In the rich and fertile steppes of the Ukraine, where every forest tree seems to harbor a singer, and every blade of grass on the boundless plains seems to whisper the echo of a song, this pensive character of Russian poetry deepens into a melancholy that finds expression in a variety of sweet elegiac melodies. A German writer says of them, "they are the sorrows of whole centuries blended in one everlasting sigh." The spirit of the past indeed breathes through their mournful strains. The cradle of the Kozak was rocked to the music of clashing swords, and for centuries the country, on both banks of the Dnieper to the northwestern branch of the Carpathian Mountains, the seat of this race, was the theatre of constant warfare. Their narrative ballads, therefore, have few other subjects than the feuds with the Poles and Tartars, the Kozak's parting with his beloved one, his lonely death on the border or on the bloody field of battle.
These ballads have sometimes a spirit and boldness which presents noble relief to the habitual melancholy of this poetry in general. Professional singers, with a kind of guitar in their hand, wander through the country, sure to find a willing audience in whatever village they may stop. Their ballads are not confined to the scenes of their early history, but find subjects in the later wars with the Turks and Tartars, and in the campaigns of more modern times; they illustrate the warlike spirit, as well as the domestic relations of the Kozaks, and their skill in narrative, as well as their power of expressing in lyric strains the unsophisticated emotions of a tender heart.
The poets of the present age exercise little or no influence on a society distracted and absorbed by the political questions of the day.
Although the history of Russia is rich in dramatic episodes, it has failed to inspire any native dramatist. Count Tolstoi has been one of the most successful writers in this line, but, with great merits, he has the fault common to the Russian drama in general, that of great attention to the study of the chief character, to the neglect of other points which contribute to secure interest.
4. LITERATURE IN RUSSIA SINCE THE CRIMEAN WAR.—After the Crimean War, in 1854, the Russian government took the initiative in an onward movement, and by the abolition of serfdom the country awoke to new life. In literature this showed itself in the rise of a new school, that of Nature, in which Turgenieff (1818-1883) is the most prominent figure, a place which he still holds in contemporary Russian literature. The publication of his "Diary of a Sportsman" first made the nobility of Russia aware that the serf was a man capable of feeling and suffering, and not a brute to be bought and sold with the soil, and this work was not without its effect in causing the emancipation. No writer has studied so faithfully and profoundly the Russian peasant and better understood the moral needs of the time and the great questions which agitate it.
Within the last twenty years the new theory of Nihilism has begun to find expression in literature, particularly in fiction. Rejecting all authority in religion, politics, science, and art, this school is the reaction from long ages of oppression. The school of nature lent itself to this new movement until at last it reached the pessimistic standpoint of Schopenhauer.
Of late, the ultra-realistic school has appeared in Russia, the writers of which devote themselves to the study of a low realism in its most repulsive aspects. While it boasts of not idealizing the peasant, like Turgenieff and others, it presents him in an aspect to excite only aversion. Art being thus excluded, and the school having neither authority, principle, nor object, whatever influence it may have cannot but be pernicious.
SCIENCE.—In mathematics and in all the natural sciences Russia keeps pace with the most advanced European nations. In chemistry Mendeleéff formulated the theory relating to atoms and their chemical properties and relations, not then discovered to be the law by which they were governed, as later experiments proved.
THE SERVIAN LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE.
The Servian alphabet was first fixed and the language reduced to certain general rules only within the present century. The language extends, with some slight variations of dialect, and various systems of writing, over the Turkish and Austrian provinces of Servia, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Montenegro, and Dalmatia, and the eastern part of Croatia. The southern sky, and the beauties of natural scenery that abound in all these regions, so favorable to the development of poetical genius, appear also to have exerted a happy influence on the language. While it yields to none of the other Slavic dialects in richness, clearness, and precision, it far surpasses them all in euphony.