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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. Excerpt from book: Section 3CHAPTER II THE RENAISSANCE The thinking world of Russia at the end of the seventeenth century, has been compared to a great raft floating unanchored, drawn, indeed, eastward towards Asia, by the current of its natural traditions, but suddenly cast in an opposite direction by some violent and merciless eddy. This idea still lingers in Western literature. It is as false as most stereotyped assertions of the kind. The eastward tendency is, on the contrary, a quite modern phenomenon in the history of Russian civilisation. It dates from yesterday, and its nature, so far, remains purely political, economic, and industrial. From a more general point of view, the tendency of the national life, though drawn even at Kiev, as at Novgorod, from the Byzantine East, was to develop itself in quite the contrary direction. JKiev entered into relations with Germany, and even with France. Novgorod opened the Baltic roads towards the West. The Tartar invasion checked all these puttings forth, but it did not replace them with any in a different direction. The "intellectuals" of the sixteenth century did not attempt, during their quarrel with the despotism resulting from the Mongol conquest, to seek refuge in Asia. We know whither Kourbski fled. In the following century, Peter The Great neither sent for the Italian artists, who had then already rebuilt Moscow, 47 nor for the Little Russian monks, who, before his time, had laboured to reform the schools. He simply hurried forward, with his eager spirit, the slow progress which was already carrying his bark steadily westward. He swelled the sails, he made the rowers pant for breath, and grasped the helm with steady hand; but the vessel's course was laid already. Some impenitent Slavophils do indeed still cast as a crime in the great Reformer's teeth, that he broke th...