literary documents. Through Lithuania and Poland, Russia has always been in touch with Western Europe, chiefly with Germany, and through the Black Sea with Byzantium and afterwards with Turkey. Moreover, the southern steppes of Russia cannot be separated from Iranian and Turco-Mongolian portions of Central Asia, which in their turn are closely connected with India and China.

Thus it is that the task of studying Russia historically

is an enormous one. Nevertheless Russian scholars,

though aware of the complexity of the task, boldly and patiently set themselves to solve it. The archæological study of Russia is not more than a hundred years old, but a huge mass of material has already been collected, and many difficult problems have been solved. Year by year, excavations are made in Russia, and step by step her prehistoric and proto-historic destinies are being elucidated. The very rich barrows of South Russia have shown how closely the northern slopes of the Caucasus and the northern shore of the Black Sea were connected with the great Oriental civilisation-with Mesopotamia, Elam and Iran. We clearly see now how old and how rich this civilisation was. From the third millennium B.C. onwards the South of Russia was one of the most interesting centres of civilisation. During the neolithic period, there dwelt on the banks of the Dnieper and the Bug an agricultural population which produced uncommonly artistic painted pottery of the same type as the oldest painted pottery of Elam. In the copper age the river Kuban in North Caucasus was one of the chief centres of the civilisation which afterwards impregnated Europe. During the early and late iron age, that is to say, at the time when the great Assyrian Kingdom and later that of Persia arose in the East, and the great City States flourished in the West, the steppes of South Russia formed the centre of a mighty State closely connected on the one side with Iran and on the other with Greece. This State imbibed simultaneously the cultural elements of West and East, and, thus nourished, created an independent civilisation.

During the Roman period these cultural ties became stronger; and, beginning with the third century A.D., the civilisation of South Russia became fused with the

German civilisation from the North and thus renewed and enriched the civilisation of Western Europe. The rich cultural life of the South influenced Northern and Central Russia, and created there, chiefly in the East, on the river Kama, very important and opulent centres of civilisation which were closely connected with the shores of the Baltic and the steppes of Siberia. This prehistoric civilisation became, as it grew, the basis of the culture of the Slavonic peoples, and formed the background against which the historical life of the Russian State developed.

It is natural that Russian learning should have devoted its best energies to the study of Russian history. One of the peculiarities of this history in the early period is that it cannot be separated from the history of the Greek world. The old ties between them became even closer. This connexion with the Greek world, and chiefly with Byzantium, was at once understood and rightly valued by Russian scholars. The history of the Byzantine Church and Byzantine religious dogma were from the earliest times studied in Russia by the representatives of theological learning. In the 19th century began a systematic study of the history of Byzantine literature, and of the political, economical, social and artistic evolution of Byzantium. Fresh sources of Byzantine history have been published one after another. They have chiefly been taken from the libraries of Russian monasteries and from those of the Orthodox East, especially from Mount Athos and Sinai. Much help has been given to the historians by the Orientalists, i.e. the Arabic and Armenian scholars and the specialists in the Georgian and Coptic languages. The study of Byzantium forms one with the study of the East. At the same time close attention has been paid to the political and social history of Byzantium. Here, too, the Orientalists joined forces with the Hellenists. We can affirm that to Vassilievskij and his school Europe is indebted for the foundations of its knowledge of Byzantine history; and that to Kondakoff and his school it owes its comprehension and right appreciation of Byzantine art.

It is most difficult in a short lecture to follow the gradual evolution of the Russian people from the time

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of the creation of a Russian State. Here, too, the foundation was laid by the publication and study of the documentary sources. This work is of course still unfinished, but we must remember that Western Europe is in the same position. Still we can say that the most important of these documents have been elucidated and published. The Russian Annals, for example, have been studied in a masterly manner by Shakhmatoff, who investigated them from the point of view of criticism and language and elucidated the history of their growth as well as the character of the different versions.

Russian scholars have furnished us with many works picturing the evolution of Russian life. Each of these contains not only a synopsis of our knowledge of the facts, but reflects at the same time the influence of the most important philosophical ideas prevalent in the author's day. Karamsin is the historian of the Russian Tsars; Solovieff the historian of the Russian people. Slavophils and Westerns, mystics and realists, idealists and economic materialists in turn coloured the facts of Russian history under the influence of their general ideas. But every surrender to natural bias and every exaggeration were combined with a fresh and ever deeper appreciation of the facts brought about by the discovery and elucidation of new sides of Russian life. At this moment Russian historical learning can boast of having found its Macaulay in the person of a man who understood and appreciated the peculiarities of the evolution of Russia and her close connexion with Western Europe. I speak of the classical works of Klucevsky and his school, and especially of his best pupil Miliukoff. Let me describe their work by reading to you the words of one of the best scholars in Russian history, the late member of the Russian Academy, Lappo-Danilevsky. This learned man, who was an Honorary Doctor of the University of Cambridge, lately died of starvation in Petrograd.

'Klucevsky (he says) elaborated his own "sociological " conception of Russian history. He was not inclined to accept the theory of Solovyeff and particularly the modifications of it which he introduced in the later volumes of his history. Klucevsky attached much more importance to material than to moral forces, which he appreciated in so far as they

manifested themselves in social phenomena; besides, he could not content himself, as Chicherin has done, with the study of institutions considered merely as mechanisms bound to develop in a certain way. He was interested in the real "social stuff," of which they were made, and with the "vital forces" which put them in notion; he investigated the social and economic evolution of different classes, their enslavement and emancipation, and their influence on political institutions. Yet, agreeing to some extent with the Slavophil doctrine, Klucevsky insisted on the "originality" of Russian history and explained the part that the Russian nation had played, particularly the Great Russians, whom he characterised in a very vivid manner; and he tried to represent, in a genetic way, the "real" historical evolution of this nation and not the dialectical scheme of a series of mental concepts, only logically connected with one another. According to these views, Klucevsky held that the Russian nation had passed through different stages of evolution. Ancient Russia, situated on the Dnieper, was characterised by urban life and trade; mediæval Russia, settled on the middle Volga, by feudal principalities (differing, however, in some respects, from the Western type) and by free agriculture; "Great Russia, formed at a later date, by the national State of Moscow, with the Tsar and the boyars at its head, by military and agricultural institutions; and the Russian Empire, attaining its natural limits, under the autocratic regime, by the ascendancy of the nobles, and enslaved agriculture and industry. Klucevsky presented this scheme in a brilliant picture of our evolution down to the 18th century, and formed a school of Russian historians. In a similar realistic and sociological" spirit, Miliukoff explained the evolution of Russian culture, arranged in a homogeneous series, and, with Kisewetter, Bogoslovsky, Platonov and others, entered upon definite investigations concerning the history of certain Russian institutions.'

The study of Russian history, which made enormous progress in the 19th century, owes this progress in a large measure to the fact that Russian scholars were at the same time actively concerned with questions of philosophy and law as well as social and economic problems regarded from the comparative point of view. Careful attention was also being paid to the solution of the problems of universal history in their widest aspects. Let me describe to you what is being done in Russia in this department by citing the words of one of the

greatest authorities on general history, a man who combines the qualities of a profound jurist and of an acute historical enquirer-Sir Paul Vinogradoff, a professor formerly of Moscow and now of Oxford, and member of the Russian and British Academies.

'All the great nations of Europe (he says) have come to realise in the course of the 19th century to what extent their political, economic and cultural life are products of historical factors; but no nation has been led by conditions and events to so keen a consciousness of this fundamental truth as the Russian people. Apart from the evolution of self-government and the contrasts of economic classes, the problems of orientation towards the West have made Russian scholars especially interested and open-minded in connexion with the scientific study of general history. In the forties and fifties, at the height of the militarist regime of Nicholas I, Granovsky, a professor in Moscow, gave eloquent expression to the best aspirations of French and German scholarship in explaining the progress of the civilised world. His famous lectures on Alexander the Great, Timur, Saint Louis, and Bacon, marked the stages in the road from material domination to spiritual achievement.

"The holders of the chair of History in Moscow remained true to the tradition started by Granovsky, and set before their students and the public at large the historical landmarks of Western civilisation as manifestations of the human struggle for freedom and knowledge. Kudriavtzeff, in his "Destinies of Italy," treated the transition from the ancient to the modern world in its general political aspect-a task which Gibbon, Bury and Hodgkin have undertaken with such success in England. Guerrier turned with indefatigable industry and insight to the leaders of religious thought-St Augustin, Bernard III of Clairvaux, Innocent III. Kareieff presented an encyclopædic survey of the general course of Modern History, besides making a special study of certain aspects of the French Revolution. Vinogradoff investigated the origins of social structure and social functioning in the mediæval past of England, Wales and Italy. His pupil, A. Savine, has made remarkable contributions to the social history of England in the 15th century. M. Karelin made a thorough study at first-hand of the political and cultural ideas of the Italian Renaissance. Boris Tchicherin, a Hegelian philosopher of remarkable learning and analytical power, summarised in four volumes the development of political theory from the Greeks to the Germans of the 19th century.