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ight had I," cries Kropotkin in his Memoirs' "to thesehigher joys [his research work on the southern limits ofthe ice age] when all round me was nothing but miseryand struggle for a mouldy bit of bread.'' In the samevein the outburst of Verkhovensky in Dostoevsky's ThePossessed 1 is typical: "Down with culture. . . . Thethirst for culture is an aristocratic thirst." So too, itseemed to Tolstoy (1828-1910) that "a pair of boots ismore important than all your Madonnas and all yourrefined talk about Shakespeare.'' So, in the second halfof his life, he repudiated the greater part of Europeancivilization, preached that "religious perception" and" the union of mankind " were the sole purpose of art, andstrove to find in service of the Russian peasant the onejustification for his inexhaustible creative gifts.The most fundamental reason for this tendencytowards repudiation or questioning of Europe and hercivilization was the Russian thirst for social justice,stimulated by the consciousness of the abyss between theso-called civilized and the so-called uncivilized, the tinyeducated minority and the vast uneducated mass. OneRussian nationalist summed up in extreme form thus(1874): "There are two layers of Russian people distinguishedfrom each other not so much by privileges asby the fundamental difference that each represents adifferent epoch of history—the upper the nineteenthcentury, the lower the ninth." A hostile French critic,with similar exaggeration, expressed the same contrast(1839): "Le Kamchatka et Versailles a trois heures dedistance, voila la Russie."The magnitude of the problem and political conditionsin Russia bred among many despair of gradually bridging1 Memoirs of a Revolutionist (1899; written in English). PrinceKropotkin (1842-1921), born and brought up in the old, aristocraticquarter of Moscow, joined the revolutionary youth, was arrested in 1874,but escaped two years later, and spent the remainder of his life abroad,largely in England, as the apostle of his own version of anarchism, until1917 when he returned to Russia.2 First published in 1871 (translated by Constance Garnett); one ofthe profoundest studies of revolutionary ideas and mentality. As inall the novels of Dostoevsky (1821-81) the foreigner must beware ofdiscounting the large element of psychological autobiography and oflooking upon them as giving a typical picture of Russia.322