The remarks of Karl Karl’itch on men and things were to me always interesting, for he was a shrewd observer, and displayed occasionally a pleasant, dry humour.  But I very soon discovered that his opinions were not to be accepted without reserve.  His strong, inflexible Teutonic nature often prevented him from judging impartially.  He had no sympathy with the men and the institutions around him, and consequently he was unable to see things from the inside.  The specks and blemishes on the surface he perceived clearly enough, but he had no knowledge of the secret, deep-rooted causes by which these specks and blemishes were produced.  The simple fact that a man was a Russian satisfactorily accounted, in his opinion, for any kind of moral deformity; and his knowledge turned out to be by no means so extensive as I had at first supposed.  Though he had been many years in the country, he knew very little about the life of the peasants beyond that small part of it which concerned directly his own interests and those of his employer.  Of the communal organisation, domestic life, religious beliefs, ceremonial practices, and nomadic habits of his humble neighbours, he knew little, and the little he happened to know was far from accurate.  In order to gain a knowledge of these matters it would be better, I perceived, to consult the priest, or, better still, the peasants themselves.  But to do this it would be necessary to understand easily and speak fluently the colloquial language, and I was still very far from having, acquired the requisite proficiency.

Even for one who possesses a natural facility for acquiring foreign tongues, the learning of Russian is by no means an easy task.  Though it is essentially an Aryan language like our own, and contains only a slight intermixture of Tartar words,—­such as bashlyk (a hood), kalpak (a night-cap), arbuz (a water-melon), etc.—­it has certain sounds unknown to West-European ears, and difficult for West-European tongues, and its roots, though in great part derived from the same original stock as those of the Graeco-Latin and Teutonic languages, are generally not at all easily recognised.  As an illustration of this, take the Russian word otets.  Strange as it may at first sight appear, this word is merely another form of our word father, of the German vater, and of the French pere.  The syllable ets is the ordinary Russian termination denoting the agent, corresponding to the English and German ending er, as we see in such words as—­kup-ets (a buyer), plov-ets (a swimmer), and many others.  The root ot is a mutilated form of vot, as we see in the word otchina (a paternal inheritance), which is frequently written votchina.  Now vot is evidently the same root as the German vat in Vater, and the English fath in father.  Quod erat demonstrandum.