Russian landowners, and he roars out, "We are sleeping, and the time
is slipping away; we are sleeping!" Lavretsky replies, "Permit me to
observe, that we are not sleeping at present, but rather preventing
others from sleeping. We are straining our throats like the
cocks--listen! there is one crowing for the third time." To which
Mihalevich smilingly rejoins, "Good-bye till to-morrow." Then follows,
"But the friends talked for more than an hour longer." In Chirikov's
powerful drama, "The Jews," the scene of animated discussion that
takes place on the stage is a perfect picture of what is happening in
hundreds of Russian towns every night. An admirable description of a
typical Russian conversation is given by Turgenev, in "Virgin Soil":--

"Like the first flakes of snow, swiftly whirling, crossing and
recrossing in the still mild air of autumn, words began flying,
tumbling, jostling against one another in the heated atmosphere of
Golushkin's dining-room--words of all sorts--progress, government,
literature; the taxation question, the church question, the Roman
question, the law-court question; classicism, realism, nihilism,
communism; international, clerical, liberal, capital; administration,
organisation, association, and even crystallisation! It was just this
uproar which seemed to arouse Golushkin to enthusiasm; the real gist
of the matter seemed to consist in this, for him."*

*All citations from Turgenev's novels are from Constance Garnett's
translations.

The Anglo-Saxon is content to allow ideas that are inconsistent and
irreconcilable to get along together as best they may in his mind, in
order that he may somehow get something done. Not so the Russian. Dr.
Johnson, who settled Berkeleian idealism by kicking a stone, and the