Job, the Archimandrite of Novgorod, told me: “Evil awaits thee in Petersburg, yet I feel God will deliver thee. Thou wilt see what will happen.”
God has so willed it with us sinners that foreigners do with us just as it pleases them. We all suffer from a mania. This fatal illness is a mad passion for foreign things and people, which has infected our whole nation. Truly says the prophet Baruch: “Let a stranger come near thee and he will destroy thee.” The Germans boast and have a saying, ‘he who wants to eat bread without work, let him go to Russia.’ They call us barbarians and choose to reckon us among the beasts instead of men. They try to make us out before other nations as worse than dead dogs. It would be as well to stop some of these foreign antics; they don’t come natural to us and we only make a muddle in meddling with them. The foreign way becomes with us the fool’s way. We degrade ourselves, our language, our nation; and we expose ourselves to the ridicule of every one.
The intrusion of foreign languages has spoilt the purity of the Slavonic tongue. I know not what need we have to use foreign words. It must be only to make a boast of, there is little honour in doing it. Sometimes they speak in a way that neither they themselves nor others can understand.
Sit not down under a stranger’s hedgerow. Rather among nettles if they are thine own. A stranger’s wit forsakes thee at the threshold. Keep thine own counsel; thine own counsellors. Pleasant is the sound of the tambours beyond the hill; but when brought hither they are but baskets of bast.
Foreigners are far beyond us, I grant you, in knowledge; yet in natural quickness of wit our people are, thank God, not worse equipped than they, and they do wrong in railing at us. I am persuaded that God created us Russians not inferior to other human beings.