Russian Rambles (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: III. MY EXPERIENCE WITH THE RUSSIAN CENSOR. In spite of the advantage which I enjoyed in a preliminary knowledge of the Russian language and literature, I was imbued with various false ideas, the origin of which it is not necessary to trace on this occasion. I freed myself from some of them; among others, from my theory as to the working of the censorship in the case of foreign literature. My theory was the one commonly held by Americans, and, as I found to my surprise, by not a few Russians, viz., that books and periodicals which have been wholly or in part condemned by the censor are to be procured only in a mutilated condition, or by surreptitious means, or not at all. That this is not the case I acquired ample proof through my personal experience. The first thing that an American does on his arrival in St. Petersburg is to scan the foreign newspapers in the hotels eagerly for traces of the censor's blot, ? le masque noir, caviare, ? his idea being that at least one half of the page will be thus veiled from sight. But specimens are not always, or even very often, to be procured with ease. In fact, the demand exceeds the supply sometimes, if I may judge .from my own observations and from the pressing applications for these curiosities which I received from disappointed seekers. The finest of these blackdiamonds may generally be found in the inventive news columns of the London dailies and in the flippant paragraphs of Punch. Like the rest of the world, I was on the lookout for the censor's work from the day of my arrival, but it was a long time before my search was rewarded by anything except a caricature of the censor himself in Kladderadatsch. That it was left unmasked was my first proof that that gentleman, individually and collectively, was not deficient...