Streets of
Moscow--Recent Changes in the Character of the City--Vulgar Conception
of the Slavophils--Opinion Founded on Personal Acquaintance--Slavophil
Sentiment a Century Ago--Origin and Development of the Slavophil
Doctrine--Slavophilism Essentially Muscovite--The Panslavist
Element--The Slavophils and the Emancipation.

In the last chapter, as in many of the preceding ones, the reader must
have observed that at one moment there was a sudden break, almost
a solution of continuity, in Russian national life. The Tsardom of
Muscovy, with its ancient Oriental costumes and Byzantine traditions,
unexpectedly disappears, and the Russian Empire, clad in modern garb
and animated with the spirit of modern progress, steps forward uninvited
into European history. Of the older civilisation, if civilisation it can
be called, very little survived the political transformation, and that
little is generally supposed to hover ghostlike around Kief and Moscow.
To one or other of these towns, therefore, the student who desires
to learn something of genuine old Russian life, untainted by foreign
influences, naturally wends his way. For my part I thought first of
settling for a time in Kief, the oldest and most revered of Russian
cities, where missionaries from Byzantium first planted Christianity on
Russian soil, and where thousands of pilgrims still assemble yearly
from far and near to prostrate themselves before the Holy Icons in the
churches and to venerate the relics of the blessed saints and martyrs in
the catacombs of the great monastery. I soon discovered, however, that
Kief, though it represents in a certain sense the Byzantine traditions
so dear to the Russian people, is not a good point of observation for
studying the Russian character. It was early exposed to the ravages of
the nomadic tribes of the Steppe, and when it was liberated from those
incursions it was seized by the Poles and Lithuanians, and remained for
centuries under their domination. Only in comparatively recent times
did it begin to recover its Russian character--a university having been
created there for that purpose after the Polish insurrection of 1830.
Even now the process of Russification is far from complete, and the
Russian elements in the population are far from being pure in the
nationalist sense. The city and the surrounding co