the nature of the Russian. And the conception itself can only be amended
and enlarged by the study of the Russian mind as it expresses itself in
its own literature. The mind of the great artist, of whatever race he
springs, cannot lie. From the works of Thackeray and George Eliot in
England and Turgenev and Tolstoi in Russia, a critic penetrates into the
secret places of the national life, where all the clever objective
pictures of foreign critics must lead him astray. Ostrovsky's drama, "The
Storm," here translated for the English reader, is a good instance of this
truth. It is a revelation of the old-fashioned Muscovite life _from the
inside_, and Ostrovsky thereby brings us in closer relation to that
primitive life than was in the power of Tolstoi or Goncharov, or even
Gogol to bring us. These great writers have given us admirable pictures of
the people's life as it appeared to them at the angle of the educated
Westernised Russian mind; but here in "The Storm" is the atmosphere of the
little Russian town, with its primitive inhabitants, merchants, and
workpeople, an atmosphere untouched, unadulterated by the _ideas_ of any
outside European influence. It is the Russia of Peter the Great and
Catherine's time, the Russian patriarchal family life that has existed for
hundreds of years through all the towns and villages of Great Russia, that
lingers indeed to-day in out-of-the-way corners of the Empire, though now
invaded and much broken up by modern influences. It is, in fact, the very
Muscovite life that so puzzled our forefathers, and that no doubt will
seem strange to many English readers. But the special triumph of "The
Storm" is that although it is a realistic picture of old-fashioned Russian
patriarchal life, it is one of the deepest and simplest psychological
analyses of the Russian soul ever made. It is a very deep though a very
narrow analysis. Katerina, the heroine, to the English will seem weak, and
crushed through her weakness; but to a Russian she typifies revolt,
freedom, a refusal to be bound by the cruelty of life. And her attitude,
despairing though it seems to us, is indeed the revolt of the spirit in a