but Avos carries a significance of something fatal, full of a profound and almost terrible mystery, something like Karma or personified avenging Fate. Avos serves as a sort of incantation before the evil spirits, a formula expressing the complete dependence of man upon the will of unknown and hostile powers.
It is perhaps possible that the changeableness and indecision in the Russian attitude toward life are traceable to these traditional and all-permeating national formulas. Why should they make efforts of mind or body in the fight for an ideal, when Fate will sooner or later do exactly what has been ordained and cannot be changed by human influence?
Besides possessing the peculiarities of a special and abnormal psychology, social and personal, the tragic Russian is a man very easily affected by external influences. I met this type in all the criminal Ivans as well as in all the lesser and more accidental inhabitants of the prisons. His dreamy soul is sometimes uplifted, and then it can be beautiful, but none the less terrible withal. A word pronounced at the right moment can flood it with an emotion as quiet and peaceful as the calm of an autumn evening, or fire it with a burning flame that will touch with crimson everything around.
The soul of the Russian is too little known. Through centuries this soul has yearned for expression and for understanding, for an understanding that was not given it by the Varangians, those first rulers of ancient Russia who came down from the north, nor by the Tartars, who for three hundred years held their foot upon the neck of the Muscovites. Nor was this understanding given it by the Tsars of semi-foreign extraction; neither by the Russian cultured classes, which were foreign and often even hostile to the real nation ever living in the clouds of
