PAUL DEBRECZENY

Puškin’s Reputation in Nineteenth-Century Russia

A Statistical Approach

Measuring the place a writer occupies in the public consciousness is a difficult task because the evidence available is usually subjective or slanted. One consults, first of all, the literary critics of the writer’s own time, and the scholars or essayists of later periods, with the assumption that they represent the reading public vis-à-vis the author. But critics are usually members of literary coteries, subject to cultural fads and prejudices as are the authors themselves; and their judgments can be accepted as expressions of public opinion only to a certain extent. One can turn to diaries, letters, reminiscences of private individuals, each of whom is of course subjective but may offer opinions that can become highly revealing when set alongside the opinions of a fair number of other individuals. Such an approach is perhaps the most interesting, but also the most timeconsuming because of the difficulty of tracking down and scanning relevant materials. It is also possible to gather data—more reliable, “factual,” and quantifiable—by surveying the records of publishers, holdings of libraries, information on the reading habits of library patrons if available, school curricula, inclusions in anthologies and chrestomathies, and so forth. In this essay I would like to explore still another method that has some pretensions to tangible measurements.

What the literary critic says in an essay devoted to a particular author is of crucial importance, but it is equally significant when he brings up the name of the author outside the context of the author’s own work. In an attempt to assess to what extent a particular author is on the critic’s mind, one can count how many times he mentions the name of that author—for comparison, contrast, or whatever—in reviews or essays devoted to others. The Swedish sociologist Karl E. Rosengren has counted, for example, how many times internationally known authors, including Turgenev, Tolstoj, and Dostoevskij, were mentioned in the Swedish press in reviews of other writers’ works from 1876 through 1891 and from 1953 through 1965 (Rosengren 1968: 94-101 and 173-96). A writer might be mentioned as having influenced a certain author or as being very different from another one: the significant fact from Rosengren’s point of view is not what was said about him but the mere fact that his name was invoked. A reference to him outside the context of his own work implies that the critic regarded him as a standard against which other authors could be measured, that his name was sufficiently at the forefront of cultural consciousness to be called up from memory through certain associations. Rosengren compares his method to statistical stylistics, in which marked features falling outside the normal flow of a writer’s discourse are counted. One could go a step further and say that computing a critic’s references to authors outside the immediate context at hand is like putting him on the historian’s couch and observing his free associations. The names he brings up will reveal the cultural frame of reference within which he is operating; and conversely, being invoked means for the author that his name has been firmly lodged in that frame of reference. Naturally, one particular critic’s references reflect his personal proclivities, but if quite a few critics contribute to a journal, their combined references can add up to a network of codes shared by at least a segment of society.

In this paper five Russian journals at different periods are examined from the point of view of associative literary references. The first two are Vestnik Evropy (The European Herald) from 1820 through 1828 and Syn otečestva (Son of the Fatherland) from 1820 through 1829. The former has been selected as the leading conservative periodical, and the latter as the chief journal supporting the romantic trend, during a crucial decade in Puškin’s own lifetime.¹ The remaining three selections represent “thick journals” from later periods, and therefore it was thought that scanning one year of each would provide enough material to be meaningful. The 1862 volume of Sovremennik (The Contemporary) was selected for its twenty-five-year distance from Puškin’s death; although as the organ of the “revolutionary democrats” it is somewhat one-sided in its literary views, it is still the most significant journal of the time; and 1862, the year following the publication of Alexander II’s manifesto about the emancipation of the serfs, is a significant juncture. The next two journals surveyed are spaced twenty years apart. The 1882 volume of Otečestvennye zapiski (Annals of the Fatherland) has been chosen because that journal had in certain ways succeeded The Contemporary; and 1882, two years after the unveiling of the Puškin monument in Moscow and one year after the assassination of Alexander II, is a crucial year. Finally, the 1902 volume of Russkoe bogatstvo (Russian Treasures)—the most encyclopedic journal of the turn of the century, and a successor to Annals of the Fatherland—comes three years after the large-scale centennial Puškin celebrations of 1899 and also represents a period of social and cultural fermentation.

One departure in this paper from Rosengren’s method is that I have included in the survey not only literary reviews in the strict sense but any kind of writing having to do with literary or general cultural issues. Biographical essays, reminiscences about a late author, satirical comments on the literary attitudes of other journals (as in Svistok [The Whistler], a supplement to The Contemporary) have all been scanned for references; even those parts of the various surveys of domestic and foreign affairs which deal with cultural questions have been included. The reasoning behind this decision has been, simply, that the wider you cast your net, the more fish you are likely to catch; but such a broadening of the areas surveyed has presented its problems. What do we do, for instance, with a historical essay such as A. Skabičevskij’s “Outline of the History of Russian Censorship” (Annals of the Fatherland, 1882, Nos. 3, 4, 6, 8, 10-12)? If the essay were devoted solely to Puškin, it would not count as a reference to him, but if in the course of a survey fifty different authors become the essayist’s subject, should they all be excluded? After all, the very fact that an author is mentioned, or not mentioned, in a survey can be significant. After some thought and some false starts, it was decided that in such a case the segment of the article dealing with a particular author should be counted as one reference, even if it ran to sixteen pages. Similarly, an extended reference should be counted as one only, even in a conventional critical essay. A review of a novella by G. Jurko begins, for example, with an eight-page analysis of Hamlet, and the play is being referred to all through the next twelve pages (Annals of the Fatherland, 1882, Vol. 265, No. 12, pp. 219-34): since this amounts to a comparison of Jurko’s novella with one literary classic, it has been counted as one reference. By contrast, if The Prisoner of the Caucasus is brought into the argument on one page, and Boris Godunov is mentioned on the next one, these amount to two references. It must be added, on the other hand, that if both works had been mentioned on the same page, they would have been counted only once; the line has been drawn at one reference per page to any one author.

All this leads one to admitting that the technique of counting references lacks precision in a strictly scientific sense. One person counting might include what another one has excluded; even the same person may make decisions, when confronting new problems, which are not entirely in line with his previous practice. Another problem is that hidden references, such as a phrase or a line of poetry quoted, can be easily identified if they belong to a major poet but may be missed if the source is a lesser-known author. Further, in order to gain greater reliability of data, one ought to survey several periodicals over decades and decades, which would be a highly unwieldy and time-consuming job. Given these limitations, I can claim only that the data presented in this essay correctly represent general trends, but not without a margin of error.

The characteristic reference found in the course of this investigation has been of the type: “Longfellow, like our Puškin, moved from romanticism to realism” (Annals, 1882, No. 6, p. 266); “Although Gleb Uspenskij was not endowed with the talents of a Puškin, a Gogol’, or a Lev Tolstoj, to us his significance is just as great” (Russian Treasures, 1902, No. 5, p. 166); “He [Nekrasov] is higher, higher than Puškin or Lermontov” (Russian Treasures, 1902, No. 11, p. 45); “An effort has been made to supply [village libraries] with at least one work each of our great writers, such as Puškin, Lermontov, Gogol’, and L. N. Tolstoj” (Russian Treasures, 1902, No. 7, p. 71), and the like. Such references, along with more elaborate comparisons of literary merits, occur with great regularity, and their relative frequency, I submit, can be assumed to be typical for Russian cultural discourse beyond the confines of our samples.

THE EUROPEAN HERALD (VESTNIK. EVROPY), 1820-28

Established in 1802, The European Herald was at first edited by N. M. Karamzin (1802-1804), later by V. A. Žukovskij (1808-10) and by V. V. Izmajlov (1814), and, although it did not engage in sharp debates with the Šiskovites, it generally supported the trend of new sensibility.² Puškin’s very first published poem, “To a Versifier Friend” (K drugu stixotvorcu), appeared in it in 1814 (No. 13). From 1815 on, however, M. T. Kačenovskij became its sole editor, and he gradually transformed it into a champion of “good sense” according to the neoclassical model. It was in this journal that Ruslan and Ljudmila was most severely criticized (1820, No. 11) and where conservative tastes were generally defended against such champions of the new as P. A. Vjazemskij and A. S. Griboedov. After the Decembrist uprising, literary debates generally subsided, but in 1828 a new contributor to the journal, N. I. Nadeždin, took up the cudgel against Puškin and other presumed romantics once more. With several adverse reviews of his work, The European Herald devoted a large enough number of its pages to Puškin , yet, as Table I shows, it contained relatively few references to him outside the context of articles dealing directly with him.

The table reveals that contributors to the journal operated chiefly within a classical or neoclassical frame of reference, with some recognition of outstanding romantics such as Byron, Walter Scott, and Schiller. Karamzin’s high ranking is a tribute more to the historian than to the poet or writer of fiction. It has been necessary to cite quite a long list in order to get as far as Puškin, who shares twenty-third place with Ossian (MacPherson), Pliny, and Schiller.

Since the number of references counted for the nine years is 1,741, even the highest number related to a single author (to Homer) amounts only to 5.34 percent of the total. The percentage for Puškin is 0.86.

Puškin’s standing improves, of course, if we discount foreign authors and eighteenth-century Russian classics: among his Russian contemporaries he is in third place, behind Karamzin and the sentimentalist poet I. I. Dmitriev.

This, however, is not the full story. Looking at the source of Puškin references, one is struck by the fact that all but four of the fifteen fall in the period prior to December 1825. For the six years from 1820 through 1825,

TABLE I The European Herald (Vestnik Evropy), 1820-28

Total number of references counted: 1,741

Puškin shares seventeenth place with Schiller, Tasso, and Žukovskij. The clear implication is that after the Decembrist uprising, references to Puskin, at least in this particular journal, declined for political rather than literary reasons. Even if the tsar had concluded a private truce with the poet, to critics it must have seemed safer to leave him alone. Three of the four post-1825 references to him represent unidentified citations from his poetry in Nadeždin’s essay “Literary Forebodings about the Coming Year” (1828, Nos. 21-22).

SON OF THE FATHERLAND (SYN OTEČESTVA), 1820-29

First established in 1812 as a champion of patriotic sentiments engendered by the Napoleonic War, Son of the Fatherland was gradually expanded in scope by its editor, N. I. Greč, and by 1820 it had become the main promoter of new literary trends. It carried some of Puškin’s poetry and several friendly reviews of his works. After 1825, Greč gradually shifted to politically conservative positions, and the standards of the journal were somewhat lowered, but the change was not so abrupt as to cause a break in the number of Puškin references. As one would expect, references to the poet gradually increased over the decade, as his fame grew.

As Table 2 shows, Puškin occupies fifth place, which is in keeping with the journal’s policy to promote new trends. Byron’s being in third place (rather than seventh, as in The European Herald) and the high ranking of Schiller and Žukovskij point in the same direction. The heavy presence of ancient Greek and Latin authors as well as pre-romantic Western writers indicates that even a romantic journal operated in a general milieu of classical and neoclassical culture.

The forty-three references to Homer amount to 4.17 percent of the total; the Puškin references represent 3.01 percent. Fourteen out of the thirty-one Puškin references fall into the period 1820-25. Among Russian writers, Puškin occupies second place (next to Lomonosov), and among his Russian contemporaries he comes in first. This is an extraordinary achievement by a poet still in his youth (he was only thirty at the end of the period surveyed), unparalleled, as we shall see, by any of the great writers of the latter half of the century.

THE CONTEMPORARY (SOVREMENNIK), 1862

Established by Puškin in 1836, The Contemporary was probably the bestknown nineteenth-century Russian journal. It was taken over by N. A. Nekrasov and 1.1. Panaev as new editors in 1847, and V. G. Belinskij contributed to it in his last years. It was in this journal that Tolstoj’s Childhood first appeared (1852, No. 9) and that Turgenev published most of the stories which were to form A Sportsman’s Sketches. After N. G. Čemysevškij, N. A. Dobroljubov, and M. E. Saltykov-Ščedrin joined the staff of the journal (in 1854, 1856, and 1857, respectively), it shifted to the left and became more and more radical in both its political and literary attitudes. The year 1862 represents the last period when the journal still functioned as the organ of the “revolutionary democrats” to full extent: in June of that year Čemyševskij was arrested, and the journal was prohibited for eight months.

TABLE 2 Son of the Fatherland (Syn otečestva), 1820-29

Total number of references counted: 1,031

Although this truncated year of The Contemporary offers less material than the other journals included in the present survey, it is still a rich source for associative literary references. It contains M. A. Antonovič’s well-known review of Fathers and Sons (Vol. 92, March), an essay on Turgenev’s female characters (Vol. 93, May), a major article by Čemyševskij on Tolstoj’s pedagogical journal Jasnaja Poljana (Vol. 92, March), and reviews of certain volumes of collected works by I. V. Kireevskij, A. S. Xomjakov, and K. S. Aksakov (Vol. 91, January and February). Although these writings are not counted as references to the author under review, they yield a large number of references to other authors. The journal’s satirical supplement, Svistok (The Whistler), is also included in our survey.

This year of the journal was chosen for our survey under the assumption that it would reveal a low point in Puškin’s reputation, a period when he had been eclipsed by Gogol’, especially in the estimation of civicminded literary critics. Čemyševskij had indeed said as much in his “Sketches of the Gogolian Period in Russian Literature” (1855, No. 12, and 1856, Nos. 1—12) and in his reviews of P. V. Annenkov’s edition of Puškin (1855, Nos. 2-3 and 7-8). Dobroljubov, especially in his essay “The Contribution of the People’s Point of View to the Development of Russian Literature” (1858, No. 2), echoed Čemyševskij’s opinion that Puškin, more an artist than a thinker, was a poet of the past. The ground was being prepared for D. I. Pisarev’s notorious 1865 essay “Belinskij and Puškin,” in which the critic declared that it was best to leave Puškin untouched on the bookshelf, along with Lomonosov, Deržavin, Karamzin, and Žukovskij (Pisarev 1956 III: 295).³ Similarly, in the 1862 articles surveyed, whenever a critic mentions an author with veneration, as though holding up his party’s banner, the names are always those of Gogol’ and Belinskij. Yet when it comes to establishing a general frame of reference for Russian culture, it is Puškin whose name is invoked.

The twenty-one references to Puškin represent 5.11 percent of the total number of references, which is close to the 5.36 percent accorded to Homer in The European Herald during the 1820s—the highest figure relating to a single author which we have seen so far.

Hegel, though no author of imaginative literature, has been included in our survey because he is often mentioned in literary contexts. N. I. Kostomarov, a professor at St. Petersburg University, is frequently referred to because he expressed Slavophile views on Russian history, which the contributors to The Contemporary tried to ridicule on every available occasion. V. I. Askočenskij was the author of an 1858 novel, An Asmodeus of Our Time, with which Antonovič compared Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons.

TABLE 3 The Contemporary (Sovremennik), 1862

Total number of references counted: 411

Apart from Černyševskij’s article on Jasnaja Poljana, Tolstoj is referred to only once (in Antonovič’s review of Fathers and Sons), which reflects his withdrawal from the literary scene in this period. Dostoevskij’s journal Time is the frequent target of attacks, but by name he is mentioned only once (in The Whistler ).

ANNALS OF THE FATHERLAND (OTEČESTVENNYE ZAPISKI), 1882

The history of Annals of the Fatherland goes back to 1818, but the journal did not achieve prominence until its editorship was assumed by A. A. Kraevskij in 1838. It was here that Belinskij published most of his essays up until 1847. After that date Annals was eclipsed by The Contemporary, but in 1867, the year after the government had finally closed down The Contemporary, Kraevskij offered his somewhat attenuated journal to Nekrasov, and thus Annals became a successor to the radicals’ organ. From 1868 on it employed N. K. Mixajlovskij and A. M. Skabičevskij as its leading literary critics, and as political events evolved at a rapid pace, it became more and more closely associated with the populist movement. In 1878, after Nekrasov’s death, Mixajlovskij entered into co-editorship with Saltykov-Ščedrin. The year 1882 was the last one under the two writers’ joint editorship, for in 1883 Mixajlovskij was arrested, and in 1884 Annals was closed down by the government.

In the 1882 volume we find Mixajlovskij’s famous essay on Dostoevskij as a writer endowed with a “cruel talent” (Nos. 9-10), a major article on John Stuart Mill and Renan (Nos. 2-3), and Skabičevskij’s survey of Russian censorship, already mentioned. We come across reviews of Leskov, Garšin, Hugo, and Zola, and of A. Nezelenov’s book A. S. Puškin in His Poetry: The First and Second Periods in His Life and Works, 1799-1826 (No. 12).

If one read only the critics’ overt statements, one would assume that Puškin continued to be underappreciated as he had been by the “revolutionary democrats.” Skabičevskij wrote, for instance, that the poetry of Puškin and Lermontov “did not present any profound, salutary ideas capable of fostering society and moving it forward” (1868, No. 1, “Sovremennoe Obozrenie,” p. 15); and an 1878 essay, entitled “New Prognostic Signs in Our Literature,” relegated not only Puškin’s works but also those of Gogol’, Turgenev, and Ostrovskij to “social mementos of Russian life,” in which “one cannot feel the pulse of the people” (No. 8, “Sovremennoe obozrenie,” pp. 165-66). Despite such statements, however, the 1882 volume yielded the data shown in Table 4.

Ever since the romantic revival of Shakespeare in the earlier decades of the century, he had been frequently performed on the Russian stage and constantly referred to by literary critics, especially those, like Belinskij, who had been brought up on German idealist philosophers. Turgenev’s essay “Hamlet and Don Quixote” and his stories “Prince Hamlet of the Ščigrovo District” and “The Lear of the Steppe” testify to how central a place Shakespeare occupied in Russian aesthetic consciousness from about the fourth decade of the century on. To be second to Shakespeare on the scale of references is surely no shame for Puškin.

It must be observed, on the other hand, that the twenty-five references to Shakespeare amount to only 3.53 percent of the total number of references; and those to Puškin (21) represent 2.96 percent—lower than the percentages either for Son of the Fatherland (3.01) or for The Contemporary (5.11). Whatever that might imply, Puškin certainly stands first among Russian writers referred to.

M. N. Katkov and Ivan Aksakov are mentioned so often because, as leading figures in conservative, Slavophile-oriented circles, they were the frequent targets of satirical comments in Annals of the Fatherland.

The evidence seems to indicate that although War and Peace and Anna Karenina had drawn much comment during the preceding fifteen years, Tolstoj (with only five references) was still viewed as a contemporary, not as a classic. The same is true of Dostoevskij (four references), who had died the year before and whose career was surveyed by Mixajlovskij in his “Cruel Talent.” In 1882, when a critic invoked “our great writers,” “our best literature,” the names mentioned were almost invariably Puškin, Gogol’, and Lermontov, with the occasional addition of Turgenev (eight references).

TABLE 4 Annals of the Fatherland (Otečestvennye zapiski), 1882

Total number of references counted: 709

RUSSIAN TREASURES (RUSSKOE BOGATSTVO), 1902

Established in 1875 for the purpose of disseminating scientific and technological information, Russian Treasures was acquired in 1879 by a group of populist writers, who undertook publishing it as a cooperative venture. The enterprise did not last very long, however, and the editorship of the journal passed into the hands of L. E. Obolenskij in 1882. An adherent primarily of Auguste Comte’s positivist philosophy, Obolenskij nevertheless provided an outlet for Tolstojan ideas, and we see quite a few articles by and about Tolstoj appear in the journal under Obolenskij’s editorship, up to 1892. At that time a populist group, headed by N. K. Mixajlovskij, took over Russian Treasures once more, to be joined by V. G. Korolenko as Mixajlovskij’s co-editor in 1895. Although leaning toward populism, Russian Treasures could be considered a mainstream, middle-of-the-road journal that reflected the chief concerns of Russian society and culture at the turn of the century.

The 1902 volume contains major essays on Victor Hugo (No. 2), Gleb Uspenskij (Nos. 3, 4, 5), Stanislaw Przybyszewski (No. 4), H. G. Wells (No. 4), A. A. Bestužev-Marlinskij (Nos. 5, 8, 12), Afanasij Fet (No. 7), the Yiddish poet S. G. Trug (No. 8), Emile Zola (No. 10), and Nekrasov (Nos. 11, 12). There is an article each on mass readership in Russia (Nos. 6, 7, 8) and on village libraries in Vjatka Province (No. 7). Since 1902 was the fiftieth anniversary of Gogol’s death, there are several essays devoted to him in the first four issues for the year.

TABLE 5 Russian Treasures (Russkoe bogatstvo), 1902

Total number of references counted: 1,760

The ninety-two references to Puškin amount to 5.23 percent of the total number, close to the 5.36 percent for Homer in The European Herald during the 1820s. (It is interesting to note that one year of a turn-of-the-century “thick journal” yields almost the same overall number of references as nine years of the largest journal in the 1820s.) These figures indicate how integral Puškin had become to the thinking of educated Russians. The references range from comparison of Puškin with other poets through statements about “our greatest classics” to almost unconscious citations of lines or phrases from his poetry. At least at the turn of the century he was more clearly at the forefront of Russian cultural consciousness than Tolstoj, Dostoevskij, or Turgenev.

A few caveats must be mentioned in this context. For one thing, the canonization of Puškin as the anointed poet of Holy Russia (a result of the 1899 celebrations) had brought with it a certain simplification of his poetic identity. In the eyes of some lesser-educated Russians, he was simply a symbol of national greatness with no regard for the aesthetic complexity of his works. We read, for instance, that the mayor of Nižnij Novgorod, by the name of Memorskij, responded to a higher directive to hold Gogol’ celebrations by calling together all the teachers and administrators of the city’s schools. “In his opening remarks to the assembly,” relates the report, “Mr. Memorskij developed two ideas: one, ‘that Gogol’ is no Puškin,’ and two, that there was no need to celebrate him as Puškin had been celebrated; in other words, there was no need for ‘Gogol’ days’ as there had been ‘Puškin days,’ and if there was to be a program of reading at schools in memory of Gogol’, such a program must have ‘a general pedagogic character, leaving Gogol’s works in the background,’ because,” as was added later at the meeting, “acquainting the pupils with Gogol’ may even be harmful, since he paid too much attention to the negative aspects of life” (Russian Treasures, 1902, No. 3, pp. 159-60). Little did the good mayor of Nižnij Novgorod realize that one of Gogol”s teachers at Nežin High School had been dismissed in 1827 for possessing some works by Puškin!

Another fact to be borne in mind is that by 1902 Puškin had still not reached more than the thin upper layer of society. Provincial teachers and librarians who tried to read him and other classics to illiterate peasants and workers reported that the response of their audience was disappointing. “I tried to read Puškin and Gogol’, Lermontov and Nekrasov, Turgenev, and Dostoevskij,” reports one teacher, “but each of these attempts left a deep sense of pain and sorrow in my soul. . . . My listeners not only did not understand what I was reading to them, but they didn’t even try, didn’t even wish to” (Russian Treasures, 1902, No. 6, p. 90). Similarly, we can see from provincial librarians’ reports that Puškin’s works were not among volumes needing to be frequently replaced because of heavy use (Russian Treasures, 1902, No. 7, p. 69).

Finally, the difference between Puškin’s reputation at home and abroad could be seen already at the turn of the century: a survey of French readers turned up some references to Tolstoj and Dostoevskij, but none to Puškin (see the report in Russian Treasures, 1902, No. 1, pp. 29-30).

Tolstoj—to turn back to the evidence of Table 5—had at last received his rightful ranking by 1902, although it must be observed that a good many of the references are to his controversial religious and pedagogical views rather than to his fictional works. The rest of Table 5 more or less corresponds to later twentieth-century perceptions of who were the most outstanding nineteenth-century authors.

One of the most remarkable aspects of our list is that, apart from Shakespeare, no foreign author appears on it. This is not because Russian Treasures was a parochial journal—indeed, it reported on foreign political and cultural developments more broadly than did the other journals surveyed—but Russian culture had become so rich during the nineteenth century that interpreting it had evidently become the most important task for literary journals.

A disappointing fact revealed by our survey of Russian Treasures is that there are only four references to Čexov. Although in a brief review of his works in No. 2 of the journal Mixajlovskij retracts his earlier view that Čexov was an amoral writer and describes him as one of the leading authors of the period, his name is rarely invoked in reviews of other contemporary writers. This lack of canonization by his contemporaries is even more striking than the low ranking of Tolstoj and Dostoevskij was in 1882.

TABLE 6 Puškin’s Ranking in the Five Journals Surveyed

Our findings are summarized in Table 6. Puškin’s high ranking in Son of the Fatherland shows that he had achieved already in his twenties the kind of recognition that was to be granted to Tolstoj only in his seventies, and to Dostoevskij, Turgenev, and Čexov only after their deaths. The data gathered from The Contemporary indicate that, contrary to the commonly accepted notion, Puškin’s fame did not go into decline during the decades immediately following his death. Annals of the Fatherland shows him maintaining a lead among Russian writers, and Russian Treasures demonstrates that by the turn of the century he had become the timeless national poet of Russia. The term “Russia’s Shakespeare” is not an empty cliché: by the tooth anniversary of his birth Puškin had become an integral part of the “personality” of the educated Russian, springing to the mind as spontaneously as Shakespeare does among English-speaking people.