"No plough ever furrowed the boundless undulations of this wild vegetation. Only the unbridled herds have ever opened a path through this impenetrable wilderness. The face of earth is like a sea of golden verdure, broken into a thousand shades. Among the thin, dry branches of the taller shrubs climb the cornflowers—blue, purple, and red; the broom lifts its pyramid of yellow flowers; tufts of white clover dot the dark earth, and beneath their poor shade glides the agile partridge with outstretched neck. The chattering of birds fills the air; the sparrow-hawk hangs motionless overhead, or beats the air with the tips of his wings, or swoops upon his prey with searching eyes. At a distance one hears the sharp cry of a flock of wild duck, hovering like a dark cloud over some lake lost or unseen in the immensity of the plain. The prairie-gull rises with a rhythmic movement, bathing his shining plumage in the blue air; now he is a mere speck in the distance, once more he glistens white and brilliant in the rays of the sun, and then disappears. When evening begins to fall, the steppes become quite still; their whole breadth burns under the last ardent beams; it darkens quickly, and the long shadows cover the ground like a dark pall of dull and equal green. Then the vapors thicken; each flower, each herb, exhales its aroma, and all the plain is steeped in perfume. The crickets chirp vigorously. … At night the stars look down upon the sleeping Cossack, who, if he opens his eyes, will see the steppes illuminated with sparks of light—the fireflies. Sometimes the dark depths of the sky are lighted up by fires among the dry reeds that line the banks of the little streams and lakes, and long lines of swans, flying northward and disclosed to view by this weird light, seem like bands of red crossing the sky."
Do we not seem to see in this description the growth of this impetuous, ardent, spasmodic life, goaded on to quick maturity by the knowledge of its own brevity?
Without entirely accepting Montesquieu's theory as to climate, it is safe to allow that it contains a large share of truth. It is indubitable that the influence of climate is to put conditions to man's artistic development by forcing him to keep his gaze fixed upon the phenomena of Nature and the alternation and contrast of seasons, and helps to develop in him a fine pictorial sense of landscape, as in the case of the Russian writers. In our temperate zone we may live in relative independence of the outside world, and almost insensible to the transition from summer to winter. We do not have to battle with the atmosphere; we breathe it, we float in it. Perhaps for this reason good word-painters of landscape are few in our (Spanish) literature, and our descriptive poets content themselves with stale and regular phrases about the aurora and the sunset. But laying aside this parallel, which perhaps errs in being over-subtle, I will say that I agree with those who ascribe to the Russian climate a marked influence in the evolution of Russian character, institutions, and history.
Enveloped in snow and beaten by the north wind, the Sclav wages an interminable battle; he builds him a light sleigh by whose aid he subjects the frozen rivers to his service; he strips the animals of their soft skins for his own covering; to accustom his body to the violent transitions and changes of temperature, he steams himself in hot vapors, showers himself with cold water, and then lashes himself with a whip of cords, and if he feels a treacherous languor in his blood he rubs and rolls his body in the snow, seeking health and stimulus from his very enemy. But strong as is his power of reaction and moral energy, put this man, overwrought and wearied, beside a genial fire, in the silence of the tightly closed isba, or hut, within his reach a jug of kvass or wodka (a terrible fire-water more burning than any other), and, obeying the urgency of the long and cruel cold, he drinks himself into a drunken sleep, his senses become blunted, and his brain is overcome with drowsiness. Do not exact of him the persevering activity of the German, nor talk to him of the public life which is adapted to the Latin mind. Who can imagine a forum, an oracle, a tribune, in Russia? Study the effect of an inclement sky upon a Southern mind in the Elegies of Ovid banished to the Pontus; his reiterated laments inspire a profound pity, like the piping of a sick bird cowering in the harsh wind. The poet's greatest dread is that his bones may lie under the earth of Sarmatia; he, the Latin voluptuary, son of a race that desires for its dead that the earth may lie lightly on them, shrinks in anticipation of the cold beyond the tomb, when he thinks that his remains may one day be covered by that icy soil.
The Sclav is the victim of his climate, which relaxes his fibres and clouds his spirit. The Sclav, say those who know him well, lacks tenacity, firmness; he is flexible and variable in his impressions; as easily enthusiastic as indifferent; fluctuating between opposite conclusions; quick to assimilate foreign ideas; as quick to rid himself of them; inclined to dreamy indolence and silent reveries; given to extremes of exaltation and abasement; in fact, much resembling the climate to which he has to adapt himself. It needs not be said that this description, and any other which pretends to sum up the characteristics of the whole people, must have numerous exceptions, not only in individual cases but in whole groups within the Russian nationality: the Southerner will be more lively and vivacious; the Muscovite (those properly answering to that name) more dignified and stable; the Finlander, serious and industrious, like the Swiss, to whose position his own is somewhat analogous. There is in every nation a psychical as well as physical type to which the rank and file more or less correspond, and it is only upon a close scrutiny that one notices differences. The influence of the Tropics upon the human race has never been denied; we are forced to admit the influence of the Pole also, which, while beneficial in those lands not too close upon it, invigorating both bodies and souls and producing those chaste and robust barbarians who were the regenerators of the effete Empire, yet too close, it destroys, it annihilates. Who can doubt the effect of the snow upon the Russian character when it is stated upon the authority of positive data and statistics that the vice of drunkenness increases in direct proportion to the degrees of latitude? There is a fine Russian novel, "Oblomof" (of which I shall speak again later), which is more instructive than a long dissertation. The apathy, the distinctively Russian enervation of the hero, puts the languor of the most indolent Creole quite in the shade, with the difference that in the case of the Sclav brain and imagination are at work, and his body, if well wrapped, is able to enjoy the air of a not unendurable temperature.
Not only the rigors of climate but the aspect of the outside world has a marked influence on character. Ovid in exile lamented having to live where the fields produced neither fruits nor sweet grapes; he might have added, had he lived in Russia, where the fields are all alike, where the eye encounters no variety to attract and please it. Castile is flat and monotonous like Russia, but there the sky compensates for the nakedness of the earth, and one cannot be sad beneath that canopy of turquoise blue. In Russia the dark firmament seems a leaden vault instead of a silken canopy, and oppresses the breast. The only things to diversify the immense expanse of earth are the great rivers and the broad belts or zones of the land, which may be divided into the northern, covered with forests; the black lands, which have been the granary of the empire from time immemorial; the arable steppes, so beautifully described by Gogol, like the American prairies, the land of the wild horses of the Russian heroic age; and lastly, the sandy steppes, sterile deserts only inhabited by the nomadic shepherds and their flocks. Throughout this vast body four large arteries convey the life-giving waters: the Dnieper which brought to Russia the culture of old Byzantium; the Neva, beside which sits the capital of its modern civilization; the Don, legendary