CHAPTER III
INTELLECTUAL LIFE
I.—CAUSES OF ITS WEAKNESS. II.—INTELLECTUAL CURRENTS. III.—LITERATURE. VI.—ART. V.—THE RENOVATING MOVEMENT.
I.—The Causes of its Weakness.
The Mongols who overwhelmed Russia in the thirteenth century are generally regarded as the authors of a crime against civilization. The rupture between Muscovy and the western countries, the sudden check in the development of the national culture, are taken to be their work. For many years I shared the common error, and I confess it without shame; appearances all pointed that way, and the history of the invasion is still exceedingly obscure. The first testimony against this view which attracted my attention was all the more conclusive in that it was borne by one of the Princes of the national Church; and it is a well-known fact that, until the eighteenth century at all events, the whole intellectual life of the country was almost entirely concentrated in that Church.
'Judging by the state of her knowledge and the progress of her development during the two centuries which preceded the Mongol invasion,’ writes Monsignor Macarius in his 'History of the Russian Church' (v. 285), 'we do not believe her progress during the two following centuries would have been any more rapid even if the Mongols had not come among us. … These Asiatics did nothing to prevent the clergy, especially the cloistered clergy, from pursuing their learned studies. But the Russians of that period do not seem to have felt any need of a higher culture. They followed in the path of their ancestors, and their longings were confined to being able to read easily, and understand the sacred texts. …'
Recent inquiry, too, has destroyed the illusion according to which a flood of Eastern barbarism was supposed to have swept, with the invaders, over all the elements of European culture. The comrades of Batou, and of the great head of his staff, Soubatoï, were not, as Monsieur Léon Cahun has most excellently set forth in a book which is a revelation (Introduction à l'Histoire de l'Asie, 1896, p. 343, etc.), such desperate barbarians as all that. They were first-rate strategians and wonderful organizers, worthy representatives of a civilization which was to astonish Henry of Castile's Ambassadors to Samarkand a century later (1405), and spread the use of Ouloug-Beg's astronomical tables all over
