Note 10 — Chapter I · INTRODUCTION

Here the historian is gravely influenced by preconceptions derived from geography, which assumes a Continent of Europe, and feels himself compelled to draw an ideal frontier corresponding to the physical frontier between “Europe” and “Asia.” The word “Europe” ought to be struck out of history. There is historically no “European” type, and it is sheer delusion to speak of the Hellenes as “European Antiquity” (were Homer and Heraclitus and Pythagoras, then, Asiatics?) and to enlarge upon their “mission” as such. These phrases express no realities but merely a sketchy interpretation of the map. It is thanks to this word “Europe” alone, and the complex of ideas resulting from it, that our historical consciousness has come to link Russia with the West in an utterly baseless unity—a mere abstraction derived from the reading of books—that has led to immense real consequences. In the shape of Peter the Great, this word has falsified the historical tendencies of a primitive human mass for two centuries, whereas the Russian instinct has very truly and fundamentally divided “Europe” from “Mother Russia” with the hostility that we can see embodied in Tolstoi, Aksakov or Dostoyevski. “East” and “West” are notions that contain real history, whereas “Europe” is an empty sound. Everything great that the Classical world created, it created in pure denial of the existence of any continental barrier between Rome and Cyprus, Byzantium and Alexandria. Everything that we imply by the term European Culture came into existence between the Vistula and the Adriatic and the Guadalquivir and, even if we were to agree that Greece, the Greece of Pericles, lay in Europe, the Greece of to-day certainly does not.