The Sedalia weekly bazoo. [volume] (Sedalia, Mo.) 187?-1904, 1885-07-07
RUSSIAN SCHOOLGIRLS.

A Description of the Glass From Which the
Nihilists Obtain Valuable Recruits.
The newcomer had journeyed more
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 baoysncy 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 infantile 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 q woman in experience,
with strange history and an eduea-
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
Il. III
Petersburg. and had. at the time of my
meeting with her, already spent three
years ut the ''Higher Courses for
Women" in the capital.
/ found Sophie VaSsilievna well &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 smattering
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 route singularly
circuitOus. 1t was Pissarey who, in
opposing his natural school, to the
aesthetic system of the great art critic.
Bielinsky, produced 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 writers, one for whose cOmpO- |
Sit!ons she had great Partially was the |
novelist Dostoievsky. an author who. |
with a mastery power of analyZing
motives, painted the suflerings of the |
poor, and, himself paralyZed, delighted !
to infiict morbid creations upon his |
readers. Sophie VaSSilievna had also |
adopted some of the ideas of the famous |
economist and exile Chernisheysky,
whose sOcialistic romance, whats TO |
be Done?' exerted. even long after its !
publication. an enormous influence |
upon the Russian youth of both sexes. |
Some of these apparently aggressive |
facts L mention in order to present q |
type as well as an individual; for this |
young Russian, with q personality |
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 strong
of oppression in all its
forms, Sophie Vassiiievna seemed to
suffer from the same nobleness of i'm
pulse and meanness of opportunity as
those which afflict her sisters of the
new generstion of Russian women