over the novels of Richardson and Sterne, grew violent romanticists when Byron was the undisputed overlord over the minds of Pushkin and the youthful Lermontoff, became plus royalistes que le roi over Hegelian dialectics, with the famous "all that which exists is reasonable," in the Thirties and early Forties, then Darwinists and positivists and Spencerians and Schopenhauerians and symbolists and Nietzscheans and even, at last, decadents with a faint touch of pornography to boot, all in turn (at times somewhat behindhand) as these movements succeeded one another in the thought of Western Europe. But all these numerous intellectual shades of opinion were almost immediately recreated and incorporated into the peculiarly national psychology of the Russian, with its sober realism of manner and high idealism of thought. The history of Russian Literature is thus at the same time the history of Russian thought.
Thus the saying current in Russia, that "the Frenchman will hit upon an invention, the Englishman will manufacture it, the German will import it into Russia for sale, and the Russian will come and steal it," has been shown to be true in other fields than industry. But the process has been much more than mere appropriation. It has been a laborious and painstaking process of transmutation and fusion. It has been a gathering of threads of somber color and bright color, garish and subdued, and weaving them into one majestic tapestry of a wonderful design and charming the sense of vision with the beauty of its composition and the harmonious blending of all the tints and shades of the rainbow.
It has been a fructifying process par ecxellence, not of cramming only or even of assimilation, whereby Russia has returned a hundred fold for what it has borrowed.
Some of the most prominent writers of France, England, Germany, Italy, Spain, and America, of the last quarter of a century, have been more or less the product of the school of writing as exemplified in the works of Turgenieff, Dostoyefski,
