14 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



the boys who had attained the age of eighteen and the girls just past sixteen, — 

 those are the legal ages for marriage in Eussia. Then he wrote, "John to 

 marry Anna, Paul to marry Parashka," and so on with five couples, "The five 

 weddings ' ' he added, ' ' must take place in ten days, next Sunday but one. ' ' 



Many will remember Pushkin's exclamation as he listened with 

 growing seriousness to Gogol's reading of " Dead Souls," " God ! what 

 a sad country is Russia ! " or his comment later, " Gogol invented 

 nothing, he tells the simple truth, the terrible truth." 



First among the geographic influences underlying such conditions 

 has undoubtedly been the remoteness of Eussia from the main cur- 

 rents of European civilization on the one hand and her close proximity 

 to, and contact with Asia on the other. When the Russian state re- 

 vived in the fifteenth century around Moscow, it was not only isolated, 

 but overshadowed and stifled by Asia. Evidences of this may be seen 

 in many ways ; one still hears the saying, " Scratch a Russian and find 

 a Tartar." The art and architecture of Russia show unmistakable 

 proofs of the necessity the nation was ^^nder so many years of bearing 

 the brunt of the Asiatic onslaught. The contact with western civiliza- 

 tion, on the other hand, was for a long period remote and attenuated, 

 and the influence of the west upon the Russian masses imperceptible. 



Another great difficulty arose from the fact that Russia did not lie on 

 the way to any other part of the world. She has not been on any of the 

 great trade routes or channels of human intercourse. To better under- 

 stand the significance of this simple geographic fact, we have only to 

 consider its influence in other parts of the world, as for example in 

 the case of the prosperity and progress of the towns along the medieval 

 trade routes, or the conspicuous decline of Renaissance Italy after the 

 discovery of the western hemisphere. Following upon the voyages of 

 Columbus, Vasco da Gama and Magellan, the trade routes left the 

 Mediterranean for the Atlantic and coincident with this came the decay 

 of the Florence of the Medici and the Rome of Julius II. On the 

 other hand, the increased importance of Italy, and for that matter the 

 Balkans, since the opening of the Suez Canal, reflects the return in 

 part at least of the Mediterranean to its former place. 



As if to emphasize the geographic isolation still f^^rther, infant 

 Russia, following the suggestion of geographic propinquity, went to 

 Byzantium for its religion. This fact was fraught wdth tremendous con- 

 sequence, for to her geographic isolation Russia thus added religious 

 isolation. She divorced herself from the religion, thought and culture 

 created in western Europe by the medieval church. She did not share 

 in the civilization in which the church and later the protestant revolt 

 served as basic factors. Political and social institutions developed in 

 ecclesiastical moulds. The very physiognomy of the cities was deter- 

 mined by it, so that even with the development of modern industrialism. 



