After this everything that arose around it was felt by the true Russdom as lies and poison. A truly apocalyptic hatred was directed on Europe, and “Europe” was all that was not Russia, including Athens and Rome, just as for the Magian world in its time Old Egypt and Babylon had been antique, pagan, devilish. “The first condition of emancipation for the Russian soul,” wrote Aksakov in 1863 to Dostoyevski, “is that it should hate Petersburg with all its might and all its soul.” Moscow is holy, Petersburg Satanic. A widespread popular legend presents Peter the Great as Antichrist. Just so the Aramaic Pseudomorphosis cries out in all the Apocalypses from Daniel and Enoch in Maccabæan times to John, Baruch, and Ezra IV after the destruction of Jerusalem, against Antiochus the Antichrist, against Rome the Whore of Babylon, against the cities of the West with their refinement and their splendour, against the whole Classical Culture. All its works are untrue and unclean; the polite society, the clever artistry, the classes, the alien state with its civilized diplomacy, justice, and administration. The contrast between Russian and Western, Jew-Christian and Late-Classical nihilisms is extreme--the one kind is hatred of the alien that is poisoning the unborn Culture in the womb of the land, the other a surfeited disgust of one’s own proper overgrowths. Depths of religious feeling, flashes of revelation, shuddering fear of the great awakening, metaphysical dreaming and yearning, belong to the beginning, as the pain of spiritual clarity belongs to the end of a history. In these pseudomorphoses they are mingled. Says Dostoyevski: “Everyone in street and market-place now speculates about the nature of Faith.” So might it have been said of Edessa or Jerusalem. Those young Russians of the days before 1914--dirty, pale, exalted, moping in corners, ever absorbed in metaphysics, seeing all things with an eye of faith even when the ostensible topic is the franchise, chemistry, or women’s education--are the Jews and early Christians of the Hellenistic cities, whom the Romans regarded with a mixture of surly amusement and secret fear. In Tsarist Russia there was no bourgeoisie and, in general, no true class-system, but merely, as in the Frankish dominions, lord and peasant. There were no Russian towns. Moscow consisted of a fortified residency (the Kreml) round which was spread a gigantic market. The imitation city that grew up and ringed it in, like every other city on the soil of Mother Russia, is there for the satisfaction and utilities of the Court, the administration, the traders, but that which lives in it is, on the top, an embodiment of fiction, an Intelligentsia bent on discovering problems and conflicts, and below, an uprooted peasantry, with all the metaphysical gloom, anxiety, and misery of their own Dostoyevski, perpetually homesick for the open land and bitterly hating the stony grey world into which Antichrist has tempted them. Moscow had