An Excerpt from Philosophical Letters, by Pyotr Chaadaev, 1836.  This passage helped to ignite the controversy in the 19th century between those who defended Russia's cultural uniquess and superiority (the Slavophiles), and those who believed Russia could only fulfill her world mission by borrowing everything from the West (the Westernizers).

We Russians, like illegitimate children, come into this world without patrimony, without any links with people who lived on the earth before us.  We have in our hearts none of those lessons which have preceded our own existence.  Each one of us must himself once again tie the broken thread of the family.  What among other peoples is a matter of habit, instinct, we can only get into our heads by hammer strokes.  Our memories go no further back than yesterday;  we are, as it were, strangers to ourselves.  We walk through time so singly that as we advance the past escapes us forever.  This is a natural result of a culture based wholly on borrowing and imitation.  There is among us no inward development, no natural progress' new ideas throw out the old ones because they do not arise from the latter, but come among us from heaven knows where.  Since we accept only ready-made ideas the ineradicable traces which a progressive movement of ideas engraves on the mind and which gives ideas their forcefulness makes no furrow on our intellect.  We grow, but we do not mature;  we advance, but obliquely, that is in a direction which does not lead to the goal. . .  Isolated in the world, we have given nothing to the world, we have taught nothing to the world; we have contributed nothing to the progress of the human spirit.  And we have disfigured everything we have touched of that progress.  From the very first moment of our social existence, nothing has emanated from us for the common good of men;  not a single useful thought has sprouted in the sterile soil of our country;  not a single great truth has sprung from our midst. . .