review was made by the Russian authors--a review of ancient and modern
great men--and a verdict arrived at. For a thousand years Christian Russia
kept silent and listened to the hymns to the ancient and modern great men,
to the heroes whom they worshipped. She listened to the hymns and worship
of the great men while she begrudged praise to the good and saintly and
suffering men. Russia is called "Holy," not because she pretends to be
_holy_, but because her ideal is holiness--not greatness but holiness. She
first made use of the word in the nineteenth century. The poet Pushkin
first used it, and he used it in the customary way, like Lord Byron, or
Goethe, praising the great men, although still alluding here and there to
the true Russian ideal--to the good and saintly man. But he spoke not in
order to say a new, an original word to the world, but only to break the
silence and to attract the attention of the world to Russia. He was the
first of a series of preachers. He was listened to and applauded, but he
said nothing new. After him followed the preachers: Gogol, Tolstoi,
Goncharov, Tchehov, Turgeniev, Dostojevsky, and many others, like a choir,
in which three voices are still the strongest and most expressive: Gogol,
Tolstoi, Dostojevsky. What did they say?

They held a grand review of the souls, of the ancient and modern souls, and
found that there exists no great man among them. That was their verdict. In
all their writings they tried to show in the clearest manner, and to the
smallest detail, that there is no great man in the world. They analysed
everyone who was mentioned and adored by worldly society or by tradition as
a great man, and proved that he was not a great man at all. It was very
courageous indeed to speak like that in a world which was accustomed from
the beginning, in the pagan as in the Christian epoch, to adore greatness,
to divinise great men, to imitate and to worship heroes. It was still more
courageous to speak like that in the nineteenth century, when the worship
of great men found so many advocates, when the name of the demi-god