The first time I came to Russia I travelled straight to the small village where I am now staying. What did I imagine Russia to be like? All I can think of now is that there was a big blank in my mind. I had read translations of Russian books, but they had left no definite picture or landscape in my mind; I had read some books about Russia and got from them very definite pictures of a fantastic country, which proved to be curiously unlike Russia in every respect. A country where feudal castles, Pevenseys and Hurstmonceuxs, loomed in a kind of Rhine-land covered with snow, inhabited by mute, inglorious Bismarcks, and Princesses who carried about dynamite in their cigarette-cases and wore bombs in their tiaras; Princesses who owed much of their being to Ouida, and some of it to Sardou. Then everything in these books was so gloriously managed; everybody was so efficient, so powerful; the Bismarcks so Machiavellian and so mighty; the Princesses so _splendide mendaces_. The background was also gorgeous, barbaric, crowded with Tartars and Circassians, blazing with scimitars, pennons, armour, and sequins, like a scene in a Drury Lane pantomime; and every now and then a fugitive household would gallop in the snow through a primæval forest, throwing their children to the wolves, so as to escape being devoured themselves. This, I think, was the impression of Russia which I derived before I went there from reading French and English fiction about Russia, from Jules Verne’s “Michel Strogoff,” and from memories of many melodramas. Then came the impressions received from reading Russian books, which were again totally different from this melodramatic atmosphere.