[1] There is, strictly speaking, no middle class in Russia; the “bourgeoisie,” or merchants, it is true, may seem to form an exception to this remark, but into their circles the traveller would find it, from many reasons, difficult, and even impossible, to enter.

But even in those rare cases where the stranger united to a determination to study the noble and interesting language of the country, an intention of remaining here long enough to learn it, he was often discouraged by the belief, that the literature was too poor to repay his time and labour.  Besides, the Russian language has so little relation to the other European tongues—­it stands so much alone, and throws so little direct light upon any of them, that another obstacle was thrown into his way.

The acquisition of any one of that great family of languages, all derived, more or less remotely, from the Latin, which extends over the whole south and west of Europe, cannot fail to cast a strong light upon the other cognate dialects; as the knowledge of any one of the Oriental tongues facilitates, nay almost confers, a mastery over the thousand others, which are less languages of distinct type than dialects of the same speech, offshoots from the same stock.

Add to this, the extraordinary errors and omissions which abound in every disquisition hitherto published in French, English, and German periodicals with regard to Russian literature, and deform those wretched rags of translation which are all that has been hitherto done towards the reproduction, in our own language, of the literature of Russia.  These versions were made by persons utterly unacquainted with the country, the manners, and the people, or made after the Russian had been distilled through the alembic of a previous French or German translation.

Poetry naturally forces its way into the notice of a foreign nation sooner than prose; but it is, nevertheless, rather singular than honourable to the literary enterprise of England, that the present is the first attempt to introduce to the British public any work of Russian Prose Fiction whatever, with any thing like a reasonable selection of subject and character, at least directly from the original language.

The two volumes of Translations published by Bowring, under the title of “Russian Anthology,” and consisting chiefly of short lyric pieces, would appear at first sight an exception to that indifference to the productions of Russian genius of which we have accused the English public; and the popularity of that collection would be an additional encouragement to the hope, that our charge may be, if not ill-founded, at least exaggerated.

We are willing to believe, that the degree—­if we are rightly informed, no slight one—­of interest with which these volumes were welcomed in England, was sufficient to blind their readers to the extreme incompetency with which the translations they contained were executed.