ABSTRACT
I would insist and reiterate that any European poet, thinker, or philanthropist would be understood and accepted in Russia as in his own land, and more readily than in any other part of the world. Shakespeare, Byron, Walter Scott, and Dickens are closer and more meaningful to Russians than they are to Germans, though we sell fewer than one tenth of the translated works of these writers compared to the number of copies sold in Germany with all its abundant publications. The French Convention of 1793 extended the right of citizenship au poète allemand Schiller, l’ami de l’humanité [to the German poet Schiller, the friend of humanity] – a beautiful, grand, and prophetic gesture in itself. But they could not even suspect that on the other side of Europe, in barbaric Russia, Schiller had become a truly national poet, and was better understood by the Russian barbarians than he ever was in the France of those times or in the whole course of our century. While in France only some professors of literature were familiar with the citizen Schiller, l’ami de l’humanité, in Russia he was absorbed by the Russian soul and, like Zhukovskii, he became a hallmark and almost an era in the history of our development.
