The Sun.
London, England, 1870-04-09 00:00:00

LITERATURE.

Dixon's Free Russia.

Free Russia. By William rlepwarth Dixon. Two

Vols. Hurst and Blackctt.

An early copy of this important and remarkable
work, long announced and eagerly anticipated, has
at length reached our hands through those of Mr.
Dixnn's thoroughly congenial publishers. Associated
as the Mt ssrs. Hurst and Blackett have been, in their
capacity as Lis pu'.)liabera, with Mr. Hepworth
Dixo I's previoas labours as a man of letters, tra-
velling now in the Old World, now in the New, now
in Palestine, now in America, they have participated
more or less directly in the rapid expansion and
development of his literary reput ttion. As a keen-
eyed awl most observant traveller, there is hardly a
man now living who can vie with the author of the
" Holy Land" and of "New America." Flying on the
wing; of the wind, h has all his wits about him
whithersoever he goes. And whatever may be the
system he adopts in jotting down the rough
notes of
~his rapidly alternating impressions—
at one moment of the country he is traversing, at the
next of the people by whom it is inhabited—certain
it is that those swiftly caught and clearly defined
impressions run out in a sort of felicitously instinc-
tive sequence, in a full, and radiant, and symmetrical
panorama. These were the characteristics which
were recognised upon the instant by the
readers of " The Holy Land" and of tt New
America," and as such they are still borne
very vividly indeed in the popular remem-
brance. They are the characteristic., it should now
be added, if possible, yet more vividly apparent in
Mr. Dixon's newly completed work on " Free
Russia." The author's hand, we may also say at once,
is well " in" to the accomplishment of the daring
delineation upon which he has here ad-
ventured. The result is a more important
work upon the great Muscovite Empire than
any foreign traveller across the steppes has ever even
attempted, much less ever accomplished. A flood
of light, as broad and lambent and resplendent in its
colouring as that of the Aurora Borealis has thus been
thrown at a glance over vast tracks of country and
remote cities and settlements hitherto only dimly
brought to popular view by the merest glimmerings
of information. The comprehensive scope of the
work
.is, upon the most casual survey of it,
instantly recogizable. Within the compass of two
handsome volumes, sixty-six chapters—not one of
them of a superficial character —have been touched
off curente calanzo, and yet hardly so much with a
flying pen as with a winged and luminous pencil.
Thirty-three chapters 'are equably accorded to each
volume as its fair proportion. The opening out of
the Japan-like Empire of the last Czar, Nicholas,
into the Free Russia of the present Czar, the Second
Alexander, is the tale Mr. Dixon has had to relate to
us. And most fully, eloquently, picturesquely,
hopefully, and suggestively is it here related.
Our author's knowledge of Russia dates not
from yesterday. Twice before these last and
most important journeyings of his into the
Russian Czar's dominions, he had been there as a
temporary but most watchful sojourner. The
changes and developments he consequently describes
are changes and developments he himself has seen
and appreciated. The book, as he has written it, is nO
dry, didactic, political treatise. It is in many parts
as enthralling as a romance, besides being full from
cover to cover of life and character. In the
mere " get up" of the work, both inter-
nally and externally, there appears to us to
be something eminently characteristic. Radiant
in black and white, with delicate emblazonries, the
•cry binding seems appropriate with its symbolic
devices of the two-headed eagle, and the imperial
'dem, awl the saintly knight crushing under lance
and hoof that old heraldic dragon of evil, which may
ba regarded by the more imaginative reader as typical,
according to option, of either slavery or ignorance.
I'he letterpress is further adorned with some exqui-
sitely coloured or!ginal illustrations. As a chromatic
frontispiece to Volume One,we have the grnen-milla"
vetted Convent of Solovetsk in the Froz m Sea. While
as the gorgeously illuminated frontispiece to Volume
l'wo, we have what alibost, at the first gl ince, looks
like the representation of the Burning of Moscow im-
mediately after its capture byNapoleon the Great, but
which turns out on examination to be merely the
ptxtraiture of an atmospheric effect, visible on the
Eastern Steppes at the time the Ru ssian Infantry is
being escorted by Kozaks and Kirchiz. According
to what Mr. Dixon here relates, Napoleonism has
merged into a sort of hero-worship far beyond any
dreamt of in Mr. Carlyle'a philosophy : ex. gr.—

In Moscow, I hear of a body of worshipers who hav°
the singular quality of drawing their hope from a foreign
soil. These mon are Napoleonists. Like all the Dissent-
ing sects, the/ hate the official empire, and drive the official
church. Seeing that the chief enemy of Russia in modern
times was Napoleon, they take him to have been literally, that
Messiah which he assumed to be, in a certain mystical sense,
to the oppressed and divided Poles ; and they have raised the
Corsican hero into the rank of a Slavonic god. Their society
is secret, and their worship private. That they live and thrive,
as an organized society, is affirmed by those who know their
country well. Their meetings are held with closed doors
and windows, under the very eyes of the police ; but add
is the case with so many sects in Moscow, that their immu-
nity from detection need excite no wonder in our eye°•
Making a sort of altar in their room, they place on it a bust
of the foreign prince, and fall on their knees before it.
Busts of Napoleon are found in many houses ; in none
more frequently than in those of the imperial race. I have
been in most of these imperial dwellings, and do not recollect
one, from the Winter Palace to the Farm, in which there
was not a bust of their splendid foe.

According to our traveller, the poor believing
Russians are wonderful believers in amulets :

A Russian, he says, is a believer in stones, in rings, in
rosaries, in rods ; for he bears about him a hundred relics of
his ancient pagan creeds. His favourite amulet is A
cross, which 'he can buy in brass for a kopek; one form
for a man, a second form for a woman ; the mas-
culine form being Nikon's cross, with a true Greek
cross in relief ; the feminine form being a mi%-
tura of the two. Once tied round the neck, this
amulet is never to be taken off, on peril of sickness and
sudden death. To drop it is a fault, to lose it is a sin. .6'
second talisman is a bone ball, big as a pea, hollow, drilled,
and fitted with a screw. A drop of mercury is coaxed into
the hole, and the screw being turned, the charm is perfect,
and the ball is fastened to the cross. This talisman protects
the wearer from contagion in the public baths

he grand starting point of Russian Development in
modern times, Mr. Dixon thus commemorates when
recording the in very truth most memorable date at
which the-Serfs were Emancipated :
On the 3d of March. 1861, be writes, the Emancipation Act
was signed. The rustic population then consisted of tsventy.
two miLions of common serfs, three millions of Appanage
peasants, and twenty-three millions of Crown peasants•
The first class were enfranchised by that act ; and a separate
law has since been passed in favour of these Crown peasants
and Appanage peasants, who are now as free in fact as
they formerly were in name. A certain portion of land vary'
in t; in different provinces according to soil and climate, was
affixed to every • soul ;' and Government aid was promised
io the peasants in buying their homesteads and allotments•
The serfs were not slow to take this hint. Down to Januar/
1, 1869, more than half the enfranchised male serfs hove
taken advantage of this promise; and the debt now owing
from the people to the Crown (that is, to the bondholders)
is au enormous sum.

Thanks to the writer of these two splendid volumes
"Free Rus74a' is brought clearly, boldly, vividly, cony
prehensively, and yet at the sirne time very minutely
within the ken of every intelligent reading English-
man. Mr. Dixon has sketched the earliest fortunes
of the country and of the race inhabiting it, thus, sO
to speak, radiantly in relief—not as it were on a fiat'
dead-level surface, and with a sort of Chinese per-
spective—because he has viewed his theme throng'''.
out with the I inocular scrutiny, at one and the same
moment of a historical student, and of a living 11°11.*
titian.

ST. JAMES'S THEATRE.—}is Highness the Prince
of Tech and her Royal Highness tho Princess of Teo
honoured this theatre last evening With their preseuee.