Together with the fashionable literature the Russian educated classes adopted something of the fashionable philosophy.  They were peculiarly unfitted to resist that hurricane of “enlightenment” which swept over Europe during the latter half of the eighteenth century, first breaking or uprooting the received philosophical systems, theological conceptions, and scientific theories, and then shaking to their foundations the existing political and social institutions.  The Russian Noblesse had neither the traditional conservative spirit, nor the firm, well-reasoned, logical beliefs which in England and Germany formed a powerful barrier against the spread of French influence.  They had been too recently metamorphosed, and were too eager to acquire a foreign civilisation, to have even the germs of a conservative spirit.  The rapidity and violence with which Peter’s reforms had been effected, together with the peculiar spirit of Greek Orthodoxy and the low intellectual level of the clergy, had prevented theology from associating itself with the new order of things.  The upper classes had become estranged from the beliefs of their forefathers without acquiring other beliefs to supply the place of those which had been lost.  The old religious conceptions were inseparably interwoven with what was recognised as antiquated and barbarous, whilst the new philosophical ideas were associated with all that was modern and civilised.  Besides this, the sovereign, Catherine II., who enjoyed the unbounded admiration of the upper classes, openly professed allegiance to the new philosophy, and sought the advice and friendship of its high priests.  If we bear in mind these facts we shall not be surprised to find among the Russian nobles of that time a considerable number of so-called “Voltaireans” and numerous unquestioning believers in the infallibility of the Encyclopedie.  What is a little more surprising is, that the new philosophy sometimes found its way into the ecclesiastical seminaries.  The famous Speranski relates that in the seminary of St. Petersburg one of his professors, when not in a state of intoxication, was in the habit of preaching the doctrines of Voltaire and Diderot!

The rise of the sentimental school in Western Europe produced an important change in Russian literature, by undermining the inordinate admiration for the French pseudo-classical school.  Florian, Richardson, Sterne, Rousseau, and Bernardin de St. Pierre found first translators, and then imitators, and soon the loud-sounding declamation and wordy ecstatic despair of the stage heroes were drowned in the deep-drawn sighs and plaintive wailings of amorous swains and peasant-maids forsaken.  The mania seems to have been in Russia even more severe than in the countries where it originated.  Full-grown, bearded men wept because they had not been born in peaceful primitive times, “when all men were shepherds and brothers.”  Hundreds of sighing youths and maidens visited the scenes described by the sentimental writers, and wandered