Here I wish to make a long parenthesis. One of the most striking features among educated Russians of all classes, whether landowners, doctors, lawyers, or officials, is the prevalence of what is called “culture.” We consider “culture” as a luxury--something extra, a pleasant appendage to education. The Russians consider culture and education to be synonymous and “culture” to be indispensable. In their eyes what they call a “cultured” and we call an educated man must possess a certain wide general knowledge. He must be able to talk authoritatively on literature, science, and the arts, the European stage, etc. He is positively ashamed if he is caught ignorant of some one like Sudermann or Finsen or Grieg. I have often seen Russians amazed and aghast at the “unculturedness” of Englishmen who have taken their degree at a University. This is not surprising considering that for two or three generations boys in England no longer receive any kind of instruction at schools. To the educated Russian, a certain wide layer of general knowledge is considered absolutely indispensable. He is ashamed to be without it. You meet with extraordinary examples of this very often. For instance, I once knew a Cossack officer who was well known for the rows he made in restaurants, for letting off pistols at odd moments, and for fighting duels. He was what is called in Russia a “skandalist” (a row-maker). This same man, I afterwards found out, had written a most valuable work on the differential calculus, and was one of the most brilliant of modern mathematicians. Now this indispensable “culture” has its good sides, but it has its bad sides also. It is often exaggerated in Russia just as ignorance is exaggerated in England. In many cases what is called “culture” and what is considered to be indispensable, is not culture at all, but a terribly superficial smattering of thin-spread information, possessing which its owner considers he has the right and even the duty of pronouncing an arbitrary and final judgment on a subject of which he knows nothing. I once knew an official employed in business in Moscow who was perfectly aghast because he discovered I knew nothing, that I had not even the shadow of pretence to any kind or sort of knowledge of natural science, that I was ignorant and not ashamed of being ignorant, of the elementary principles of dynamics. This same official, secure of his position in what he considered a universal field of “culture,” told me that Browning’s “Ring and the Book” was an old-fashioned, milk-and-water poem, rather like one of Trollope’s novels, and that Browning was a writer who was all sound and no sense, a victim to a fatal fluency and an incredible facility of expression. The result, therefore, of this culture is that in some cases it makes the man genuinely many sided and widely appreciative, and in others, as in the case I have just quoted, it leads him to express opinions of the kind which the French call _saugrenu_.