Ivan Federof was the first of Russian printers. In 1564 he cast the Slavonic characters. Being accused of heresy, he fled for his life. The Lithuanian magnates with whom he sought refuge, forced him to till the soil. Unhappy Federof said, "It was not my work to sow the grain, but to scatter thru the earth food for the mind, nourishment for the souls of all mankind." He perished in Lemberg in extreme poverty.[59] Woful was his fate—symbolic of the sad destiny which was to befall every literary man in Knoutland.[60]
Let the Russian who intends to become an author prepare his last will and testament, and notify the nearest undertaker. No night will be too dark to keep gendarmes from bursting into his room and hauling him off to a prison from which he may never emerge. (If he comes from an aristocratic family let him adopt an empty-eyed skull and yellow cross-bones as a suitable coat-of-arms). In the den of the bloody bear there is a blackness as of many clouds. Within this deep shadow, Virtue is slaughtered and Genius treated like an unwelcome cur.
FOOTNOTES:
[42] When Pushkin began to write, the Russian literary language was in a somewhat unsettled and nebulous state, and his poetry helped to form and fix it. He thus did for Russian literature what Chaucer did for English.
[43] Kropotkin is too mild. Pobedonostzeff, world-renowned as the "Modern Torquemada," shed more blood, and was a colder and—if possible—crueller being than the terrible Spanish Inquisitor, while the physical tortures that he used, with the exception of burning at the stake which was too open an affair, were practically the same that were in vogue during the Dark Ages. He started numerous massacres which resulted in the deaths of great numbers. He often inflamed peoples who lived in harmony, to destroy each other. He was eminently successful in stirring up racial hatred and religious prejudice. "When I was in the Caucasus I saw the Georgian everywhere working peacefully and contentedly side by side with the Tartar and the Armenian. How happily and simply, like children, they played and sang and laughed, and how difficult now to believe that these simple, delightful people are busy killing each other in a senseless, stupid way, obedient to dark and evil influences."—Maxim Gorky in London Times. These "dark and evil influences" emanated from the medieval fissures in the theologic brain of Constantine Petrovitch Pobedonostzeff.
[44] Twenty years previous, in the pages of this very magazine, the same thing occurred, for the enlightened Ingersoll and the orthodox Jeremiah Black argued about Christianity.
[45] We would naturally expect better things from the author of that specially fine sonnet, "Russia" (see Stedman's American Anthology), beginning:
"Saturnian mother! why dost thou devour
Thy offspring, who by loving thee are curst?"
[46] The same mistake (and a respectable number of others) is made by William Eleroy Curtis in his false and disgusting "The Land of the Nihilist." He devotes a whole chapter to Alexander II., speaks continually of his assassination, and yet does not know even the name of the famous assassin. He says it is Elnikoff (sic)! This is a bad guess. On this occasion two bombs were thrown. The first by Rysakov, and it destroyed the carriage. The second by Grinevetsky, and it destroyed the emperor. How carefully and conscientiously the well-informed author has studied the history of the Russian Revolution which he so vilely condemns! If he ever compiles a work on England, I dare say he will announce that Charles I. was sentenced to death by the Quakers.