out religious
faith; and in the realist Turgenev, we find the same kind of thing.
Turgenev even reaches a stage of hopeless nihilism, and one of his
heroes, Bazarov,--in "Fathers and Sons,"--reflecting one day on the
lot of the peasant, considering it better than his, says sadly, "He,
at least, will have his little hut, while all I can hope for is a
bed of thorns." Finally, all the tortuous quests of the ideal toward
which Tolstoy strove, were suggested to him, as he himself says, by
his insatiable desire to find "the meaning of life, destroyed by
death."

It is sometimes maintained that this state of intellectual sadness
is innate in the Russians; that their sanguinary and melancholy
temperaments are a mixture of Don Quixote and Hamlet. Foreign
critics have often traced this despair to the so-called mysticism
peculiar to the Slavonic race.

What is there mystical in them? The consciousness of the
nothingness, of the emptiness of human life, can be found deep down
in the souls of nearly all mankind. It shows itself, among most
people, only on rare tragic occasions, when general or particular
catastrophes take place; at other times it is smothered by the
immediate cares of life, by passions that grip us, and, finally, by
religion. But none of these influences had any effect on Tchekoff.
He was too noble to be completely absorbed by the mean details of
life; his organism was too delicate to become the prey of an
overwhelming passion; and his character too positive to give itself
over to religious dogmas. "I lost my childhood faith a long time
ago," he once wrote, "and I regard all intelligent belief with
perplexity.... In reality, the 'intellectuals' only play at
religion, chiefly because they have nothing else to do." Tchekoff,
in his sober manner, has seen and recognized the two great aspects
of life: first, the world of social and historical progress with its
promise of future comforts; secondly, an aspect that is closely
related to the above, the obscure world of the unknown man who feels
the cold breath of death upon him. He was an absolute positivist;
his positivism did not make him self-assertive nor peremptory; on
the contrary, it oppressed him.

But why should this sad state of mind, which has been expressed by
great men in all literatures, be so exceptionally prominent among
the Russians, and particularly among the modern ones? The reason is,
without a doubt, because the political and social organization of