The task is not in truth the writing in the narrative form a _precis_
of a strange human document, but the rendering--I perceive it now
clearly--of the moral conditions ruling over a large portion of this
earth's surface; conditions not easily to be understood, much less
discovered in the limits of a story, till some key-word is found; a word
that could stand at the back of all the words covering the pages; a word
which, if not truth itself, may perchance hold truth enough to help the
moral discovery which should be the object of every tale.
I turn over for the hundredth time the leaves of Mr. Razumov's record, I
lay it aside, I take up the pen--and the pen being ready for its office
of setting down black on white I hesitate. For the word that persists in
creeping under its point is no other word than "cynicism."
For that is the mark of Russian autocracy and of Russian revolt. In its
pride of numbers, in its strange pretensions of sanctity, and in the
secret readiness to abase itself in suffering, the spirit of Russia is
the spirit of cynicism. It informs the declarations of her statesmen,
the theories of her revolutionists, and the mystic vaticinations of
prophets to the point of making freedom look like a form of debauch, and
the Christian virtues themselves appear actually indecent.
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