CURIOSITIES OF RUSSIAN LITERATURE. 159 



even to the last her love remained, and the struggle killed her, Mary 

 Von Korper shrank with horror from the assassin of her son. To clear 

 his memory, she gave up her guilty love ; but it was twined in the very 

 heart-strings of her life, and she survived not the sacrifice. 



This is the spot, (said the old man, turning to the travellers,) where 

 the murder was alleged to have been committed ; and here Mary begged 

 me with her last breath to put up this tablet, that the stranger might 

 learn, and the inhabitant never forget, that this history is mournfully 

 true, and no idle legend. 



CURIOSITIES OF RUSSIAN LITERATURE. 



WHILE the rapid physical developement of the Russian empire, has 

 powerfully arrested the attention of our speculative statesmen, it is 

 singular how little is known in this country of the intellectual progress 

 of that northern nation. Her gigantic military resources, the grasping 

 ambition and Scythian energy of her government, are subjects that have 

 been treated usque ad nauseam; but of her literature we absolutely 

 know little or nothing and still continue to regard as barbarians a 

 people in a state of singular, moral, and physical developement. It 

 would be unjust to attribute this ignorance to a want of curiosity on the 

 part of the reading public of England it proceeds from a far different 

 cause, from the absence of all sources of information. Our national 

 library, whether arising from the incapacity of its presiding junta, or 

 from the slender nature of its pecuniary resources, is lamentably 

 deficient in the productions of foreign mind. Scarcely a work of any 

 celebrity published on the continent, within the last fifteen or twenty 

 years, is to be found in the collection. 



The birth of Russian literature was as sudden as that of the natural 

 day of a tropical climate. No " pale gradations" harbingered its 

 approach. 



Russian literature has had two beginnings very distant from each 

 other. The first, which almost immediately followed the translation of 

 the Bible into the Sclavonian tongue, she owes to the Byzantine empire, 

 and the Norman scalds. The examples of France, of Germany, and of 

 our own country determined the second. The interval between these 

 two periods was marked by the Tartar conquest, an event as fatal to 

 the intellectual progress as to the national independence of the Russian 

 people. 



The first of these eras dates from the tenth and eleventh centuries, 

 and it is incontestable that at that period, Russia, so far from being in 

 the rear of the other European countries, had already outstripped them 

 in literary cultivation and it would afford matter for much curious 

 speculation, whether this northern empire, but for the fatal battle of 

 Kalka, and the disastrous subjugation entailed thereby, would not 

 at this moment occupy the highest point in the scale of European 

 civilization. 



But in order to justly appreciate the value of this first period of 

 developement, we must await till the literary men of Russia have 

 brought to light some of the ten thousand manuscripts that are buried, 

 almost beyond the reach of investigation, in their convents. So 



