, when the patriotic feelings were excited,
there was a violent hostility to foreign intellectual influence; and
feeble intermittent attempts were made to throw off the intellectual
bondage. The invasion of the country in 1812 by the Grande Armee, and
the burning of Moscow, added abundant fuel to this patriotic fire. For
some time any one who ventured to express even a moderate admiration for
French culture incurred the risk of being stigmatised as a traitor to
his country and a renegade to the national faith. But this patriotic
fanaticism soon evaporated, and exaggerations of the ultra-national
party became the object of satire and parody. When the political danger
was past, and people resumed their ordinary occupations, those who
loved foreign literature returned to their old favourites--or, as the
ultra-patriots called it, to their "wallowing in the mire"--simply
because the native literature did not supply them with what they
desired. "We are quite ready," they said to their upbraiders, "to admire
your great works as soon as they appear, but in the meantime please
allow us to enjoy what we possess." Thus in the last years of the reign
of Alexander I. the patriotic opposition to West European literature
gradually ceased, and a new period of unrestricted intellectual
importation began.

The intellectual merchandise now brought into the country was very
different from that which had been imported in the time of Catherine.
The French Revolution, the Napoleonic domination, the patriotic wars,
the restoration of the Bourbons, and the other great events of that
memorable epoch, had in the interval produced profound changes in the
intellectual as well as the political condition of Western Europe.
During the Napoleonic wars Russia had become closely associated with
Germany; and now the peculiar intellectual fermentation which was going
on among the German educated classes was reflected in the society of St.
Petersburg. It did not appear, indeed, in the printed literature, for
the Press-censure had been recently organised on the principles laid
down by Metternich, but it was none the less violent on that account.
Whilst the periodicals were filled with commonplace meditations on
youth, spring, the love of Art, and similar innocent topics, the young
generation was discussing in the salons all the burning questions which
Metternich and his adherents were endeavouring to extinguish.

These discussions, if discussions they might