P. KOTSCHETOV, Director of the Musical and Dramatical School of the Philharmonic Society; A. BRANDUKOV, Inspector of same school; professor, A. KORESHTSCHENKO.
Y. VASILIEVA, President of the Actors' Aid Society.
Russia in Literature
By British Men of Letters.
The following address, signed by a number of distinguished writers in Great Britain, and intended for publication in Russia, appeared in The London Times on Dec. 23, 1914.
To Our Colleagues in Russia:
AT this moment, when your countrymen and ours are alike facing death for the deliverance of Europe, we Englishmen of letters take the opportunity of uttering to you feelings which have been in our hearts for many years. You yourselves perhaps hardly realize what an inspiration Englishmen of the last two generations have found in your literature.
Many a writer among us can still call back, from ten or twenty or thirty years ago, the feeling of delight and almost of bewilderment with which he read his first Russian novel. Perhaps it was "Virgin Soil" or "Fathers and Sons," perhaps "War and Peace," or "Anna Karenina"; perhaps "Crime and Punishment" or "The Idiot"; perhaps, again, it was the work of some author still living. But many of us then felt, as our poet Keats felt on first reading Homer,
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"like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken." |