moujiks the excellence of the European regime brought by them from Zurich in their sealed railway carriage. For my part, I believe that the Bolsheviks have given the death-blow to the republican idea in Russia. Our peasants have long memories, and for centuries to come the word " Republic " will be to them the synonym of disorder, robbery and murder. They will come back to the monarchic idea, by virtue of which they founded their immense empire, but the new monarchy will be much more democratic than the old. The people have realised that their hare are feeble folks, easily intoxicated by Utopias, incapable of weighing their actions, and they will not confide the government of the country to them again. They will, no doubt, take them into their service, because they will have need of their knowledge; but at the same time they will send to the new Duma many more of their own representatives than before. These new deputies will have no European culture; but, possessed of the good sense and knowledge of life characteristic of the Russian people, they will vote laws which would have seemed cruel and barbarous to our former government.
Russia has turned over a new page in her history. Dostoyevsky, who understood and foresaw the future so clearly, will become her favourite author. Hitherto, my compatriots had been content to admire him; now they are beginning to study him.
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It is curious enough that not one of the writers who gathered round Pushkin's monument and celebrated in prose and verse the great man's Russian poetry, his Russian heart, his Russian ideas and his Russian sympathies, made the slightest allusion to his negro origin, which is nevertheless of great interest.
In the seventeenth century one of the small negro principalities of Africa, on the Mediterranean coast, was conquered by its neighbours. The king was killed, his harem and his sons were sold to pirates. One of the little princes, bought by the Russian ambassador, was sent to Peter the Great as a present. The Emperor gave the little blackamoor to his young daughters, who played with him as with a doll. Noticing the intelligence of the child, Peter the Great sent him to Paris, where the young Hannibal, as the Emperor called him, received a brilliant education. Later he returned to Petersburg and served the Emperor with much devotion. Anxious to keep him in Russia, Peter the Great married him to the daughter of a hoyard, and ennobled him. His descendants remained in our country, married Russians, and at the beginning of the nineteenth century repaid Russia's hospitality by giving her a great poet.101
101 Pushkin's mother was a Hannibal.
Although he was a good deal fairer than his maternal ancestors, Pushkin had many characteristics of the negro type : black frizzly hair, thick lips, and the vivacity, the passion and the ardour of the natives of Africa. This did not prevent him from being Russian in heart and mind. He formed our literary language, and gave us perfect models of prose, poetry, and dramatic art. He is the true father of Russian Hterature. Still, there are many things in Pushkin's life and works which are explicable by the fact of his African origin. Why, then, did none of his admirers refer to it ?
Probably, because at this time the idea of race-heredity was unknown to the Russians. I do not know if it even existed at all in Europe. It was introduced later by Count Gobineau, who, I beUeve, discovered it in Persia. Certain French writers assimilated it, and, exaggerating it a little, made it very fashionable. It is such a basic truth that it is impossible to write a good biography without taking it into account, and we ask ourselves in astonishment how it was that it was not discovered earlier.
It was thanks to this ignorance of the idea of heredity that Dostoyevsky never attached much importance to his Lithuanian origin. Although he and his brothers habitually said, "We Dostoyevsky are Lithuanians," he sincerely considered himself a true Russian. This was also due to the fact that the former empire of Russia was much more united than is generally supposed. All those emigrants who at present demand the separation of their country from Russia have, as a fact, no solid following. The majority of the Lithuanians established in the large Russian towns were sincerely attached to Russia. They were even more patriotic than the Russians, because they had inherited the idea of fidelity to their country from their civilised parents, whereas the sentiment has never been very strongly developed among the Russians. Our education tended to kill patriotism instead of stimulating it; its ideal was a pale and shadowy cosmopolitanism. On the other hand, the Lithuanians, with characteristic modesty, spoke so Uttle of themselves and of their country, that Russians came to believe Lithuania had been long dead. It is only since the war that Lithuanians have begun to raise their heads timidly; but when we read the books they have published recently, we see very plainly that they know little of the history of their own country. Their intellectuals leave them year by year, migrating to Russia, Poland and Ukrania, and the Lithuanians who have remained in the country have gradually become a rustic society of peasants and small tradespeople, who have but a dim recollection of their ancient glory and do not understand its causes. They forget their Norman culture, declare they have nothing in common with the Slavs, and pride themselves on belonging to the tribe of Finno-Turks. The Finno-Turks are a fine race; it would ill become us to disparage them, for they are the ancestors of the Russians, the Poles and the Lithuanians. But intellectually they are inferior and have never produced a single man of genius. It was not until they were crossed with superior races that they emerged from their obscurity and began to count in history. The fusion of the Finno-Turks established on the banks of the Niemen with the Slavs who came down from the Carpathians produced the Lithuanian people, who later assimilated the genius of the Normans. As long as this Norman fire continued to burn in the race, Lithuania was a brilliant and civilised state; when it began to die down, Lithuania gradually fell into oblivion, though it retained the Norman character which distinguished it from its Polish, Ukrainian and Russian neighbours. It was natural that Dostoyevsky should have felt little interest in his obscure and forgotten nation, and should have attributed greater importance to his Russian antecedents. And yet those who read his letters will see that all his life he was haunted by the idea that he was unlike his Russian comrades and had nothing in cotomon with them. " I have a strange character ! I have an evil character! " he often says in writing to his friends. He did not realise that his character was neither strange nor evil, but simply Lithuanian. " I have the vitality of a cat. I always feel as if I were only just beginning to live! " he says, affirming that strength of character in himself which is natural to the Norman, but which he could not find in the Russians. " I happened to see Dostoyevsky in the most terrible moments of his life," says his friend Strahoff. " His courage never failed, and I do not think that anything could have crushed him." 102 If Dostoyevsky was surprised at his own strength, the childish weakness of his Russian friends was still more surprising to him. He was obliged to bring down all his own ideas to the level of their comprehension, and even so, they were often at cross-purposes. Their puerile conceptions of honour astounded him. Thus one of his best friends, A. Miliukov, anxious to save him from the trap set for him by the publisher Stellovsky, proposed that all his literary friends should help him to complete the novel The Gambler by writing each one chapter, and that my father should sign the whole. Miliukov, in short, proposed that Dostoyevsky should commit a fraud, and was quite unconscious that he had done so. Later, when he described this incident to the public, he gloried in having tried to save his illustrious friend. " I will never put my name to another man's work," my father replied indignantly.
102 Dostoyevsky's biographers have laid too much stress on the eternal complaints in his letters to relations and intimate friends. These should not be taken too seriously, for neurotic people love to complain and to be consoled. I speak feelingly, for I have inherited this little weakness. My will is very strong; I think nothing could break my spirit or crush me, and yet any one reading my letters to my mother and my intimate Mends would get the impression of a person in despair and on the verge of suicide. Doctors who speciaUse in nervous disorders coidd no doubt explain this anomaly. For my part, I think that persons may have both very strong wills and feeble nerves. In their actions they are guided by their strong wills, but from time to time they soothe their unhealthy nerves by cries and tears, and complaints to those of their friends who are indulgent to them.
Another of Dostoyevsky's most characteristic ideas, his passionate interest in the Catholic Church, is also only to be explained by atavism. The Russians have never shown
