I had, therefore, the intention, before proceeding to a record of any things I had seen myself, to collect and convey the impressions I had received of the Russian character and of Russian life in various classes, correcting and illustrating my impressions by those of others who have worked in the same field, and by evidence drawn from Russian literature. I meant to try and illustrate books by examples taken from life, and throw light on events and people by examples taken from literature; but I found when I began to do this that the writing of such an introduction was equivalent to the writing of two large books, one on the Russian people and one on Russian literature, a task which I still hope to accomplish some day, but for which I do not at present feel sufficiently equipped. Moreover, even were I sufficiently equipped, the writing of two such books cannot be accomplished in a hurry in a country which is in a state of political effervescence. I have therefore sadly resigned myself to work backwards, and give to the public my record of raw facts first and the explanation at a later date. Nevertheless in giving this collection of scraps to the public I still have an aim and a purpose. As I have said, Englishmen are amazingly ignorant of Russia; not only because they deliberately prefer the works of sensation-mongers to those of really well-informed writers like Sir D. M. Wallace or M. Leroy-Beaulieu, but also because, when they honestly seek for truth in the newspapers which are by way of being serious, they are almost invariably misled. On the other hand Englishmen who live in Russia, even if only for a short period—such as officers from the Indian Army who come out on leave to learn the language—find no difficulty in forming a just appreciation of the country and its people. It has always struck me that if any such person were to write a record of what he saw and thought, that record would have a real value because it would constitute an aspect of the truth and not an aspect of the lie. This is therefore my aim, and it is the only merit I claim for this work. It contains aspects of things, seen by some one whose object was to try and understand the ordinary and not to invent the extraordinary. And therefore, although my work has no sort of claim to be taken seriously, either as history, or as a manual of useful information, it will have the negative merit of being free from any attempt at sensationalism, and, I hope, the positive merit of containing some aspects of the truth, some unvarnished record of _la chose vue_. If what I have written leads others to take an interest in Russia and to go and see for themselves, and to treat exhaustively in a masterly fashion the things at which I have hinted incompletely and haltingly, I shall feel amply rewarded.