Every Cossack has his own vineyard, and presses his own wine, and his immoderate drinking is not so much due to inclination as to sacred custom, to neglect which would be regarded as a kind of apostasy.... Women he looks upon as a means for promoting his prosperity. Only the young girls are allowed by him to enjoy any leisure: from a married woman he demands a life of drudgery from early youth to old age, and he is quite Oriental in expecting deference and hard work from his wife.... The Cossack who considers it unbefitting in the presence of strangers to exchange a kind or affectionate word with his wife involuntarily feels her superiority as soon as he is alone with her. For the whole of his house and farm are acquired through her and maintained by her labour and care....” Between these extremes of Northern and Southern Russia, the Great Russian stands out like a beacon or an indestructible landmark. He represents the _purest_ type of the Russian people, the children of “matyushfia Moskva.” Whatever Russia has produced in the way of true greatness in every sense of the words, has its cradle in Great Russia, and has been nursed at the breast of Mother Moskva. This truly Russian people inhabits the huge central tracts of Russia, and the governments of Moskva and Novgorod are their particular home. The Russian faith owes its beauty, the Russian ideal its purity to this people, and to the race they have given the _All-Slav Ideal_. And they are the only Russian people whose soul has two faces, an outer and an inner one. The Russian sculptor Tsukoff has symbolized them in a figure resembling a sunflower. It is as well to know that the Great Russian cannot live without sunflower-seeds. He calls them “podsolnushki.” Everything is smothered in “podsolnushki” shells—streets, floors of rooms and railway carriages, even the corners in the churches. Every Great Russian munches “podsolnushki,” and by temperament he himself is a “podsolnushki.” He has an outer shell and a kernel. In Russia the sunflower is queen of the flowers, and as the sunflower is among the flowers so is the Great Russian among the Russian peoples. He is the true “tsarkiya Rus.” The Tsar is the sun, the heart of the realm, and the Muscovite people are the “podsolnushki.” Each individual is only one among many, a particle, a seed for the propagation and glorification of his own race. Probably, the Great Russian has no equal in the world as regards idyllic simplicity. Not because he munches “podsolnushki,” crosses himself in tram-cars when passing a church, goes about in big boots in the heat of summer, and drinks vodka, wine and beer without regard to time or season, but because he is a true yeoman soul. He is quite indifferent to all that does not interest him personally. The surface of his soul is as hard and impervious as the shell of the sunflower seed. His face wears an imperturbable, changeless expression. To reach the kernel of his _human_ soul one has