But while he supposed he was extinguishing the living forces and arresting the advancing power of mind in his empire, a new world was maturing beneath the smooth hard surface he had created.

The Russian intellect, in spite of all, was blossoming from seed scattered long before his time.

There were historians, and poets, and romanticists, and classicists, just as in the rest of Europe.
There were the conservative writers who felt contempt for the West, and for the new, and who believed Russia was as much better before Ivan III.

than after, as Ivan the Great was superior to Peter the Great; and there were Pushkin and Gogol, and Koltsof and Turguenief, whom they hated, because their voice was the voice of the New Russia.
Turguenief, who with smothered sense of Russia's oppression was then girding himself for his battle with serfdom, says: "My proof used to come back to me from the censor half erased, and stained with red ink like blood.

Ah! they were painful times!" But in spite of all, Russian genius was spreading its wings, and perhaps from this very repression was to come that passionate intensity which makes it so great..