Wessington Springs herald. (Wessington Springs, Aurora County, Dakota [S.D.]) 1883-1891, 1885-07-03
RUSSIAN ~scHooL-eIRLs.
Absorption of the Glass From Which the
Nihilists Obtain Valuable Recruits.

Absorption of the Glass From Which tho
Nihilists Obtain Valuable Recruits.
The newcomer had %journeyed mere
than a thousand versts to spend her va
cation at home. Looking at eighteen
younger by at least three years, she
had all the sprightly buoyancy and ease
of manner that characterize feminine
society in the Russian capital. Her
features were strikingly oval; the
smallness of the nose and mouth gave
the face an almost ~infantilc expression,
but the forehead was lofty; in merry
moments the brown-black eyes scin.
tillated with light and motion; the
countenance, normally pale, flushed
family under excitement. Sophie Vas
silievna had teeth of peculiar white
ness, and laughed with a clear, silvery
laugh that to a lover must have
sounded like music. A child in man
ners, she was a woman in experience,
with a strange history and an educa-
ton only to be paralleled in the coun-
try OF her birth. Her earliest memories
were of the storms of an inland ocean;
her earliest friends were the kith and
kin of those Mongol toilers of the sea
whose khibitkas dot almost every shore
and islet of the Caspian. At the age of
ten she was entrusted to the care of an
intelligent Russian family in Astrakhan,
and there, three years later, she again
found herself under the paternal roof.
On the completion of her studies at the
local gymnasium, she proceeded to St.
Petersburg, and had, at the time of my
meeting with her, already spent three
years at the s'Higher Courses for
Women" in the capital.
1 found Sophie Vassilievna we'll &C
quainted with general literature and
history. She could converse with flu
ency in French and German, and had
a critical knowledge of her own
tongue, fortified by the smattcring
of ecclesiastical Slavonic usually
entailed by the theological course
in Russian schools. With mod
ern science, particularly chemistry
and astronomy. she was surpris-
ingly familiar. Sociology was her IA
vorite study. Spencer she knew at
first hand. The doctrines of Darwin
had reached her by Il route singularly
circuitous. 1t was Pissarev who, in
opposing his natural SCHOOL, to the
aesthetic system of the great art critic,
Bielinsky, produced a body of ethical
science, mainly based on the Darwinian
revelations, which is to-day the ground
work of almost all free thought in Rus
sian educational establishments. OF
native writer's, one for whose compo-
sitions she had great partially was the
novelist Dostoievsky, an author who.
with a mastery power of analyzing
motives, painted the sufferings of the
poor, and, himself paralyzed, delighted
to infict morbid creations upon his
readers. Sophie Vassilievna had also
adopted some of the ideas of the famous
economist and exile Chernishevsky,
whose socialistic romance, ''What's to
be Done?' exerted, yer long after its
publication, an enormous influence
upon the Russian youth of both lei
Some of these apparently aggressive
facts [ mention in order to present a
type as well as an individual; for this
young Russian, with a personality
thoroughly her own, had been moulded
by influences that sway a whole class.
Communicative, fond Of change, emf
nently impractical, easily moved by en-
thusiasm or Indignation, idealistic in
her views of life, receptive Of new ideas
and openly cynical in her rejection Of
many old ones, interested in human
nature for its own sake, with q strong
intolerance of oppression in all its
forms, Sophie Vassilievna seemed to
suffer from the same nobleness of i'm
pulse and meanness of opportunity as
those which afflict her sisters OF the
new generation of Russian women
Edmund Noble, IN Atlaatic% Monthly.