Potugin took off his hat and began fanning himself with his handkerchief. ‘Russian art,’ he began again. ‘Russian art, indeed!... Russian impudence and conceit, I know, and Russian feebleness too, but Russian art, begging your pardon, I’ve never come across. For twenty years on end they’ve been doing homage to that bloated nonentity Bryullov, and fancying that we have founded a school of our own, and even that it will be better than all others.... Russian art, ha, ha, ha! ho, ho!’ ‘Excuse me, though, Sozont Ivanitch,’ remarked Litvinov, ‘would you refuse to recognise Glinka too, then?’ Potugin scratched his head. ‘The exception, you know, only proves the rule, but even in that instance we could not dispense with bragging. If we’d said, for example, that Glinka was really a remarkable musician, who was only prevented by circumstances--outer and inner--from becoming the founder of the Russian opera, none would have disputed it; but no, that was too much to expect! They must at once raise him to the dignity of commander-in-chief, of grand-marshal, in the musical world, and disparage other nations while they were about it; they have nothing to compare with him, they declare, then quote you some marvellous home-bred genius whose compositions are nothing but a poor imitation of second-rate foreign composers, yes, second-rate ones, for they’re the easiest to imitate. Nothing to compare with him? Oh, poor benighted barbarians, for whom standards in art are non-existent, and artists are something of the same species as the strong man Rappo: there’s a foreign prodigy, they say, can lift fifteen stone in one hand, but our man can lift thirty! Nothing to compare with us, indeed! I will venture to tell you some thing I remember, and can’t get out of my head. Last spring I visited the Crystal Palace near London; in that Palace, as you’re aware, there’s a sort of exhibition of everything that has been devised by the ingenuity of man--an encyclopædia of humanity one might call it. Well, I walked to and fro among the machines and implements and statues of great men; and all the while I thought, if it were decreed that some nation or other should disappear from the face of the earth, and with it everything that nation had invented, should disappear from the Crystal Palace, our dear mother, Holy Russia, could go and hide herself in the lower regions, without disarranging a single nail in the place: everything might remain undisturbed where it is; for even the _samovar_, the woven bast shoes, the yoke-bridle, and the knout--these are our famous products--were not invented by us. One could not carry out the same experiment on the Sandwich islanders; those islanders have made some peculiar canoes and javelins of their own; their absence would be noticed by visitors. It’s a libel! it’s too severe, you say perhaps.... But I say, first, I don’t know how to roar like any sucking dove; and secondly, it’s plain that