It is as
though he had followed the Volga, flowing eastward, not alone for
thirty, but for thirty hundred _versts_ through plains reverberant with
the age-long combat and clashing, the bleeding and fusing of Slav and
Tartar; had followed it until it reached the zone where Asia, with her
caravans and plagues and shrill Mongolian fifes, comes out of endless
wastes. And it is as though, piercing further into the bosom of the
eternal mother, Asia, his eye had rested finally upon a single spot, a
single nucleus; that it had watched that nucleus increase into a tribe;
had watched that tribe commence its westward march, wandering, spawning,
pushing ever westward, battling and groping, advancing slowly,
patiently, steadily into power and manhood, until it had come into
possession of the wildest and fairest land of eastern Europe, until it
had joined with other stocks and swelled into a vast nation, a gigantic
empire; and that then, in that moment of fulfilment, Borodin had turned
in prophetic ecstasy upon modern Russia and bade it ring its bells and
sound its chants, bade it push onward with its old faith and vigor,
since the Slavonic grandeur and glory were assured. For through the
savage trumpet-blasts and rude and lumbering rhythms, through the
cymbal-crashing Mongol marches and warm, uncouth peasant chants that are
his music, there surges that vision, that sense of immanent glory, that
fortifying asseveration.
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