One of the strangest peculiarities of Russian life is that you will find the greatest contrasts everywhere. Here you will see the most luxurious castles, cathedrals, convents, villas and estates; there you will find the most desolate huts of the moujiks and lonely hermit caves in the wilds of Siberia. Here you will meet the most selfish chinovnik, the most fanatic desperado or reckless bureaucrat; there you face the noblest men and women, supermen, physically and mentally. You will find that all Russian life is full of such mental and physical contrasts. This is the dualism that confronts like a sphinx the foreigners. In the same way you will find that the Russian homes are full of contrasting colors, bright red and yellow, white and blue. The Russian music is the most dramatic phonetic art ever created; it reaches the deepest sorrow and the gayest hilarity and joy. Dreamy, romantic, imaginary, simple, hospitable and childlike as an average moujik, is the soul of the people. Nowhere is there a hint of those qualities which are thrown up as dark shadows on the canvas of his horizon. While with one hand Russia has been conquering the world, with the other she has been creating the most magnificent masterpieces of humanity. In the same generation she produces a Plehve and a Tolstoy, both in a way, true to national type. In the popular American imagination, which invariably seizes upon a single point, three things stand out as representative of Russia: the moujiks, the Cossacks and the Siberian penal system. The vast unknown spaces between these three have been filled in with the dark colors of poverty and oppression, so that a Russian is looked upon as an outcast of evolution, an exile of the ages. the Russia of the dark powers is past; thus soon will pass the Russian chinovnik, the Russian spy and the Russian gloom, who have been a shadow of the Slavic race. From now all the world will listen to the majestic masterpieces of the Russian composers, see the infinite beauty of the Russian life and feel the greatness of the Russian soul. Not only has Russia her peculiar racial civilization, her unique art and literature, and national traditions, but she has riches of which the outside world knows little, riches that are still buried. The Russian stage, art galleries, archives, monastery treasuries and romantic traits of life remain still a sealed book to the outsiders. Take for instance, Russian music, the operas of Rimsky-Korsakoff, the plays of Ostrowsky and the symphonies of Reinhold Gliere or Spendiarov and you will have eloquent chapters of a modern living Bible. No music of another country is such a true mirror of a nation's racial character, life, passion, blood, struggle, despair and agony, as the Russian. One can almost see in its turbulent-lugubrious or buoyant-hilarious chords the rich colors of the Byzantine style, the half Oriental atmosphere that surrounds everything with a romantic halo.