Burlington weekly free press. [volume] (Burlington, Vt.) 1866-1928, 1885-06-12

Edmund Noble in Atlantic Monthly.1
The newcomer hat iourneyed more than
1000 versts to spend her vacation at home.
Looking at Is 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 intantile expression, but
the forehead was lofty in merry mo-
ments the brown-black eyes scntillated
with light and motion the countenance,
normally pale, flushed family under eX-
element. Sophie Nassilievna had teeth
of peculiar whiteness, and laughed with Il
clear, silvery laugh that to Il lover must
have sounded like music. A child in man
nerS, she was woman in experience
with II strange history and an education
only to be paralleled in the country 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 tolers of the sea whose khibtias
dot almost every shore and islet of the
Caspian. At the age of ten she was en-
trusted to the care OF an intelligent Rus
sian family in Astrakhan, and there,
three years later, she again found herself
under the paternal roof. On the compile
ton of her studies at the local gymna-
stun, she proceeded to st. Petersburg,
ulltl llttl, Ut lHt llIllt Ol my meeting WIFI
her, already spent three years at the
Higher Course for Women" in the CAPT
tai
| found Sophie Nassilevna well &c.
quanted with general literature and his
tory. She could converse with tluency in
French and German, and had critical
knowledge of her own tongue, fortified by
the smattering of ecclesiastical SlavOnlc
usually entailed by the theological course
in Russian schools. With modern science,
particularly chemistry and astronomy,
she was surprisingly familiar. Sociology
was her favorite study. Spencer she knew
at first hand. The doctrines of Darwin
had reached her by route singularly cir
cuitous. 1t was Pissarev who, in oppos-
ing his natural SCHOOL, to the esthetic
system of the great art critic, Belinsky,
produced body of ethical science, mainly
based on the Darwinan revelations, which
is to-day the groundwork of almost all
free thought in Russian educational eS-
adjustments OF native writers, one for
whose compositions she had great partial
ty was the novelist Dostoevsky,-a au
thor who, with a mastery power of an
alyzing motives, painted the sutferings of
the poor, and, himself paralyzed, delight
ed to inflct morbid creations upon his
readers. Sophie Nassilievua had also
adopted some of the ideas of the famous
economist and exile Chernishevsky,wh
SOcialstic romance, "What's to be Done p
eXerted, even long after its publication,
an enormous influence upon the Russian
youth of both sexes. some of the appa-
rently aggressive facts mention in order
to present IA type as well as an individual
for this young Russian. with Il personal
ity thoroughly her own, had been nodded
by influences that sway whole class.
Communicative, fond of change, eminent
ly impractical, easily moved to enthusi-
asm 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 a strong intolerance of oppres-
sion in all its forms, Sophie Nassilievna
seemed to suffer from the same nobleness
of impulse and meannesS of opportunity
as those which atilict her sisters of the
new generation of Russian women.