I.—THE OLDEST PERIOD
Of the many Slavic nations and tribes that at one time occupied the east of Europe from the Elbe and the headwaters of the Danube to Siberia, and from the Ionic Sea to the Baltic and White Seas, some have entirely disappeared in the ruthless struggle with a superior German civilisation; others, like the Bulgarians and Servians, have paled into insignificance under the lethargic influence of the Crescent, to be fanned to life again within the memory of the present generation by a breath of national consciousness, which is the result of the Romantic Movement in European literature; others again like the Bohemians and Poles, rent asunder by fraternal discord and anarchy, have forfeited their national existence and are engaged in an unequal battle to regain it. Of all the Slavs, Russia alone has steadily gathered in the lands of the feudal lords, to shine at last as a power of the first magnitude among the sisterhood of states, and to scintillate hope to its racial brothers as the “Northern Star.”
The unity of the Russian land was ever present to the minds of the writers in the earliest days of the appanages. The bard of the Word of Ígor’s Armament and Daniel the Palmer made appeals to the whole country and prayed for all the princes in the twelfth century, and for upwards of four centuries Moscow has been the centre towards which the outlying districts have been gravitating. Yet, in spite of so continuous and well-defined a political tendency, Russia is the last of the Slavic nations to have evolved a literature worthy of the name. Bohemia had a brilliant literature of the Western stamp as early as the thirteenth century; Bulgaria had made a splendid start three centuries before, under the impulse of the newly introduced religion; the Servian city of Ragusa, receiving its intellectual leaven from its Italian vicinage, invested Petrarch and Dante with Servian citizenship in the fifteenth century, and, shortly after, gloried in an epic of a Gundulić, and in a whole galaxy of writers; Poland borrowed its theology from Bohemia, took an active part in the medieval Latin literature, and boasted a golden age for its native language in the sixteenth century. Russia produced an accessible literature only in the second half of the eighteenth century, became known to Western Europe not earlier than the second quarter of the next, and had not gained universal recognition until within the last twenty-five years.
In the case of the Western and Southern Slavs, a community of interests, whether religious or social, has led to an intellectual intercourse with their neighbours, from whom they have received their models for imitation or adaptation. Without a favourable geographical position, or some common bond with the external world, no nation can have a healthy development, especially in the incipient stage of its political existence. Blatant Slavophiles of fifty years ago heaped reproach on the reforms of Peter the Great, on the ground that they were fashioned upon Western ideals, and that he had retarded the evolution of Russia according to its inherent Slavic idea. There still survive men of that persuasion, though a comparative study of Russian literature long ago demonstrated that every step in advance has been made by conscious or unconscious borrowings from abroad. If there was a Russian literature previous to the introduction of Christianity, it certainly stood in some kind of relation to the literatures of the neighbours. The few extant treaties with the Greeks for that period show unmistakable Byzantine influences, and the Russian Code of Yarosláv, with its purely Norse laws, dates from a time when the Varyágs had not yet disappeared in the mass of the Slavic majority.
With the introduction of Christianity, Russia, instead of entering into closer communion with the rest of the world, was separated from it even more securely than before, and soon after, an intellectual stagnation began that lasted very nearly to the end of the seventeenth century. Various causes combined to produce this singular effect. Chief of these was its geographical position. Living in the vast eastern plain of Europe, which in itself would have been productive of a larger life, the Russian tribes had civilised neighbours on one side only. On the north they were separated from the Swedes by rude Finnish tribes; on the south, they had for centuries to contend against all the nomads, Pechenyégs, Cumanians, Khazars, who slowly proceeded from Asia to central Europe to become lost in the nations to the south of the Carpathians and in the Balkan peninsula; in the east the Finns of the north met the Tartars of the south, and behind them lay unprofitable Asia. On the north-west, it is true, was the civilised Teutonic Order, but the inveterate hatred between these Germans and the Slavs prevented any intercommunication from that quarter. There was left Poland, through which Russia might issue into Europe; but savage Lithuania was wedged in between the two, so as to reduce still more the line of contact with the West. When Lithuania became civilised, and a part of Poland, the latter had grown suspicious of the youthful Ilyá of Múrom who “had sat thirty years upon the oven,” and enunciated a political maxim that either Russia would have to become Polish, or else Poland Russian. Knowing that there was no other exit for Russia, Poland permitted no light to reach it from the West. When England began to communicate with Russia in the sixteenth century, King Sigismund made an earnest appeal to Queen Elizabeth to stop sending skilled mechanics, lest the Colossus should awaken and become a danger to Europe.
These external causes of Russia’s aloofness were still more intensified by a systematic determination of Russia to keep out the Catholic contamination that would come from intercourse with Europe. This was a direct outgrowth of its adoption of Christianity from Byzantium, instead of Rome. Cyril and Methodius, the apostles to the Slavs, were themselves Bulgarians from Macedonia. When they first carried the new religion to Moravia and later to Bulgaria, they, no doubt, preached and wrote in the dialect with which they were most familiar. This innovation of preaching the gospel in another than one of the three sacred languages was a necessary departure, in order to win over the troublesome Slavs to the north of Byzantium. Though at the end of the ninth century the various dialects were already sufficiently dissimilar to constitute separate languages, yet they were not so distant from each other as to be a hindrance to a free intercommunication. When, a century later, Christianity was introduced into Russia from Constantinople, Bulgarian priests and bookmen were the natural intermediaries, and the Bulgarian language at once became the literary medium, to the exclusion of the native tongue. Soon after, the Eastern Church separated from Rome, and the Greek-Catholic clergy inculcated upon their neophytes an undying hatred of the Latins, as the Romanists were called. In Moscow, the slightest deviation from the orthodox faith was sufficient cause for suspecting a Romanist heresy, and anathemas against Roman-Catholics were frequent, but at Kíev, where the contact with Poland was inevitable, the disputes with the Latins form a prominent part of ecclesiastical literature. To guard the country against any possible contagion, the punishment of Russians who crossed the border, in order to visit foreign parts, was so severe, that few ever ventured out of the country. The seclusion of Russia was complete.
Even under these difficulties, literature and the arts might have flourished, if Constantinople had been able to give to the new converts even its degraded Byzantine culture, or if there had not been other powerful causes that militated against a development from within. In the west of Europe the Latin language of the Church did not interfere with an early national literature. Latin was the language of the learned, whether clerical or lay, and mediated an intellectual intercourse between the most distant members of the universal faith. At the same time, the native dialects had received an impulse before the introduction of Christianity, often under the influence of Rome, and they were left to shift for themselves and to find their votaries. The case was quite different in Russia. The Bulgarian language, which was brought in with the gospel, at once usurped on the native Russian to the great disadvantage of the latter. Being closely related to the spoken Russian, Bulgarian was easily acquired by the clergy, but it was not close enough to become the literary language of the people. On the one hand, this new gospel language could at best connect Russia with Byzantium by way of Bulgaria; on the other, Russian was looked down upon as a rude dialect and was discouraged, together with every symptom of the popular creation which was looked upon as intimately connected with ancient paganism.
This Bulgarian language was not long preserved in its purity. Detached from its native home, it was immediately transformed in pronunciation, so as to conform to the spoken Russian; thus, for example, it at once lost its nasals, which were not familiar to the Russian ear. In the course of time, words and constructions of the people’s language found their way into the Church-Slavic, as the Bulgarian was then more properly called. Naturally, many words, referring to abstract ideas and the Church, passed from the Bulgarian into the spoken tongue. Thus, the two dialects, one the arbitrary literary language, the other, the language of every-day life, approached each other more and more. At the present time, the Russian of literature contains a large proportion of these Church-Slavic words; the language of the Bible and the liturgy is the Church-Slavic of the sixteenth century, which differs so much from the original Bulgarian that, though a Russian reads with comparative ease this Church-Slavic, he has to study Bulgarian as a German would study Old German. This Church-Slavic of the Russian redaction has also been, and still is, in part, the ecclesiastical language of the other Greek-Catholic countries of the Slavs.
Some time passed before Russia could furnish its own clergy. All the leading places in the Church were at first filled with Bulgarians and Greeks who were steeped in Byzantine religious lore. The Church at Constantinople stood in direct opposition to the classical traditions of Greece. These were not separated from the old heathenism, and to the luxury and voluptuousness of medieval Greece, which was ascribed to classical influences, the Church opposed asceticism and self-abnegation. Monasticism was preached as the ideal of the religious life, and arts and sciences had no place in the scheme of the Church. Theology and rhetoric were the only sciences which the hermit practised in his cell, in the moments that were free from prayer and self-castigation. And it is only the Church’s sciences that ancient Russia inherited from Byzantium. The civil intercourse between the two countries was very slight, and the few Russian ecclesiastics who visited Mount Athos and the Holy Land brought back with them at best a few legends and apocryphal writings. The Byzantine influence at home showed itself in a verbal adherence to the Bible and the Church Fathers, and an occasional attempt at pulpit oratory in the bombastic diction of contemporary Greece.
Not a science penetrated into ancient Russia. Historically the rest of the world did not exist for it, and geographically it was only of interest in so far as it came into contact with Russia: Russia knew more of Tartars and Cumanians than of Germany or France. Arithmetic, not to speak of mathematics, and physics, medicine and engineering, were unknown before the sixteenth century, and then only when a few foreigners practised these arts in the capital and at the Court. The only literature that reached Russia was the legendary lore of the South and West, through Bulgaria and Poland, generally at a time when it had long been forgotten elsewhere: thus, the Lucidarius and Physiologus were accepted as genuine bits of zoölogical and botanical science, long after sober knowledge had taken possession of the universities of the world. The literature of Russia before Peter the Great is by no means meagre or uninteresting, but it lacks an important element of historical continuity; in fact, it is devoid of every trace of chronology. What was written in the twelfth century might with equal propriety be the product of the sixteenth, and vice versa, and the productions of the earliest time were copied out as late as the seventeenth century, and relished as if they had just been written. Where a certain literary document has come down to us in a later copy, it is not possible to date it back, unless it contains some accidental indication of antiquity. In short, there was no progress in Russia for a period of six or seven centuries, from the tenth century to the seventeenth.
In this achronism of literary history, there may, however, be discerned two periods that are separated from each other by the first invasion of the Tartars. Previous to that momentous event, Kíev formed the chief intellectual and political centre of the Russian principalities. Here the Norse traditions, which had been brought by the Varyág warriors, had not entirely faded away in the century following the introduction of Christianity, and the Court maintained certain relations with the rest of the world, as in the case of Yarosláv, who was related, by the marriage of his children, to the Courts of Norway, France, Germany and Hungary. On the other hand, Vladímir’s heroes were celebrated abroad, and Ilyá of Múrom is not unknown to German tradition and the Northern saga. Not only its favourable geographical position, but its climate as well, inspired the inhabitants of Kíev with a greater alacrity, even as the Little-Russians of to-day have developed less sombre characteristics than the Great-Russians of the sterner north. It is sufficient to compare the laconic instructions of Luká Zhidyáta in the commercial Nóvgorod with the flowery style of Serapión’s sermon, or the dry narrative of the northern chronicles with the elaborate adornment of the stories in the chronicles of Néstor and Sylvester, to become aware of the fundamental difference between the two sections of Russia. The twelfth century, rich in many aspects of literature, including that beautiful prose poem of popular origin, the Word of Ígor’s Armament, gave ample promise of better things to come. Similarly, the bylínas of the Vladímir cycle, the best and most numerous of all that are preserved, point to an old poetic tradition that proceeded from Kíev.
The fact that these bylínas have been lately discovered in the extreme north-east, in the Government of Olónetsk, while not a trace of them has been found in their original home, has divided the scholars of Russia into two camps. Some assert that all the Russians of Kíev belonged to the Great-Russian division, and that the Tartar invasion destroyed most of them, and caused the rest to migrate to the north, whither they carried their poetry. The Little-Russians that now occupy the south of Russia are supposed by these scholars to have come from Galicia to repeople the abandoned places. The Little-Russians themselves claim, with pardonable pride, to be the direct descendants of the race that gave Russia its Néstor and the bard of the Word of Ígor’s Armament. There are weighty arguments on both sides, and both the Great-Russians, with whom we are at present concerned, and the Little-Russians, or Ruthenians, who have developed a literature in their own dialect, claim that old literature as their own.
The terrible affliction of the Mongol invasion marks, on the one hand, the beginning of the concentration of Russia around Moscow, and, on the other, accentuates more strongly the barren activities of the Russian mind for the next few centuries. Historians have been wont to dwell on the Tartar domination as the chief cause of Russian stagnation, but the calmer judgment of unbiassed science must reject that verdict. It is true, the Tartars carried ruin to all the Russian land, but after every successful raid, they withdrew to their distant camps, ruling the conquered land merely by exacting tribute and homage from its princes. The Tartars in no way interfered with the intellectual and religious life of the people; on the contrary, they mingled freely with the subject nation, and intermarriages were common. It has already been pointed out that the germ of unprogressiveness was older than the invasion, that the Byzantine religious culture was the real cause of it. That Moscow was even less progressive than Kíev is only natural. All its energies were bent on political aggrandisement, on throwing off the hated Tartar yoke, and it was farther removed from Europe than the more fortunate southern metropolis. All these conditions were unfavourable to the practice of the gentler arts.
The religious lore of ancient Russia was derived from the gospel, which was hardly ever accessible in continuous form, but only as an aprakos, i. e., as a manual in which it was arranged according to the weekly readings. This was supplemented by two peculiar versions of the Old Testament, the palæas, in which passages of the Bible were intermingled with much apocryphal matter, and which originally had served as controversial literature against the Jews, and to prove the coming of Christ; there was no translation of the whole Old Testament, and as late as the eighteenth century a priest referred to the palæa as to Holy Writ. Prayers to saints, lives and legends of saints, with moral instructions, complete the list of the religious equipment that Russia received from Byzantium. One of the oldest Russian manuscripts, the Collection of Svyatosláv, made for Svyatosláv of Chernígov in 1073, is a copy of a similar production, translated from the Greek for Simeón of Bulgaria. It is an encyclopedia of ecclesiastic and moral themes, culled from the Church Fathers, among whom John Chrysostom is most prominent. Later, there were many similar collections, known under the names of The Golden Beam, Emerald, Golden Chain, and so forth.
By the aid of this literature and such Greek models as were accessible to the priests, were produced the sermons that have come down to us in a large number, and a few of which, like those of Cyril of Túrov and Serapión, do not lack literary polish, and are not inferior to Western pulpit oratory of the same period. Whenever the preachers turned to praise the princes, as in the case of Ilarión who eulogised Vladímir, they had in mind only their orthodox Christianity, for religion was the all-absorbing question. Similarly, when Vladímir Monomákh wrote his Instruction to his children, he composed it according to the model given in Svyatosláv’s Collection. Sermons and Instructions, from the introduction of Christianity to the middle of the eighteenth century, form one of the most important ingredients of Collections, and served as models for Spiritual Testaments even in the eighteenth century. Sylvester’s Domostróy belongs to the same type, though what in Vladímir was the enthusiasm and earnestness of the new faith, has in this later document become a series of external observances. Formalism and adherence to the dead letter characterise the whole period of Russian unprogressiveness, and remained the characteristic of the Church at a much later time, in spite of the enlightened labours of a Feofán or Platón; and it was the same formalism that caused the schism of the raskólniks, who saw in Nikón’s orthographical corrections of the corrupt Bible text an assault upon the orthodox religion.
Only a small proportion of the literature of ancient Russia was produced outside the ranks of the clergy. There were few literate persons who were not priests or monks; for there hardly existed any schools during this whole period, and even princes could not sign their names. The influence of the lettered priest was paramount, and if he was at all equal to the task of composing readable sermons, these were eagerly sought for by all who could read them. When, in the sixteenth, and still more in the seventeenth century, rays of light began to penetrate into Moscow, the chief and most dangerous task of instruction fell to the share of those preachers who had come in contact with Polish learning at Kíev; in the days of Peter the Great, Feofán Prokopóvich was an important factor in the civilisation of Russia, and in the beginning of the nineteenth century the sermons of Platón still form an integral part of literature.
To the student of comparative literature the semi-religious lore, which finds its expression in the apocrypha, is of vastly greater interest. The poetical creative activity of the people, combining with the knowledge of religious lore, has ever been active in producing spurious legendary accounts of matters biblical. The book of Enoch and the Talmud disseminated such legends in regard to the Old Testament long before the birth of Christianity. The Russian apocryphal literature is rich in legendary accounts of the creation of the world, the confession of Eve, the lives of Adam, Melchisedec, Abraham, Lot, Moses, Balaam, the twelve patriarchs, David, and particularly Solomon. Much more extensive is the store of legends from the New Testament. The birth of the Holy Virgin is dilated upon in the gospel of Jacob, the childhood of Christ is told in the gospel of Thomas, while a fuller story of Pilate’s judgment of Christ and of Christ’s descent into Hell is given in the old gospel of Nicodemus. Lazarus, Judas, and the twelve apostles have all their group of legends, but the Assumption of the Virgin Mary and the Judgment-day were the most popular. The list is far from being exhausted, and only a small part of the material has been scientifically investigated and located. Most of these stories travelled by the customary road over Bulgaria from Byzantium. As they have also reached the west of Europe, the investigator of their Western forms has to look into Byzantine sources; but as many of the legends have been preserved in the Slavic form, and when they have disappeared from the Greek, or as fuller redactions are to be met with in the North, he cannot well afford to overlook the Slavic sources. The index librorum prohibitorum of Russia, fashioned after the Greek, includes all such apocrypha as were current at the time of the composition of the first index. The clergy were continually preaching against them, yet their efforts were useless, especially since they themselves were at the same time drawing extensively on the apocryphal accounts of the palæas, lives of saints, etc.
There is this vast difference in the literature of this kind as it was current in Russia and in the West. Elsewhere the legends were early seized upon by the fancy of the poets, were clothed in the conventional garb of verse, remodelled, combined, beautified, until they became the stock in trade of literature, while the memory of the unadorned story had entirely faded from the popular consciousness. Dante’s Divine Comedy is an illustration of how transformed the legends had become at a very early date. In Russia nothing of the kind has taken place. With the usual achronism of its literature, legends of the eleventh and eighteenth centuries live side by side, or mingle in the same version, and they have undergone no other change than corruption of misunderstood passages, transposition of motives, modernisation of language. The religious songs that a mendicant may be heard singing at the present time in front of a church are nothing but these old legends, almost in their primitive form.
Nearly allied to the apocryphal stories are the profane legends that form the subject-matter of so much of European medieval literature. The stories of Alexander the Great, the Trojan War, Digenis Akritas, Barlaam and Josaphat, Calilah-wa-Dimnah, are as common in Russian literature as in that of France or Germany. Byzantium is the immediate source of most of these legends both for the East and the West, but there are also many motives in the Russian stories that were derived from the West through Servia and Bulgaria. It is not yet quite clear how these stories came to travel in a direction opposite to the customary route of popular tales; no doubt the crusades did much to bring about an interchange of the oral literature of the nations. In the West, these stories have furnished the most beautiful subjects for medieval poetry, but as before, the Russian stories have not found their way into polite literature. They have either remained unchanged in their original form, or, being of a more popular character than the religious legends, have adapted themselves to the style of folktales, as which they have been preserved.
It is not unlikely that many of these tales were brought back from Palestine, the common camping-ground of the Christian nations during the crusades. Pilgrimages to the Holy Land began soon after the introduction of Christianity into Russia, and in the twelfth century we have the first account of such a journey, from the pen of the abbot Daniel. None of the later accounts of Palestine and Constantinople compare in interest with the simple narrative of Daniel the Palmer, after whose Pilgrimage they are fashioned and whose very words they often incorporated in their Travels. The purpose of all these was to serve as incitements to religious contemplation. There is but one account of a journey to the west of Europe. It was undertaken by the metropolitan Isidor who, in 1437, attended the Council of Florence. A few years later Afanási Nikítin described his journey to India, which was one of the earliest undertaken by Westerners in the same century; but while Vasco de Gama and Columbus were revolutionising the knowledge of geography, and were making the discovery of a route to India the object of mercantile development, Nikítin’s report, important though it was, had absolutely no effect upon dormant Russia.
As there existed no external geography, so there was no external history. But fortunately for Russia, a long series of chronicles have saved historical events from oblivion. The earliest chronicle, that of Néstor, was the model for all that followed. Excepting the history of Kúrbski, who had come into contact with Western science through the Polish, and Krizhánich, who was not a Russian, there was no progress made in the chronological arrangement of historical facts from Néstor to Tatíshchev, while in style and dramatic diction there is a decided retrogression. The promise held out by the historian of the twelfth century was not made good for six hundred years. Néstor and Sylvester, the continuator, were of the clerical profession, and naturally the religious element, richly decked out with legend, folktale and reports of eye-witnesses, is the prevailing tone throughout the whole production. The Bible and the Byzantines, Hamartolos and John Malalas, serve as models for the fluent style of this production, but the vivid, dramatic narrative bears witness to considerable talent in the author. At first only the cities of Kíev, Nóvgorod and Súzdal, and Volhynia seem to have possessed such chronicles; but those that are preserved show traces of being composed of shorter accounts of other individual places. In the following centuries, most of the larger cities and monasteries kept chronological records of important events, and with the centralisation of Russia about Moscow there also appeared a species of Court chroniclers whose dry narration is often coloured in favour of the tsarate.
All this mass of literature is essentially ecclesiastic, and hardly any other could raise its head against the constant anathemas of the Church. No prohibition of the priests was strong enough to obliterate the craving for a popular literature, for no school, no science, was opposed to the superstition of the people, which therefore had full sway. The best the Church was able to do for the masses was to foster a “double faith,” in which Christianity and paganism lived side by side. We shall see later how this state of affairs has been favourable to the preservation of an oral tradition up to the present time. Yet, but for the Word of Ígor’s Armament, and its imitation, the Zadónshchina, no one could have suspected that the elements of a natural, unecclesiastic literature were present in ancient Russia.
This Word of Ígor’s Armament is unique. It was composed at a time when Russia was already well Christianised, yet the references to Christianity are only sporadic, whereas the ancient pagan divinities and popular conceptions come in for a goodly share of attention. There are some who are inclined to see in this production a forgery, such as Hanka concocted for Bohemian literature, or Macpherson for Celtic, for the absence of any later works of the kind seems to be inexplicable. But this absence need not surprise us, for no such work could have been written at a later time outside the Church, which alone was in possession of a modicum of learning. It must be assumed that the bard of the Word represents the last of a bygone civilisation that had its firm footing in the people, but stood in a literary relation to the singers of the Norsemen; for there is much in the Word that reminds one of the Northern sagas. The tradition of the bard came to an end with this last production, but his manner, corrupted and twisted by a wrongly understood Christianity, lived on in the folksong of the people; hence the remarkable resemblance between the two.
But for the inertia of the Russian Church and people, it would not have been necessary to wait until a Peter the Great violently shook the country into activity, for long before his time glimpses of European civilisation reached Moscow. In the fifteenth century, we have found metropolitan Isidor travelling to the Council of Florence, to cast his vote in favour of a union of the Churches under Rome. In the same century foreigners began to arrive in Moscow to practise medicine or architecture, or to serve in the Russian army; in the time of Iván the Terrible there was already a considerable foreign colony in Moscow, and its influences upon individual Russians were not rare. Iván the Terrible himself made several attempts to get skilled mechanics from the West, but his efforts were generally frustrated by Poland and the Germans of the Baltic provinces.
The most important points of contact with the West were in the Church itself, through Kíev and Western Russia. These outlying parts of Russia had early come into relation with Poland, and their unyielding orthodoxy had been mellowed by the prevailing scholasticism of the Polish theology. In the academy of Kíev, Greek and Latin grammar, theology and rhetoric were taught, while these sciences—especially grammar, even though it were Slavic grammar—were looked upon at Moscow as certain expressions of heresy. The correction of the corrupt church books, which in itself was advocated by priests who had imbibed the Kíev culture, made the presence of learned men—that is, of such as knew grammar enough to discover orthographical mistakes—an absolute necessity. In the reign of Alexis Mikháylovich, Kíev monks were called out for the purpose of establishing a school, and only in 1649 was the first of the kind opened. This innovation divided the churchmen into two camps,—those who advocated the Greek grammar, and those who advocated the Latin,—that is, those who would hear of nothing that distantly might remind them of the Latins, and those who were for a Western culture, even though it was to be only the scholastic learning already abandoned in the rest of Europe. The battle between the two was fought to the death. Those who were in favour of the Latin were generally worsted, and some of the most promising of them were imprisoned and even capitally punished; but men like Medvyédev, and later Simeón Pólotski, laid the foundation for an advancement, however gradual, which culminated in the reforms of Peter the Great.
Where a few individuals gained some semblance of Western culture, they could not write freely at home, and had to develop their activities abroad. Kúrbski, who for a long time stands alone as an historian, wrote his History in Poland, and it remained without any influence whatsoever at home; its very existence was not known before our own times. The same thing happened with Kotoshíkhin, whose description of Russia was known to the learned of Sweden, but the original of which was unknown until its accidental discovery by a Russian scholar of the nineteenth century. So, while the ferment of reform began much earlier than the eighteenth century, it would have been indefinitely delayed, causing many a bloody battle, if the Gordian knot had not been cut by Peter the Great in favour of the West.