I don't know if it is insanely depressing or insanely cool that these are the first (people) that come to mind when Americans imagine Russians...

I'm a big fan, actually.

BTW, Russian is a poetic language by its very nature.  Not sure you can think in it and not sound poetic.  


Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. -Voltaire

All sorts of reforms were discussed by [Alexander I] and a group of intimates who had lived abroad, and a document guaranteeing freedom of speech and religion was drawn up, supposedly to be announced at Alexander's coronation. "But for some reason this was not done, and it remained a dead letter." One of Pipes's heroes, Michael Speransky, helped to write this document, and his name may be more familiar to non-specialists in Russian history than most of the others: readers of War and Peace, which Pipes regrettably does not mention, will recall that Prince Andrey Bolkonsky at one point serves in Speransky's cabinet. At first, much impressed with Speransky's ideas about reform, he undertakes the task assigned him of revising the Civil Code; "and with the aid of the Code Napoleon and the Institutes of Justinian he worked at formulating the section on Personal Rights." A bit later in the novel, he thinks of a recent trip home to his estate and of his impressions of and experiences with the peasants: "Mentally applying to them the Personal Rights he had divided into paragraphs, he felt astonished that he could have spent so much time on such useless work."  

Tolstoy's image of Speransky is quite deprecatory, but Pipes believes that the merits of this statesman have been neglected in accounts of Russian thought because officials of the czarist establishment are not usually considered part of the country's intellectual life. Also, the full extent of his "reform projects" was entirely unknown until the twentieth century.