Identifier: injoyfulrussia00loga (find matches)
Title: In joyful Russia
Year: 1897 (1890s)
Authors: Logan, John A. (John Alexander), 1928-
Subjects: Nicholas II, Emperor of Russia, 1868-1918
Publisher: New York, D. Appleton and Co.
Contributing Library: The Library of Congress
Digitizing Sponsor: The Library of Congress

View Book Page: Book Viewer
About This Book: Catalog Entry
View All Images: All Images From Book
Click here to view book online to see this illustration in context in a browseable online version of this book.

Text Appearing Before Image:
they form no part or parcel of Slavic litera-ture; they were written by Greek and Eoman writers, whowere in no way the forerunners of the Eussian literati.They were written about peoples who have never beenproved to be, and probably were not (with the exception ofthe Scyt!iians), in any large degree ancestors of the Eus-sians. What the scholarly adventurers of Athens and Eomewrote about the countries north of the Black Sea was lessabsorbingly interesting than what they wrote about thosecountries inhabitants, but more apropos to my theme; forit serves at least to show how much the men that have,from remote times until now, written of and in the coun-tries now called Eussia, have been affected by and inspiredto reflect the natural characteristics, phenomena, topog-raphy, climate, atmosphere, and flora of those countries.They all dwelt upon the cold, the ice and the snow, thedark and the frost—^the ancient writers who had journeyedinto what is now Eussia; and the writings of the modern
Text Appearing After Image:
Cou7it Tolstoi. SLAVIC LITERATUKE. 253 Russian authors are all held in cheek, kept rigidly inshape, clarified, purified hy the clear, cold, uncompromis-ing atmosphere of the Eussian winter—the long EussianAvinter. There is something calm, clean, self-controlledeven ahout the turgid and turbid pens of the men whowrote The Kreutzer Sonata, The Gipsies, Who is toBlame? Senilia, and Crime and Punishment. They haveall been men of turbulent passions, unchecked, exotic, andpampered sensuality. Yes; even Tolstoi the reformed, thewhite-haired, the aesthetic Tolstoi, whose roue youth (Imight almost say adolescence) we forget, ought to forget,but which was characteristic of the man, of the mansnature, and proves how in his case, as in the case ofmyriads of Eussians, art and the morality of art havetriumphed over the potent naturalism of the man. Andyet upon the relentless exposes of Derzhavin, the licen-tious-mouthed; of Pushkin, the rake, the voluptuary, of theByron-like imagination; of Lermo

Note About Images