The differences between America and Russia are many and striking, and before we enter upon a study of Russian literature we must understand Russian life. Voltaire tells us that virtue and vice are products like vinegar, and we shall find this applies also to the Russian soul with its mysticism and melancholy. When the sun almost disappears for six months at a time, and icy blizzards rage, human beings have a tendency to stay by the fire and develop their inner natures; also they develop congested livers, and brood upon the futility of life. Says Mrs. Ogi: “Don’t forget that it often gets cold in New England.” “Yes, and there is both mysticism and melancholy in New England art. But the difference is that the people of New England escaped from the cradle of despotism in Asia many centuries earlier than the Russians. So the brooding of the New England colonist took the form of calling a town meeting to plan for the building of a new road in the spring. But the Russian could not do things for himself; he had to get the permission of officials. If he tried to act for himself, they would strip him and beat him with knouts until he swooned. So the Russian’s brooding turned to despair, and he got drunk, and got into a fight and killed his neighbor, and then tried to make up his mind whether God would forgive him, or damn him to hell fire forever; he fretted over this problem until he went insane or wrote a novel--” “Or both,” says Mrs. Ogi. The dominant fact in Russian art of the nineteenth century was despotism. Here was a vast empire of a hundred million people, energetic and aspiring; and the ruling class dreamed that they could introduce modern material civilization, while keeping out the modern mind and soul. Young Russians travelled, and learned to think as the rest of Europe thought; then they came home, to find that the slightest attempt to teach or to organize was met by imprisonment, torture, exile, hard labor, or the scaffold. Wave after wave of rebellion swept Russia, to be met by wave after wave of repression. Intellectual activity which New England honored was in Russia a secret and criminal conspiracy; the youth of the country was broken in a torture chamber; and so we have the misery and distortion and impotence which we regard as characteristic Slavic qualities.