With regard to Dostoievsky’s political opinions, he synthesised and expressed them all in the speech which he made in June 1880, at Moscow, in memory of Pushkin. “There was never,” he said, “a poet who possessed such universal receptivity as Pushkin. It was not only that he was receptive, but this receptivity was so extraordinarily deep, that he was able to embrace and absorb in his soul the spirit of foreign nations. No other poet has ever possessed such a gift; only Pushkin; and Pushkin is in this sense a unique and a prophetic apparition, since it is owing to this gift, and by means of it, that the strength of Pushkin--that in him which is national and Russian--found expression.... For what is the strength of the Russian national spirit other than an aspiration towards a universal spirit, which shall embrace the whole world and the whole of mankind? And because Pushkin expressed the national strength, he anticipated and foretold its future meaning. Because of this he was a prophet. For what did Peter the Great’s reforms mean to us? I am not only speaking of what they were to bring about in the future, but of what they were when they were carried out. These reforms were not merely a matter of adopting European dress, habits, instruction and science.... But the men who adopted them aspired towards the union and the fraternity of the world. We in no hostile fashion, as would seem to have been the case, but in all friendliness and love, received into our spirit the genius of foreign nations, of all foreign nations, without any distinction of race, and we were able by instinct and at the first glance to distinguish, to eliminate contradictions, to reconcile differences; and by this we expressed our readiness and our inclination, we who had only just been united together and had found expression, to bring about a universal union of all the great Aryan race. The significance of the Russian race is without doubt European and universal. To be a real Russian and to be wholly Russian means only this: to be a brother of all men, to be universally human. All this is called Slavophilism; and what we call ‘Westernism’ is only a great, although a historical and inevitable misunderstanding. To the true Russian, Europe and the affairs of the great Aryan race, are as dear as the affairs of Russia herself and of his native country, because our affairs are the affairs of the whole world, and they are not to be obtained by the sword, but by the strength of fraternity and by our brotherly effort towards the universal union of mankind.... And in the long-run I am convinced that we, that is to say, not we, but the future generations of the Russian people, shall every one of us, from the first to the last, understand that to be a real Russian must signify simply this: to strive towards bringing about a solution and an end to European conflicts; to show to Europe a way of escape from its anguish in the Russian soul, which is