land where Tolstoi's doctrine of non-resistance is the logical outcome of
centuries of serfdom in a people's history. The merchant Dikoy, the bully,
the soft characterless lover Boris, the idealistic religious Katerina,
Kuligin the artisan, and Madame Kabanova, the tyrannical mother, all these
are true national types, true Russians of the changing ages, and the
counterparts of these people may be met to-day, if the reader takes up
Tehehov's tales. English people no doubt will find it difficult to believe
that Madame Kabanova could so have crushed Katerina's life, as Ostrovsky
depicts. Nothing indeed is so antagonistic to English individualism and
independence as is the passivity of some of the characters in "The Storm."
But the English reader's very difficulty in this respect should give him a
clue to much that has puzzled Europeans, should help him to penetrate into
the strangeness of Russian political life, the strangeness of her love of
despotism. Only in the country that produces such types of weakness and
tyranny is possible the fettering of freedom of thought and act that we
have in Russia to-day. Ostrovsky's striking analysis of this fatalism in
the Russian soul will help the reader to understand the unending struggle
in Russia between the enlightened Europeanised intelligence of the few,
and the apathy of the vast majority of Russians who are disinclined to
rebel against the crystallised conditions of their lives. Whatever may be
strange and puzzling in "The Storm" to the English mind, there is no doubt
that the Russians hail the picture as essentially true. The violence of
such characters as Madame Kabanova and Dikoy may be weakened to-day
everywhere by the gradual undermining of the patriarchal family system now
in progress throughout Russia, but the picture is in essentials a
criticism of the national life. On this point the Russian critic
Dobroliubov, criticising "The Storm," says: "The need for justice, for
respect for personal rights, this is the cry ... that rises up to the ear
of every attentive reader. Well, can we deny the wide application of this
need in Russia? Can we fail to recognise that such a dramatic background