al
institutions, guarantees of the dignity of human beings; they have
endured mental suffering because they have found that in Russia such
independence would be impossible, and, consequently, they have had a
feeling of extreme bitterness, which has forced them either to deny
or calumniate the moral forces of their country, or to formulate
very strange theories about this situation. Thus at the end of the
first twenty-five years of the century, Chadayev, one of the most
original and brilliant thinkers of Russia, developed the following
thesis in his "Philosophical Letters":--the fatal course of history
having opposed the union of the Russian people with Catholicism,
through which European civilization developed, Russia found herself
reduced forever to the existence of an inert mass, deprived of all
interior energy, as can be shown adequately by her history, her
customs, and even the aspect of her national type with its
ill-defined traits and apathetic expression.

* * * * *

In the course of the terrible struggle which he waged against the
censorship and against influential persons evilly disposed toward
him, Pushkin cried out: "It was the idea of the devil himself that
made me be born in Russia!" And in one of his letters, he says,
"Naturally, I despise my country from east to west, but,
nevertheless, I hate to hear a stranger speak of it with scorn."
Lermontov, exiled to the Caucasus, ironically takes leave of his
country, which he calls, "a squalid country of slaves and masters."
And he salutes the Caucasian mountains as the immense screen which
may hide him from the eyes of the Russian pachas. The Slavophiles
themselves, the patriots who in their way idealized both Russian
orthodoxy and autocracy, and who were wrongly considered the
champions of the existing order of things, showed themselves no less
hostile. One of their most celebrated representatives, Khomyakov,
sees in Russia "a land stigmatized" by serfdom, where all is
injustice, lies, morbid laziness and turpitude.

Dostoyevsky, who shared some of the illusions of the Slavophiles,
speaks of Europe as "a land of sacred miracles." Nevertheless,
yielding to his desire to heighten the prestige of his country, he
adds: "The Russian is not partially European, but essentially so, in
the very largest sense of the word, because he watches, with an
impartial love, the progress achieved by the various peoples of
Europe, while each one