A Woman of Yakutsk
In temperament and character the Slavs present an ensemble of defects and qualities which unite them more nearly with the Latins and Celts than with their neighbours the Germans. They are characterised by a vivacity, a warmth, a mobility, a petulance, an exuberance not always found to the same degree among even the peoples of the south. Among the Slavs of purer blood these characteristics have marked their political life with a mobile, inconstant, and anarchical spirit which has rendered extremely difficult their national existence and which, taken with their geographical position, has been the great obstacle in the way of their civilisation. The distinguishing faculty of the race is a certain flexibility and elasticity of temperament and character which render it adaptable to the reception and the reproduction of all sorts of diverse ideas; the imitative faculty of the Slavs is well known. This gift is everywhere distributed among them; this Slav malleability, peculiar alike to Pole and Russian, is perhaps fundamentally but a result of their historical progress and of their geographical position. But lately entered in at the gate of civilisation, and during long years inferior to the neighbouring races, they have always gone to school to the others; instead of living by their own invention, they have lived by borrowing, and the imitative spirit has become their ruling faculty, having been for them the most useful as well as the most widely exercised.
In the west the Slavs fell under the influence of Rome; in the east, under that of Byzantium: hence the antagonism which during long centuries has set strife in the midst of the two chief Slavonic nations. United by their common origin and the affinity of their languages, they are, however, separated by the very elements of civilisation—religion, writing, and calendar; therein lies the secret of the moral and material strife between Russia and Poland—a strife which, after having nearly annihilated the one, actually cost the other its life; as though from the Carpathian to the Ural, on those vast even plains, there was not room at one time for two separate states.
In the northwest, on the banks of the Niemen and Dvina, appears a strange group, incontestably of Indo-European origin yet isolated amidst the peoples of Europe; harking back to the Slavs, yet forming a parallel branch rather than offshoot—the Letto-Lithuanian group. Shut away in the north by marshy forests, restricted by powerful neighbours, the Lithuanian group long remained closed to all outer influences, whether of East or West. Last of all the peoples of Europe to accept Christianity, its language even to-day is the nearest of European tongues to the Sanskrit. The bone of contention among the Germans, the Poles, and the Russians, who each in turn obtained a footing among them and left an influence on their religion, they found themselves divided into Protestants, Catholics, and Orthodox.
Mixed with Poles and Russians, menaced on both sides with complete absorption, the Lithuanians and the Samogitians, their brothers by race and language, still number in ancient Lithuania nearly two million souls, Catholics for the most part; they formed the majority of the population of Vilna and Kovno. In Prussia some two hundred thousand Lithuanians constitute the representatives of the ancient population of oriental Prussia, whose name is derived from a people of that race which kept its language intact up to the seventeenth century.
The second existing group of this family, the Letts, crossed probably with Finns, number more than a million souls; they inhabit chiefly Courland, Vitetesk and Livonia; but, converted, subjected, and made slaves of by the Teutonic knights, they still live under the dominion of the German barons of the Baltic provinces, with whom they have nothing in common but their religion—Lutheranism. Like the Finnish tribes outside of Finland, the Letts and Lithuanians, scanty in number and widely scattered, are incapable of forming by themselves a nation or a state. Out of this intermixture of races by the assimilation of the ruder by the more civilised, was formed a new people—a homogeneous nation. In fact, contrary to popular prejudice there is in Russia something more than an intermixture of diverse races—there is what we to-day call a “nationality”—as united, as compact, and as self-conscious as any nation in the world. Russia, notwithstanding all her various races, is yet no incoherent mass, no political conglomeration or mosaic of peoples. She resembles France in her national unity rather than Turkey or Austria.
If Russia must be compared to a mosaic, let it be to one of those ancient pavements whose scheme is a single substance of solid color edged with a border of diverse forms and shades—most of Russia’s original alien populations being relegated to her borders and forming around her a sort of belt of uneven width.
It is in the centre of Russia that is found that uniformity of much more marked among the Russians than among all other peoples of Europe; from one end of the empire to the other the language presents fewer dialects and less localisms than most of our western languages. The cities all look alike; the peasants have the same customs, the same manner of life. The nation resembles the country, having the same unity, almost the same monotony as the plains which it peoples.