THE DREAMY SLAV

Evening Post, Volume LXXXIX, Issue 150, 26 June 1915, Page 16

THE DREAMY SLAV

GOVERNED BY IDEAS,

The Slav mind is far more subject than the British mind is to tho influence of ideas and impersonal considerations. Writes St. John G. Ervine :— " You cannot move a Russian by any personal ap* peal. He is impervious to suggestions that such-and-such things will be to his personal advantage. He does not care about his personal advantage to any great extent, certainly not to the extent of putting himself to any inconvenience. But he does care about impersonal things. > His country and his faith are two intimately related things. He does not separate them. H© does not speak of the Church and the State : for the Church, in the eyes of a Russian, is the State, and the State is the Church. For his country and his faith a Russian will do anything, and a great deal of the failure of the progressive movement in Russia is due to the fact that the advanced thinkers, the intellectuals, have been out of sympathy with the normal Russian attitude in these respects. The intellectual who has forsaken the Orthodox Church and abandoned patriotism has at the same time abandoned all hope of moving the moujik. " Doestoevsky, the great Russian novelist, one of the greatest novelists of Europe, was as nearly representative of, the average Russian a© any man could be. Russia had the same mystical meaning for Doestoevaky that Japan has for the Japanese, although Russia, in his youth, used him very sorely. He quarrelled with Turgenev, his great compeer. because Turgenev sometimes mocked Russia, regarding the spirit of internationalism as of greater value than the spirit of nationality. In Doestoevsky's eyes, Europe was of less consequence than Russia j in Turgenev'e eyes, Europe alone mattered. The student of Russian literature soon learns to see Russians as children. Perhaps a better expression would be 'simple.' The Russian peasant has something of the simplicity of an apostle in his character."