The Drama of Three Hundred and Sixty Five Days/The Russian Soul
THE RUSSIAN SOUL
The truth is, too, that there is not in the world
a more religious people than the Russian—a
people more submissive to what they conceive
(not always wisely) to be the will of the Almighty,
the governance of the unseen forces. As opposed
to the average German intellect, which
for the past fifty years has been struggling day
and night to materialize the spiritual, the Russian
intellect seems to be always trying to spiritualize
the material. No one can doubt this who has
seen the Russian peasants on their pathetic
pilgrimages to the Holy Land, standing (among
the lepers, uttering their clamorous lamentations)
before the gates of the Garden of Gethsemane, or
trooping in dense crowds down the steep steps
to the underground Church of the Virgin. The
literature of Russia, too, reflects this trait of
the Russian soul, and not only in the works of
Pushkin, Gogol, Tourgeneiff, Tolstoy, Repin,
Dostoyevsky, and Glinka, or yet in Kuprine,
Gorki, Anoutchin, Merejkowsky, and Baranovsky,
but in those simpler and perhaps cruder writings
which speak directly to uneducated minds, the
same striving after the spiritual is everywhere
to be seen. Books like Treitschke's, Nietzsche's,
and Bernhardi's would be impossible in Russia,
not, heaven knows, because of their "intellectual
superiority," which is another name for braggadocio,
but because of their moral insensibility,
their glorification of the physical forces of the
body of man, which the Russian mind sets lower
than the unseen powers of his soul.