the same absentee landlords, the same corrupt bureaucracy, the same all-absorbing centralization killing all local initiative.
(b) In both countries we are struck with the same sudden paralysis of the executive power, the same wavering and divided counsels, the same court intrigues, the same good intentions, the same absence of a man strong enough to control the destructive forces.
(c) In both countries we find the same intellectual and spiritual antecedents, and just as in France all through the eighteenth century, so in Russia all through the nineteenth, the political revolution has been preceded and partly caused by a philosophical revolution. In both countries we witness a shaking of religious beliefs by the leaders of thought, a criticism of all existing institutions. In both cases we are confronted with the same striking contradiction between political despotism and spiritual anarchy, we see the same gathering of positive and negative electricities, bound to end in the same explosion. Almost every epoch-making writing of Voltaire and Montesquieu, of Diderot and Rousseau, has its counterpart in Russian literature. For Russian literature in the nineteenth century is not a purely artistic or contemplative
