As to the foreign reviews, they are submitted to a somewhat amusing process, called the _caviar_. Suspicious passages, if they escape the scissors, get an extra dash of printing-ink. Thus the Russian is not even free to read till he goes from home, and by force of dieting he suffers from frequent mental indigestion, and the weakest sort of _spirits_ goes to his head! All this goes to prove that if speculative nihilism is a moral infirmity congenital to the soul of the Russian, active and political nihilism is the fruit of the peculiar situation of the empire. The phrase is stale, but in the present case accurate. Russia is passing through a period of transition. She goes forward to an uncertain future, stumbles and falls; her feet bleed, her senses swim; she has fits of dementia and even of epilepsy. Good intention goes for nought, whether the latent generosity of revolutionaries, or of government and Czar. Where is there a person of nobler desires and projects than Alexander II.? But his great reforms seemed rather to accelerate than to calm the revolutionary fever. As long as the revolution does not descend from the cultivated classes upon the masses of the people, it must be content with occasional spurts, chimerical attempts, and a few homicides; but if some day the socialist propaganda, which now begins to take effect in the workshops, shall make itself heard in the country villages, and the peasant lend an ear to those who say to him, "Rise, make the sign of the Cross and take thy hatchet with thee," then Russia will show us a most formidable insurrection, and that world of country-folk, patient as cattle, but fanatical and overwhelming in their fury, once let loose, will sweep everything before it. Nothing will appease or satisfy it. The constitutions of Western lands they have already torn in pieces without perusal. Even the revolutionaries would prefer to those illusory statutes a Czar standing at the head of the peasants, and institutions born within their own land. It is said that now, just as the nihilist frenzy is beginning to subside, one can perceive a smouldering agitation among the people manifesting itself occasionally in conflagrations, anti-Semitic outbreaks, and frequent agrarian crimes. What a clouded horizon! What volcanic quakings beneath all that snow! On the one hand the autocratic power, the secular arm, consecrated by time, tradition, and national life; on the other the far-reaching revolution, fanatical and impossible to appease with what has satisfied other nations; and at bottom the cry of the peasants, like the sullen roar of the ocean, for--it is a little thing--the land! Book III. RISE OF THE RUSSIAN NOVEL. I. The Beginnings of Russian Literature.