with all his might strove to impose the very thing which Charles Martel had just prevented, the rule of the Moorish-Byzantine spirit. The possibility was there of treating the Russian world in the manner of a Carolingian or that of Seleucid — that is, of choosing between Old Russian and "Western" ways, and the Romanovs chose the latter. The Seleucids liked to see Hellenes and not Aramæans about them. The primitive tsarism of Moscow is the only form which is even to-day appropriate to the Russian world, but in Petersburg it was distorted to the dynastic form of western Europe. The pull of the sacred South — of Byzantium and Jerusalem — strong in every Orthodox soul, was twisted by the worldly diplomacy which set its face to the West. The burning of Moscow, that mighty symbolic act of a primitive people, that expression of Maccabæan hatred of the foreigner and heretic, was followed by the entry of Alexander I into Paris, the Holy Alliance, and the concert of the Great Powers of the West. And thus a nationality whose destiny should have been to live without a history for some generations still was forced into a false and artificial history that the soul of Old Russia was simply incapable of understanding. Late-period arts and sciences, enlightenment, social ethics, the materialism of world-cities, were introduced, although in this pre-cultural time religion was the only language in which man understood himself and the world. In the townless land with its primitive peasantry, cities of alien type fixed themselves like ulcers — false, unnatural, unconvincing. "Petersburg," says Dostoyevski, "is the most abstract and artificial city in the world." Born in it though he was, he had the feeling that one day it might vanish with the morning mist. Just so ghostly, so incredible, were the Hellenistic artifact-cities scattered in the Aramaic peasant-lands. Jesus in his Galilee knew this. St. Peter must have felt it when he set eyes on Imperial Rome.
After this everything that arose around it was felt by the true Russdom as lies and poison. A truly apocalyptic hatred was directed on Europe, and "Europe" was all that was not Russia, including Athens and Rome, just as for the Magian world in its time Old Egypt and Babylon had been antique, pagan, devilish. "The first condition of emancipation for the Russian soul," wrote Aksakov in 1863 to Dostoyevski, "is that it should hate Petersburg with all its might and all its soul." Moscow is holy, Petersburg Satanic. A widespread popular legend presents Peter the Great as Antichrist. Just so the Aramaic Pseudomorphosis cries out in all the Apocalypses from Daniel and Enoch in Maccabæan times to John, Baruch, and Ezra IV after the destruction of Jerusalem, against Antiochus the Antichrist, against Rome the Whore of Babylon, against the cities of the West with their refinement and their splendour, against the whole Classical Culture. All its works are untrue and unclean; the polite society, the clever artistry, the classes, the alien state with its civilized diplomacy, justice, and administration. The contrast between Russian and Western, Jew-Christian and Late-Classical nihilisms is extreme —
