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It has been often the case in our own time that authors
who have met with obstacles or aversion in their own
country have found their first sanctuary in the Russian
newspapers or from the Russian public. Who knows if
in this respect Russia will not in the future play a rôle
similar to that of Holland during the Renaissance, when
it furnished a place of refuge to those authors who were
persecuted at home? An omen of this is the hero-worship
which exists in full bloom in Russia after having
been almost wholly lost in the rest of Europe.
This remarkable capacity for assimilation is also met
with, in matters of artistic handicraft, among the
peasants. The peasant readily takes to any kind of work.
He can imitate anything he sees. He knows ten trades.
If a traveller somewhere in the country loses a cap with
a peculiar kind of embroidery, ten years later the whole
region is reproducing it. Another traveller forgets in a
corner a piece of chased copper or enamelled silver,
and this waif gives rise to a new industry. Some of the
most celebrated producers of industrial art are self-made
men from the peasant class, men who have groped their
way to the position they now occupy. Maslianikof,
who as master potter has reached the post of
superintendent of the imperial porcelain-factory, was formerly a
peasant, and he has worked his way up, without any
training in the works, by his own individual exertions
and conjectures; and Ovtchinnikof, the celebrated
goldsmith of Moscow, whose transparent enamel was so much
admired at the exhibition in Copenhagen, was also born
a peasant, and is indebted to nothing but his natural
talents. He has succeeded, among other things, in
reproducing the old Byzantine art of using cloisonné-enamel
to represent the human countenance, and in
getting on the track of one of the secrets of the Japanese
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