people. For no other nation has been so disinherited by Nature, no nation has been so entirely bereft of heat and light. In the empire of the Tsar there are only two regions which are not subjected to the dominion of winter, the Crimea and Transcaucasia. Hence the value and prestige which for every Muscovite attach to those "Diamonds of the Crown." Hence the great part which these southern provinces have played in the Russian poets and novelists, in Pushkin's "Caucasian Prisoner," in Lermontov's "A Hero of our Time,"[1] in Tolstoy's "Cossacks." The Crimea and Transcaucasia are to a Russian what Switzerland and the Riviera, what Italy and Greece, are to an Englishman or a Teuton.
Geography itself therefore seems to be in Russia the accomplice of that "Drang nach Osten" and that "Drang nach Süden" in which we in the West have only seen a spirit of aggression. It is a most significant and far-reaching fact that the three great rivers of Russia, the Dnieper, the Don, and the Volga, all flow eastwards and southwards. As these three rivers are the vital arteries of Russia, as they are the
- ↑ This has just been added to Alfred A. Knopf's series of translations from the Russian.
