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Englishmen of the last two generations have found in your literature.

Many a writer among us can still call back, from ten or twenty or thirty
years ago, the feeling of delight and almost of bewilderment with which
he read his first Russian novel. Perhaps it was "Virgin Soil" or
"Fathers and Sons," perhaps "War and Peace," or "Anna Karenina"; perhaps
"Crime and Punishment" or "The Idiot"; perhaps, again, it was the work
of some author still living. But many of us then felt, as our poet Keats
felt on first reading Homer,

"like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken."

It was a strange world that opened before us, a world full of foreign
names which we could neither pronounce nor remember, of foreign customs
and articles of daily life which we could not understand. Yet beneath
all the strangeness there was a deep sense of having discovered a new
home, of meeting our unknown kindred, of finding expressed great burdens
of thought which had lain unspoken and half-realized at the depths of
our own minds. The books were very different one from another, sometimes
they were mutually hostile; yet we found in all some quality which made
them one, and made us at one with them. We will not attempt to analyze
that quality. It was, perhaps, in part, that deep Russian tenderness,
which never derides but only pities and respects the unfortunate; in
part that simple Russian sincerity which never fears to see the truth
and to express it; but most of all it was that ever-present sense of
spiritual values, behind the material and utterly transcending the
material, which enables Russian literature to move so naturally in a
world of the spirit, where there are no barriers between the ages and
the nations, but all mankind is one.

And they call you "barbarians"! The fact should make us ask again what
we mean by the words "culture" and "civilization." Critics used once to
call our Shakespeare a barbarian, and might equally well give the same
name to Aeschylus or Isaiah. All poets and prophets are in this sense
barbarians, that they will not measure life by the standards of external
"culture." And it is at a time like this, when the material civilization
of Europe seems to have betrayed us and shown the lie at its heart, that
we realize that the poets and prophets are right, and that we must, like
them and like your great writers, once more see life with the simplicity
of the barbarian or the child, i