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It is natural that the Russians, underneath the
socialistic agitations of our time, should see in their mir the
healthy germ of better social relations. They generally
regard themselves in this particular as the pioneer or
prototype for Europe.
Intellectual originality among the Russians is,
naturally, much less easily grasped, but it is not on that
account the less indisputable. Intellectually, the
Russians impress the stranger by their realism, their practical,
positive taste for the real, which has made them a great
people and has won so many victories in the battle of
life. It seems to be this quality which has given the
inhabitant of Great Russia superiority over all the other
races of the empire. While the Little-Russian possibly
surpasses the Great-Russian in continued action, through
his vivacity and delicacy, his sensibility and disposition,
he lacks the sound common sense of the other. This taste
for realism has shown itself to be the strong point of the
Great-Russian. It is this among other things which
explains how it is that, where a realistic tendency in
modern times has prevailed in French literature, and
books of this intellectual character have been brought to
Russia, they have been received there as the representatives
of something old and well known. A long time
before, the Russian authors had solved the problem of
the novel in a like manner. At the time when France
was becoming the most infatuated with Romanticism,
the whole Russian novel literature had already begun to
produce the description of actual life, and Art had begun
to follow on the track of Poetry.
The result of this realism is that the Great-Russian
despises the Little-Russian as sentimental and effeminate,
and looks down upon the Pole as on a being weak and
unreliable, or, on a higher plane, romantic and fantastic.
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