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<DIV><FONT face=Arial>'Bruised in limb after those fifty miles of crazy
progress, I beheld at last what seemed to be the gates of a typical French
chateau. A more surprising edifice to find in the middle of the Russian
steppe it would be hard to imagine. Gone was the squalor of the poor
villages; here was the sumptuous establishment of an eighteenth-century grand
seigneur . . . For the moment I was baffled by this aping of England in the
Russian steppe. It was not the England of to-day that they had achieved,
but the imitation of an England that they might have gleaned from the pages of
Ouida. . . . It was a self-contained world, on whose fringes hovered and
cringed the peasants--in the foreground rioted this strange semi-English,
semi-exotic extravagance--in the background brooded the vowed hatred of
Russia.'</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial>V. Sackville-West</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial>'The Ukraine: 1909' from <EM>Life and Letters</EM>
December 1928, pp. 575-579</FONT></DIV>
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