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and now as Julia Feodorovna Abaza is one of the ladies
in waiting at her daughter’s court. By the side of the
politicians of the different shades, artists and
scientists, Russian and foreign, had free access to her house.
For a long time it was the custom that distinguished
artists or scholars who came to St. Petersburg took up
their residence, by her invitation, in the beautiful
palace at Mikhailof Square. She had lost the power of
continuous activity or work during that long period of
her life when her whole existence had been absorbed by
the etiquette of the old court. But interest in and love
of knowledge was fresh in her to the last.
It is her inheritance which Katharina Mikhailovna’s
heir has entered upon with greater earnestness and
penetration in spite of his youth and in spite of his
oppressive situation under the existing Russian rule.[1]
A point like this makes one feel sharply the distance
from Russian Poland, where no thread from the world of
intelligence reaches completely within the court circles.
At the present time there is no central salon in
St. Petersburg. Formerly, Countess Alekseï Tolstoi
formed such a centre. The widow of the celebrated
poet, one of the most cultivated women in Russia, is
now an elderly woman and no longer an attraction to
society. Among the advanced Russians it is the style
nowadays to answer questions relating to that subject
with: “A salon! a circle! an intellectual aristocracy!
Really, what do you expect? There is nothing of the
kind here. The house where you live is an oasis. All
around it is a desert.” — And if you ask for their great
men, where they are to be found and seen, the answer
readily slips out: “I don’t know them; I have never
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