AUTHOR’S NOTE
181 Words
AUTHOR’S NOTEThe Russian or rather the Slavic nation has defied adequate description all down the centuries, although many writers have tried. The magnetism, the luminous spiritual force, is linked with dramatic exaltation and excess. Love to a Russian comes from Drouska – the soul, usually the suffering soul.
The Russian peasants sang songs of their suffering not of the body, as might be expected, but of their souls. Love and pain are intermingled until it is impossible to separate them.
Russians are a blend of despair and optimism, grandiose schemes and sheer futility, superb idealism and wild excess. They can become maddened and intoxicated by misery or exalted by love into an ecstasy when they are one with God.
The greatest change in Czar Alexander II’s reign, after the liberation of the Serfs, was the ‘reduced circumstances’ of the Secret Police.
Under his predecessor, the tyrannical Czar Nicholas I – “the most alarming Sovereign in Europe” – Universities were put under Police supervision, foreign travel was prohibited, public meetings were banned and soldiers were sent to Siberia for nothing more serious than a button out of place on parade.
- Writer
