The Court at Moscow had come into contact with foreign ideas ever since the days of Iván the Terrible. The “German Suburb,” as the foreign colony was called, was itself a piece of the West, transplanted into the semi-barbarous capital, and foreigners of necessity occupied various posts in the Government. Germans, Greeks, and especially Englishmen were employed as ambassadors and foreign agents, and in the seventeenth century it was not rare to find Westerners as teachers of Russian youths. At the same time, clergymen from Kíev carried ever more and more the Polish scholasticism and rhetoric to the most orthodox city, and with it came the weak reflection of Western culture. Alexis Mikháylovich became fascinated by the theatre, and a German troupe and even English comedians played before the Tsar; among these early plays was a crude rifacimento of Marlowe’s _Tamerlane_. Sophia went one step further, and had a Russian translation of Molière’s _Médecin malgré lui_ performed in her apartments. Even poetry of an European type had made its appearance before Kantemír, though only in the mediocre syllabic versification of a Karión Istómin and a Simeón Pólotski. Yet the progress was very slow, and the historian of Peter’s time, Tatíshchev, had figured out that at the rate at which it was proceeding, it would take Russia seven generations, or more than two hundred years, to be equal in civilisation to the rest of Europe. Then Peter appeared. He found around him weak tendencies to reform, but hardly any men to help him carry them out, and no institutions of any kind on which to engraft the new knowledge he had brought with him from Holland and Germany. There was no native scientific literature whatsoever; there were no terms in which to express the truths which he and his disciples had learned; there was no established language even for educated people. Peter united in his person the extreme of practical sense with the idealism of youth; while bent on introducing mechanical sciences for the advancement of his country, he at the same time carried on a correspondence with the philosopher Leibniz, and favoured the introduction of every branch of literature. With an indomitable will he wanted to merge savage Russia into the liberal West, and he frequently used savage means to attain his end.